How Roundtable TCG Reinvented Trading Cards With Arthurian Legend

Jason Hsieh (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unbox Podcast. On today’s show, we are interviewing Bill, a lifetime gamers, from rolling dice in DD to designing his own trading card games. He’s also the founder of Nimue Innovation Studio. He has brought Roundtable to life, which is a new game that is designed for balance and strategy. So, in this episode, we’ll talk about his journey so far in the tabletop game industry.

And some of the things he’s currently working on. And thank you so much for us on the show today, Bill.

Bill DeVoe (00:32)
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Jason Hsieh (00:34)
So before we dive into round table TCG can you kinda share with the audience like what made you even want to get into the tabletop game industry?

Bill DeVoe (00:44)
Yeah.

a great question. So I’ve been doing tabletop gaming, mostly RPGs and stuff. I started when I was about ten with advanced Dungeons and Dragons had a lot of fun playing that, went did that for a while with a lot of my friends through junior high and high school. And at the time I was mostly the dungeon master. So responsible for

figuring out what modules we were gonna run or creating my own, which wasn’t that frequent when I was 10 and 12. But as I got older, I began to make my own. And around the time that I was in college, I got introduced to a bunch of different systems, Pendrogan and Marble and Top Secret, a bunch of others. And playing with my college roommates and my and

We really explored a bunch of stuff. And again, I was usually the DM. So I was always kind of doing this in the background, as well as writing computer games for Commodore 64 or for PC or for whatever. So I did a lot of things in that space. Okay. and then as the years have progressed, I dabbled in things like modding, Doom and Quake and that kind of stuff. And really is about, I don’t know.

Ten, fifteen years ago I started to look at doing a trading card game because I got introduced to Magic in about 1994 like right when Legends came out is So yes, very early. And began playing it. We loved it. I became a DCI level 2 judge. I mean that’s how hardcore we were about this. And we ended

Jason Hsieh (02:03)
Yeah.

Bill DeVoe (02:15)
Playing Magic and seeing how it was evolving. picked up like Battle Tech and Pokémon cards and those kinds of things and you know Legend of the Five Rings, those kinds of games in the mid 90s And when I saw kind of what was going on with magic, I kind of was getting disappointed. It felt like it was just getting ponderous. Too many rulings, too many abilities.

I mean it was they’re trying to keep it fresh. Yeah. But by the same token, you really couldn’t come into it clean and not be overwhelmed. And then also they began to change it. And not I mean, this is even before Commander became out as the most popular style that people are playing now. But before that, you know, it was still it was a lot of pre-constructed decks. There was not a lot of variety. And

One of the things that we loved about early magic was opening a box and saying, What’s in here? Yeah. And then going, my God, that’s so cool. I’ve never seen that before. You know, of course, remember when we started playing, there wasn’t really a web. So we you couldn’t just like, you know, go up to Gatherer and say, Hey, what are the cards that are in this expansion that didn’t exist? We had to download card lists off of Usenet.

Wait for the rulings updates from various and sundry people. You know, that was a very sporadic engagement. And you didn’t know what cards were in what set until you collected all the cards in that set. So you know we’d buy boxes of boosters and open them up and look at all the cards and go, hey, do we have a complete set? There’s 300 in this set. We’ve got 295. I guess we’re missing some, you know.

Yeah, it was lot of fun. And we l really enjoyed that exploration and discovery. And as magic was evolving, it was really going toward, hey, here’s a pre-constructed deck. Here’s another pre-constructed deck. Well, here’s another one. And if you want any variety, you need to go to Booster Packs. And I wasn’t that interested in that. So, I began thinking about sort of merging a couple of things that I loved. You know, the Arthurian Legends and Trading Card games from that.

era, that style. And so that’s where I really kind of got involved in this process of getting a game going like this. and it was off and on for 10 years to do it.

Jason Hsieh (04:22)
Oh that take you a while, okay.

Bill DeVoe (04:24)
Yeah. and then about I said about three or four years ago we started to coalesce people together to bring the idea to fruition. But it was, you know, something that I was just kind of working on. I would spend you know, I could have a burst of energy, hyper attentiveness to something to this for, you know, two months and I do a whole bunch of cards and I print and I cut them.

You know, start playing and getting test decks and all that. And then I would get bored of it and I would go do something. And then I would come back to it two years later and go, yeah, I want to do it. And so then it was like, you know, really about ten years of that. And then I finally said, I’m tired of this being this thing running in the background in my brain. I want to get it out of my head and onto paper and actually play this game. And so that’s when we started really focusing on trying to bring it to fruition. But, like I said, you in essence, I’ve been doing this at some degree for my entire life. So it’s been, you know, over four decades now that I’ve been doing something in this vein.

Jason Hsieh (05:23)
I see, I see. What would you say is the biggest challenge looking back on building this game from scratch?

Bill DeVoe (05:28)
That’s interesting. So, the biggest thing I would say is that so making a trading card game is very difficult. A lot of people want to go for an ECG or an LCG to like just give everybody all the cards and call it good. And then that’s like, you know, hey, it’ll be perfect. and I didn’t like that because I like the discovery part. I like, you know, you opening a deck and going, my God, this is so cool.

So for me that was not really an option. So trying to figure out how the rarities were going to work, how the all of the math behind it is very challenging.

Jason Hsieh (06:00)
So for your deck is each deck different than all the other? Okay. That’s hard to set up. Yeah.

Bill DeVoe (06:05)
Yes, absolutely.

Every one of these decks is different. They are unique. Yeah. they’re actually handcrafted by my wife. And what she does is that we have four different rarities and five different card types, and she picks and chooses the right blend of all of the different things. You get the right amount of knights and quests and redirects and all that stuff.

With the appropriate rarities, and then that all goes into a box, and then that’s playable from the box, which is one of the things that we were really concerned about. Because old school magic wasn’t like that, right? Just a bunch of random cards of different rarities. And so you’ve ended up with a whole bunch of red spells and a whole bunch of forests, and you’re like, I can’t do anything with this. Our game, because our lands like this one with this farm.

are all colorless quote unquote resource points which is up here in the corner and they are able to be spent for anything so you get a full set of all the lands and then regions which are what you’re playing for because we’re not allowing you to attack the other player or the other player’s creatures. You can’t like you’re not trying to like deal damage and all that stuff. That’s not part of the game. It’s all about controlling the battlefield

⁓ strategically with how you build your deck and then tactically with how you play your hand and the cards on the table to try to conquer different regions of Britain. So like actual like places in Britain, we’ve broken up England and Wales into 30 different spaces with differing renown based on how important they are

And you play for five regions, whoever has the most renown when the last regions captured wins the game. So from a what was difficult to make the game, that was the hardest part was figuring out all the math behind that stuff. How many cards are we gonna have? How many rares are we gonna have? you know, trying to get all those things worked out. The other side of that coin was trying to get a team that could do this stuff. So like

I’m not a good graphic designer. I’m just I’m not an artist. I’m not a designer. Yeah. So finding somebody who could do that was a major hurdle. But I had somebody when I was advertising for artists for the game, who contacted me and was like, Hey, this sounds really interesting, this ad that you placed. And I’m not an artist, but I’m a graphic designer. Do you need one of those? I’m like, Yes.

Jason Hsieh (08:28)
Yeah.

Bill DeVoe (08:30)
We got really lucky that we made coalesce a team together to bring this to fruition, to at least to the Kickstarter. And you know, we had somebody on the team who do a bunch of artists that we tried reaching out to a bunch of people through her. She also contributed a bunch of art to the game. we also had the graphic designer, we had people who are willing to help out with, you know, doing demos and conventions and stuff before we launched the game.

All of that stuff would not have happened if we hadn’t had people who volunteered to step up and help us out. So that was the other side. If you don’t have that kind of a support structure, then you’re gonna have some troubles. Everything after that is like the second part of the triathlon, it’s kind of how I phrase it, which is the first part is hey, can we get this thing to a Kickstarter or to a launch?

And you need like one set of skills for that. You need a whole bunch of people who can do the graphic design and the conventions and the communications

Jason Hsieh (09:29)
You need you we need a whole team.

Bill DeVoe (09:31)
You do.

Yeah. And then some of those people though are like, okay, you get done with that, you launch the game. Congratulations. And they’re like, Okay, great. Give me my medal. I I’m not interested in doing the sales part. And so that’s the bicycling part of your game is trying to get it to you know, trying to get it to people and all that stuff. And that requires the marketing and the advertising and the knowledge of the channels. And yeah, are you gonna go

retail or distributor or direct to consumer, all of that stuff. And that’s the whole different kind of race. Which is you know, and that’s where that’s where we are right now. And that’s a whole different set of skills and different team in essence than what you had from before. So yeah. definitely if your business model is not make a Kickstarter and then sell to the Kickstarters

And then I want to sell to other people, then you have to move into that second phase, and that’s really I think where the challenge comes in. we did have somebody from Foam Brain tell us that TCGs are the hardest segment of the hardest market. Card games are the hardest.

Jason Hsieh (10:36)
It’s pretty hard

there’s a lot of big player in the TCG market, like you mentioned, Magic of Gathering, Yu Gi Oh⁓ and also Pokémon, those three kind of dominate ninety five percent of the market share. Yes.

Bill DeVoe (10:50)
Even Lorcana and Star Wars Unlimited are having problems and like those are incredible IPs.

Jason Hsieh (10:56)
Yeah, but they are still putting it in the traction, so yeah.

Bill DeVoe (10:59)
And yeah, they’re struggling. I mean, I was seeing Lorcana competitions and stuff, like, you know, tournaments, and they’d get like eight people to show up. And it was just it was surprising. Pokémon’s still getting forty. Yeah. So it is amazing to me how strong and vibrant the communities that are supporting Magic and Pokémon and Yu Gi are because I see them all the time playing. Yeah.

And occasionally I’ll see a flesh and blood, or occasionally I’ll see, you know, something else. I’ve never seen Grand Archive in the Wild, for instance, you know, or Primal or you know, there’s a whole bunch of TCGs out there. And unfortunately I’m just not seeing them being played by the general public. And they’re good games. They’re just not getting the traction that I think that they deserve.

Jason Hsieh (11:45)
Yeah, but now looking back, is that something you’ll do differently if you were to create a round table TCG again?

Bill DeVoe (11:52)
No, I would still do a TCG. I might reset my expectations for it. and I mean, like, you know, we were talking offline before, my original business plan was sell to retailers, right? Yeah. And I went to GAMA Expo right before we launched. So we had just placed our order for all of our cards. Yeah.

Right before the end of the year. And then in 2024 I went to GAMA Expo with my daughter. And our first session right out of the box was a meeting of round table with your retailers. And they’re like, yep, we’re not gonna buy your product if we don’t know who you are, so don’t even bother. And we’re like, Ow. Okay. Well, maybe we can do distributors of like, okay.

Plan B, distributors. And the next hour was them abusing us horribly about what we weren’t gonna do. And so then we had to like, okay, what’s plan C, D, E? I guess we’re on plan P now. I don’t know where we are, but yeah, we did have to change our expectations and go with the B to C model. I would definitely have shifted some of the things that we did. I think

I was hoping for more traction than we got. Yeah. so we have a lot of cards. But even then we don’t have a lot compared to what other card games you’re doing. We printed like a hundred and sixty thousand cards. Okay. That’s small. That’s like a miniscule run in the card industry. So that was like, okay, well.

Jason Hsieh (13:11)
whoa, that’s a lot.

Bill DeVoe (13:21)
I mean, I guess this is what we’re doing, but yeah, yeah. I guess I would have changed that. We would have not printed nearly as many. Probably a third as many. And we would have focused a lot more on using some of the revenue we got from the Kickstarter to advertise, market, that kind of stuff. So it would have changed our approach. We invested our money from the Kickstarter into the cards.

Jason Hsieh (13:41)
Yeah.

Bill DeVoe (13:45)
and our expectation was we’re gonna fulfill the promises we made during the Kickstarter. Yeah and then we’re going to sell the cards and that’s going to fund future development of the game. And that has not happened. So that’s where we are definitely having the biggest challenges right now. And again, it’s because I don’t have the team to do the advertising, marketing, and especially the money, because that’s the biggest problem. And

When you know we’re going to these cons and stuff, we’re just simply not even making back what it costs to go from the sales. And you know, I lived in, you know, Columbus or something, it would be one thing or Louisville. But I don’t. And so I have to schlep this stuff across the country. I’ve got to get airlines and hotels and the whole thing.

Jason Hsieh (14:28)
I see. My recommendation if I’m

in your shoes, is you just need to do a lot of like marketing that won’t scale. For example, like reaching out to influencers individually, doing social media posts daily and a lot of the thing that’s harder to scale, but you know, that’s something that could potentially build up some momentum. And I also want to talk about other products that you also have besides the TCG.

Bill DeVoe (14:51)
Yeah.

Jason Hsieh (14:52)
So can we also talk about I think you also have a product called Sudoku. Can you call I do?

Bill DeVoe (14:56)
Right. We have Su-Duck-Ku. This is one of trays. We call them a coupe. Yeah. And each player gets one. And it’s a duck-themed Sudoku game. Okay. So you have these tiles. You get nine of these tiles. They’re three by three, so nine squares. Just like a sudoku board, you lay it out in a three by three configuration. we have

The numbers zero through nine, so it’s a little bit broader than a regular traditional Sudoku. But each player has three tiles, three duck tiles, and you place them on the board in order, yeah, but it has to follow the rules of Sudoku, meaning you can’t put a three in a row column or box that has a three in it, right? Standard stuff. Yeah. If you place the last tile to complete a row column or a box, then those ducks leave the board and they join your flock.

And the first player to get 25 or more ducks in their flock wins the game. So it’s about how can I position my placements so that I’m blocking my opponents from being able to put a tile there, but I can put one there. And then complete that row and then get those nine ducks in my pond. And we have two different versions. We’ve got this one, which is the version.

Yeah. And then we have an elegance version which is all black and gold and it looks very classy. And trying to get a publisher for that actually. So that’s one of those things that we’re looking at. Right now, all of this is 3D printed. So we’re selling pre release versions. So if anybody wants one, they can order one and then we will print it and send it to them.

Jason Hsieh (16:31)
How about just kickstarter campaign for it instead of finding a publisher.

Bill DeVoe (16:34)
Well, so that’s the thing is that the Kickstarter would be okay, now we have to fulfill. Yeah. And that means working with manufacturers, working with imports and tariffs. It means working with consumer protection, you know, safety testing and you know all of those things I have zero experience in. So unlike my trading card game, I recognize I don’t know this stuff.

And I want to find somebody who does and have them do this. I mean, our goal is actually, in essence, to put it in a bag like this. I mean, it is a very portable game. You just stick it in a bag and then you take it with you. You know, you can stick it in a coat pocket or something and just take it. So it’s very portable, travel friendly. but it is like I said, you know, doing mass production like that, I don’t.

Have any experience doing it. I am going to screw it up. rather than do that with other people’s money. I would like to have somebody who has experience doing that and also with the sales and marketing aspect who could try to get this into a Barnes and Noble or a Target or whatever, or even Amazon and be able to sell it that way. That

means I don’t have to 3D print every single copy, which is what we’re doing right now. It takes about a day to print a copy. So yeah, there’s 120 tiles of the number tiles. And then we also have these geese tiles that are for variants. We actually have a couple of variants. One is geese are wild, which you just put them on the board and

It makes it easier to complete rows and columns and boxes because there’s one goose in every row, column, or box. There’s another one called Geese are a Menace, where when you draw a goose out of the bag, you then place it immediately. And depending on how you’ve oriented it, because it’s got its beak, you can orient it any way on the board. And then let’s say I put him on this way.

All the ducks in this row go back to the bag. He chases them off because you know geese are a menace. So it it really changes up the game and the board. and so things that are like really close to being done suddenly aren’t because all the ducks are back in the bag. And then we have a third variant that we’ve got, which is kind of the goose is on the loose and

The goose is trying to go around capturing ducks. He can move one space every turn. And the other players are playing regular Su-Duck-Ku. So they’re trying to get to 25 or more ducks. And the goose player is trying to step on ducks and collect 25 or more of them. So it’s two competing goals. All of the players are trying to.

get the 25 ducks in their flock and the goose has a completely different that is playing and messing around with the other people’s game. So it’s an interesting variant on it and my son came up with it actually. We were playing Su-Duck-Ku so much and he’s like can we try this and we’re like yeah absolutely my god that is fun it is

Jason Hsieh (19:25)
I see, okay. I see, I see.

Bill DeVoe (19:35)
bizarre and it’s been so fun and it’s pretty fast paced game takes about twenty to thirty minutes to play a game usually unless you’ve got very competitive people then it can take a little longer because if you want to be like really careful about whether gonna give you the option to try to capture row until there’s no space left on the board and you kind of have to you know

Jason Hsieh (19:49)
What I do.

I see. So now looking ahead for the next one, three years, what is your vision for the company going forward? Like what do you have any more product on the line or what are you planning to work on?

Bill DeVoe (20:09)
Yeah. Actually so, one of the things we’re trying to do obviously is increase visibility for roundtable. We want roundtable to be available, accessible for people to play and we would like to see more play of it. So we’ve actually considered doing a tournament next year somewhere like at Origins or Gen Con. doing a world tour tournament, pro tour kind of thing.

Sealed deck kind of thing. So you show up, pay twenty-five bucks, you get a deck, and you get two booster packs and make the best deck you can. And then whoever wins might win Excalibur. We’re spit balling I don’t know. so yeah, so we’re trying to really get to a place where we can round table more effectively. Again,

Jason Hsieh (20:46)
Ha ha.

Bill DeVoe (20:57)
We’re working on trying to get something for Su-Duck-Ku. Get a publisher who that we can really just kind of hand things off to and let them shepherd it through the process and we can guide it and get it to its final stage. And then we do have some expansions in mind for round table. We haven’t really done anything about them yet. One of them is collaborative mode. So that everybody at the table is working together.

To compete against the game. Which is kind of funny because when we started, like we’ve been really getting back into board games. We played board games when we were kids and then kind of got out of it. And other than like you know, magic or D&D, really play many board games and the space exploded. And we just kind of missed a lot of it. But one of our favorite games to play is a game called Cthulhu Death May Die.

Okay. And in that game, it’s a collaborative game. The players are investigators and they’re trying to stop Cthulhu or whomever from coming back. And so you have to work together to try to do that. And we love the collaborative games. And so we found it not completely unironic that we built our first game as competitive. So we’re like, wait a second, how can we make this collaborative? And so we’ve been working through it. I have ideas about how I want to do it. We just have not been able to make a whole lot of progress on it.

But that’s one small chunk that we’re considering investing some time and energy into getting. The other thing is our first expansion to Roundtable, which would be about the Fae. The Fae or the Fairies. And unlike when one of the pieces of art we had submitted for the Fairy Tournament was like

Tinkerbell hitting a volleyball or something. And we’re like, that’s not quite the fairies of Arthurian legend. They’re a little naughty and meaner. And, you know, they’re just, you know, a little more rough and tumble. So I told the artist, I’m like, I love it, and if we can use it in some way, we will, but right now that’s not the direction we’re going with that particular card. It’s okay.

Jason Hsieh (22:58)
Yea. Got it. Got it.

Bill DeVoe (22:59)
Anyway, but the the Fae would actually the original set that we have tries to establish some pretty basic rules for the game. I would say that it’s not nearly as complicated as magic was when it came out in ’93. It is a bit more straightforward. Again, you don’t have five colors, you’re not trying to, you know, we don’t have that kind of stuff. We tried to keep the rules pretty straightforward.

for the first version of the game. The Fae, the intent is mess with the rules. So our goal there is to introduce things that are gonna let you draw more cards, play more lands, you know, you can have a hand size that’s as big as you want, you know, the kinds of things that are unusual and really kind of

mess around with the mechanics of the game. And that was the one thing that we didn’t want to do with that first edition was to do anything that was going to make it difficult. People understand like, well you can do this except in this case, or if this thing, or it’s a Tuesday, or we don’t want to do anything like that. So this next one is going to introduce some things that are going to play around with that. So that’s one of the expansions. And we’ve got ideas for several others that are distant future.

if we can get round table to a state where people are playing it, where it’s, you know, up there with say a flesh and blood, and people, you know, there’s a a lot more interest in it, then we will definitely look at either Kickstartering or just directly funding those next expansions. So

Jason Hsieh (24:26)
Got it, got it, got it. So as well wrapping up today’s interview, for our listener that would like to learn a little bit more about you and your company, where is the best place for finding online?

Bill DeVoe (24:36)
So our main website is nimuestudios.com N I ⁓ U E Studios.com. And ⁓ we can also go to roundtabletcg.com, and then I’ll take you to the same place. we do have a Discord, it is very quiet. You’re welcome to join it. You could there’s a link to that from the website. The website has

Tons of articles about all things that we’ve been doing, blog posts and stuff, but it also has links to all of our socials. We are on YouTube, but we don’t have much up there. we’re working to try to see what we can do to improve our social media presence. It’s been slow. So again, it’s not something we have a lot of skill at. and so a lot of it is learning on the fly. So

Jason Hsieh (25:15)
Got it. Thank you so much for sharing it. And thank you so much for your time today, sharing your story, your journey, and your wisdom with the rest of the industry today.

Bill DeVoe (25:23)
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And I realize it’s been a while coming. So thank you for your patience in helping get this together. Really appreciate it.

Jason Hsieh (25:32)
And thank you for our audience 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 podcast platform so you never miss a episode. We really love it if you can leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague. It really helps us to grow and reach to more toys and game creators like yourself.

If you want to keep the conversation going, feel free to join our free Facebook community, Toys and Game Launchpad, where Toys and Game Entrepreneur connect, share ideas, and get some exclusive resources. You can check it out at toy-launch.com/group. For more tips, resources, and the latest update within the toys and game industry, visit our website at toy-launch.com. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joys through 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.