How Small Box Games Win in Japan’s Crowded Market

Jason Hsieh (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. Today we have a special guest that joined us all the way from Japan, Tokyo, Japan, actually, Jacek. His journey into the Japanese tabletop industry is anything but conventional. He was currently a key player at a design house in Japan called PT Kawat, and it’s also a home to Japan’s largest broken cafe chain and indie publisher.

Jelly Jelly Games and he’s on a mission to bring Japanese creativity to the world and the rest of the international board game industry. So in this episode he’s going to join us talk about his background, his journey going from in the video game space to the board game space and we’ll be talking about a lot of the Japanese unique culture and also some of the unique challenges to translate between the East and the West culture. And for those of you who knows, I also have a lot of background in Japan. I used to live in Tokyo.

for five years and my wife is Japanese. So I know a little bit about the Japanese culture and the unique challenges that you face as well. So thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Jacek Mackiewicz (01:03)
Thank very much for having me. Good morning. Hello from Tokyo where it’s a nice crisp 39 ish Celsius morning. I don’t know that it’s in Fahrenheit, but I can tell you it’s way too hot.

Jason Hsieh (01:16)
Yeah, it’s very hot. I think that’s close to about 100 Fahrenheit or 39 degrees Celsius. And also Japan is very humid. So it’s not just hot, but very, very humid.

Jacek Mackiewicz (01:25)
Unfortunately so. Unfortunately true, but I’m at home with a nice aircon on, so I should be safe. Good morning. Thanks for having me.

Jason Hsieh (01:33)
Yeah, so first let’s dive into your background. I know before you got into the board game industry, you to work in the video games. How do you end up working in the board game industry in Japan?

Jacek Mackiewicz (01:43)
Good question. It’s all a little bit of an accident. So I used to live in the United Kingdom. That’s where I completed my degree for game technology. And that was kind of a mix of game design, business, programming, 3D modeling, animation, kind of anything and everything involving video games. And then I used to work at Unity, which is a software house. And I taught people programming, I taught people how to make games.

I’ve always been passionate about supporting independent creators to just make stuff and share ideas, share creativity, share our thoughts and feelings of the world via interactive art. That was always important to me. Then the pandemic happened, Brexit happened, and basically that meant that the UK said no thank you to being part of the EU. They made a British exit.

and said, Brexit for any of us unaware. And kind of politically that didn’t sit right with me, you of course, as a Polish person living in the UK. I think, you know, I was like, interesting. And in my life, I’ve moved every eight years or so, it was approaching eight years of living in the UK. My partner and I, you know, we were like, okay, what should we do? And we just said, let’s try Japan. Let’s try it for a year. Okay, see what happens.

Jason Hsieh (02:44)
I see.

Jacek Mackiewicz (02:53)
If we like it, stay if we don’t like it, we’ll go somewhere else. Spoiler, we really liked the one year. We decided to stay there longer. At the time, I was still working in video games, I was working in a startup. And the way startups are they don’t always work out for many different reasons. So after a couple of months, I found myself on the job hunt again.

As someone with limited Japanese proficiency, trying to find a job in Japan is really, really difficult. So was applying like crazy, you know, to all the other studios I could find anyone that would accept English speakers. And then in the meantime, there was this cafe next to me, and I’ve been there with my friends to play board games called Jelly Jelly Cafe. And I’ve seen a lot of tourists, a lot of foreigners come in and try and play the games.

So I just sent the company an email being like, hey guys, you’re 10 minutes away from my house by train. I can speak English, Polish, German. I can teach board games. I love board games. I can teach any visitors you have any rules. So you can shoot me an email if you have people coming by. I’ll pop up. I’ll tell them the rules. You’ll pay me something, minor.

Jason Hsieh (03:54)
Okay, that’s how you started. Okay, yeah.

Jacek Mackiewicz (03:56)
And they replied to my email saying like, no, thank you.

Jason Hsieh (03:59)
Okay, okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (04:00)
But do you want to stop by the office for a chat? Okay. So said, okay, sure. And then I prepared some materials of games I’ve translated into English, prepared my CV, basically. I went in there and I continuously talked broken Japanese until they gave me a part-time job at the main office. And from there,

Jason Hsieh (04:20)
Thank you.

Jacek Mackiewicz (04:25)
They liked me enough to keep me on full time. So now I accidentally ended up in board games and I do a whole bunch of stuff to PC Cutter Design and Jelly Jelly Games, Jelly Jelly Print, Jelly Jelly Cafe, Jelly Jelly Store and Jelly Jelly International.

Jason Hsieh (04:38)
Hmm, I see. So what is your role right now? Because you’re very multifaceted right now. So what do do exactly in the company?

Jacek Mackiewicz (04:46)
There’s a good question. Officially, my role is global developer. Unofficially, what that means is that basically I’m the guy that does anything that involves any language that’s not Japanese. So fun. It’s very challenging. It’s very interesting because basically anytime we get an email, a question, a support in English, they’re like, Hey, Jacek what do we do?

Jason Hsieh (04:56)
Okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (05:07)
That’s a great question. I don’t know about international tax laws yet, but give me a couple of days. I’ll get back to you. But no, technically what I do is I translate the games from Japanese to English when we produce English versions for the international market. I’m in charge of, what’s it called, searching for publishers for our titles. So, you know, we want to

localize our titles in many different countries, many different areas so that players all around the world can get to play our wonderful games. So I’m in charge of, you know, looking for those connections and suggesting games to publishers, sending them samples, setting up meetings and trying to convince them that our games would be a good fit for the market. And I do the inverse of that as well. So I’m in touch with publishers and we take their games.

translate them to Japanese and sell them within Japan.

Jason Hsieh (05:57)
Interesting. Okay, okay, okay. So that leads me to an interesting question because you have worked from both market. What kind of game tend to be more successful for the Japanese market based on your experience

Jacek Mackiewicz (06:08)
Based on my experience and what we focus on the Jelly Jelly. So again, biased my experiences is small box games are kind of our focus and it’s what tends to do better. Of course, you can still find your big box players in board game shops, right? There are still your gloom havens, your big, you know, seven kilo, 10 kilo boxes of board games. But the market definitely leans towards smaller and you’ve lived in Japan yourself, so you know that.

The housing space is much different.

Jason Hsieh (06:36)
They don’t have a lot of shelving space to store board games somewhere random.

Jacek Mackiewicz (06:40)
Yeah, they don’t. I am currently surrounded by them on the floor. But yeah, space is definitely a premium. So because space is at a premium, whether you’re a family, a couple, you know, by yourself, and you want to get into this hobby, like you’re just naturally going to have to make difficult choices, right? Because do I choose game A? Do I choose game B? And

That combined with the Japanese economy, which is surprisingly not that great for your average consumer. So when it comes to making a choice between, I can buy one big game, they’ll take up a lot of show space, or I can buy multiple smaller games, and they’re still good games. Then I think folks were more likely lean towards those smaller experiences. And that’s been our experience, like those sell better for our customers, there’s more interest in them.

people can actually have them in their house, which is nice.

Jason Hsieh (07:27)
I see, see. And how do you and your team choose which international games to bring into Japan? What are some of the criteria besides the size that you’re looking for?

Jacek Mackiewicz (07:36)
That is a very good question. I’m still learning. Sometimes I’m like, this game will be a hit. And I show it to the team and they’re like, we’re not going to do it. So I’m still learning. mean, you know, it feels like a bit of a cop out to say a good game because, you know, all games are good. But there’s definitely a certain amount of criteria we look at when we publish games. So

Jason Hsieh (07:42)
Okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (07:58)
I’ll start with the abstract stuff first maybe, and then I’ll describe a bit more of the game mechanisms. The two key things that I always hear from my colleagues is box size, which we’ve already said. Even if I bring them a small box, they’re like, can we make it smaller? I’ll ask, I’ll let you know, we’ll see. So box size and the art style. Art style is very important in the Japanese market.

Again, you know, things here tend to be more kawaii, things here tend to be cuter, lighter, more kind of approachable. Whereas, you know, in the West, we have a lot of different art styles. You’ve got your like fantasy gritty art styles, you know, like that, whether it’s 80s fantasy or like dark fantasy, or a lot of spaceship stuff, or sci-fi stuff. We are starting to see more of a trend with anthropomorphic animals.

cute little humanoid animals are becoming very popular in board games in the West. And then there’s the classic boring German art as people say, there’s a distinction, people often say between American games and European games. Whereas American games are like beer and pretzel games, right? So you’ll have a beer, you’ll throw some dice, you’re like, yes, I attack you for five.

Jason Hsieh (09:02)
Yeah

Jacek Mackiewicz (09:03)
My warrior levels up and then you’re eating some pretzels. Whereas Euro games are very much like, I have five woods and I convert up to three coal and the three holes are two spaces. ⁓

Jason Hsieh (09:12)
What’s up?

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a good description,

Jacek Mackiewicz (09:18)
So that’s where the German boring art comes from. It’s very much like here’s trains, here’s some wheat, here’s some people stood in a field or whatever. So oftentimes we have to ask the publishers to be comfortable with changing the art style just because we know it won’t be popular, eye-catching or right for the market. Which is interesting to me because I like different art styles. I have board games and

And in every art style you can imagine, and there’s a unique selling points to every art style, think. And I also think it’s quite nice to share different cultures, different art styles with people. But, you know, at the end of the day, you want your products to reach customers. So we do almost always ask if we can adapt the art style to better fit the market.

Jason Hsieh (10:00)
I see, I see. And just a follow up question on that, obviously you don’t need to share a specific number, but I’m just wondering how does that kind of business arrangement usually work? Do you pay the Western publisher like a royalty? Then you help them with all the translations and bring them into the Japanese market. How does that kind of partnership typically happen?

Jacek Mackiewicz (10:20)
So there’s two main types that we focus on. One is we kind of buy the game as is. So we use their factory, then we leave the box size the same. We leave the components the same. We just change the language.

So we don’t change the art style, we don’t change the box size, those do happen. We just send them all the Japanese files, they produce the game. And in that case, we simply kind of buy them from the publisher, right? Per copy. We pay a reduced price per copy, we ship it to us, and then we sell it. And then the other type is based on royalties, like you said. So we kind of get the license to the game, and then we can…

Jason Hsieh (10:47)
Okay.

Okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (10:59)
With the publisher’s permission we can change the art style, can change the box size, can change the components, whatever we want. That’s pre-approved. And then when we manufacture the game, we simply pay a percentage per copy that we print to the original publisher.

Jason Hsieh (11:14)
I see. OK, OK, that’s interesting. And how about the other way around? Because you also export some of the Japanese game to the Western market. How does that kind of arrangement typically work?

Jacek Mackiewicz (11:24)
So very much similar, just the other way around. So we have our catalog that I sent out or show as shows to publishers. When they’re interested, they receive a sample. So we always like to send a physical sample because it’s important, right? It’s one thing to read about a game or read about a toy, and then you actually get your hands on it and you’re like, this is different than I imagined. So we started a sample. If everyone’s happy, then we do the same kind of thing. We say, hey, do you want to just

buy it from us with your localized version. We have our own factory, we’ve got Jelly Jelly Print and I can tell you more about that in a second. Always say, hey, you guys have the license, you do whatever you want, just please check with us first and then they’ll pay a percentage each copy.

Jason Hsieh (12:04)
Okay,

okay, okay, okay. Kind of similar. Okay. And when you are doing the other way around, I was just wondering what kind of game tend to attract the Western publisher more from the Japanese designers.

Jacek Mackiewicz (12:15)
It’s a good question. I think that’s actually the tricky part and the interesting part is that it’s all about finding the right publisher. Because the Western market is so big, it’s so wide, there’s so many companies, there’s so many potential customers, there’s so many publishers, there’s so many. So many, there’s so much. And so it’s less about knowing what does well and what doesn’t.

And more about knowing all these guys have certain focus, their games are, you know, this certain type of game, these guys have a certain type of game. So it’s just approaching the right people and knowing like these guys will really like the box style that we have, for example, there’s a certain box style that a certain publishers really like, and that could be enough to get them interested. Other ones, you know, are specific mechanics. We’re like, OK, this is like a, you know, a party game of a conversational party game.

This publisher publishes a lot of those games. That being said, our most popular title recently is called Yubibo, which translates from Japanese to finger sticks. And if you’ve played Twister, you know, the game of your whole body, where you like putting your hands and legs on the colors, it’s like that before your fingers. So you’re working together cooperatively to hold up sticks between your fingertips and not let them drop.

Very silly, not a traditional board game, but that’s been doing great. So that’s been signing in many countries, many territories. And it’s one of those games when you see it, you get it and you want to play it.

Jason Hsieh (13:34)
Okay, so that’s a good example of the game that actually went really well without bringing too much modification as well. What has been some of the biggest challenge for you when you try to localize games, for example, into the Japanese languages so far?

Jacek Mackiewicz (13:49)
Various challenges. It’s still the kind of not fully knowing what the Japanese audience will or will not like. And a lot of that depends on cultural, like culture is just so important when it comes to localizing board games. And I don’t mean board games, know, like mechanics focused ones, but anything that’s more party, more conversation or

between players.

Jason Hsieh (14:11)
I can imagine trivia game being very very hard to translate into the Japanese culture because there’s a lot of trivia game that’s more culture nuances that is almost impossible to translate that.

Jacek Mackiewicz (14:21)
Yes, we get a lot of stuff that’s like, you know, hey, this sells, you know, millions of copies and people love it. And we look at it and you know, pop culture references or western shows, western games.

Jason Hsieh (14:32)
I mean, even myself, I struggled to play some of the US trivia game because I didn’t grow up in the United States. I grew up in Taiwan. So I didn’t understand a lot of the inside joke that the trivia game have here in US. So I can imagine try to translate that into the Japanese culture. You would just fall flat. People don’t understand what exactly the joke is about at all.

Jacek Mackiewicz (14:52)
Exactly. So we’d have to completely change the question. And at that point, we’re essentially making the game ourselves in a way, do know what I mean? And it’s similar. So we’ve recently released a small, very, very small game. it’s in your pocket, it looks like a pack of gum. And it’s just questions that you ask your friends, right? And it’s very, very simple. Let’s say the question was like person most likely to really watch a movie. Okay, we count down three to one. If you think it’s you, we’ll raise our hand. Okay. If

If you think it’s someone else, you point at them. If you point it at someone who raised their hand, you both get a point.

Jason Hsieh (15:20)
Okay. Okay.

I see, okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (15:25)
Super simple, very simple game, take it with you. And you’re like, okay, that sounds, you know, very, very simple. But again, culturally, people in Europe are more likely to be mean to their friends, right? If you really like someone, then you’re comfortable being mean to them. In English, call it banter. In Europe, I don’t know what they call it. But you know, if I really love someone, I’m going to be mean to them. They’re going to be mean to me back and they will hug and it’s all good.

Not so in Japan at all. Right?

Jason Hsieh (15:52)
That’s true, yeah.

Jacek Mackiewicz (15:54)
Very different. So even I remember like when I was translating one of the games and I said, the first player is the one who’s most likely to go to jail. Right? Because in Europe that was was point of fun conversation. Like you totally get arrested. No, you’d get arrested, you know, that kind of thing. Here they were like, no, we shouldn’t do that.

Jason Hsieh (16:10)
I can

totally relate to that. That’s very Japanese because they are so, I think they are afraid of confrontation. That’s just part of the culture. They don’t want to confront each other. And also they don’t like to speak out loud of what they really think, which is one thing I also struggle with the Japanese culture because a lot of things is unspoken rule or there’s a Japanese word called like kukimu means read the air.

It’s like, What are you talking about? I don’t understand. But that’s a very unique Japanese thing that you have referring to.

Jacek Mackiewicz (16:43)
Exactly. it’s one those things where like culture really influences so much of how we interact with each other. That even things that sound simple in nature are like, well, culturally, this just wouldn’t work as well, you know, for x, y, reasons. So yeah, that’s, it’s not so much a challenge as it is just a really interesting facet of constantly learning and improving what I know and

getting to tell other people and they are like, oh yeah, interesting truth.

Jason Hsieh (17:11)
Yeah, because they don’t understand the cultural differences and the nuances unless you have lived in both countries like me and right now. And also, are some of the trends you seeing in Japan in the indie board game industry right now?

Jacek Mackiewicz (17:25)
Hmm. So the indie board game scene in Japan is super, super cool. Before I’ll answer your question, but just quickly, want to introduce it to folks who might not be aware. So in video games, people often get together for something called a game jams, right? Or you have a set amount of time to make a video game together. Usually 48 hours, sometimes 72, whatever you get a, you get a theme.

You get together with a team, it’s meant to be challenging and the constraints kind of breed creativity. Right? So you’ve got 40 hours to make a game, what can I do? And sometimes those games then turn on into fuller games and they become, you know, successors or full releases. And the term jam came from the music industry where musicians would get together and just jam out, Just jam out some tunes, see what works. So that’s really big in the West. I’ve participated in many myself. They’re good fun as long as you get your sleep.

And there’s a big culture of that kind of independent creativity. Not so much in board games. Okay. So far, at least that I’m aware of, I know it’s slowly changing. Not so much in board games. People don’t tend to get together, make their own board games, sell their own board games as much. You very much you get people making prototypes and then they’re looking for publishers, looking for kickstarters, but they’re making those prototypes as a business idea.

right? The creation, the finished creation of the world. Here we have this scene called the doujin scene, right? The doujin is, gosh, I forgot the official translation, but it’s when you when you make something as a fan, right? It came from drawing comics, manga of stuff you like, writing fan fiction, and making music, making

Jason Hsieh (18:33)
Yes,

Jacek Mackiewicz (18:55)
anything fan goods related for yourself. And we have that seen as well in board games. So people make their own board games, they get together in these things called game designer circles. And the game designer circle is essentially a group of people, like-minded individuals working together. And they make small board games, card games. And we have an official show twice a year called Tokyo Game Market where they can sell those games.

Jason Hsieh (19:18)
Okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (19:19)
And again, the super cool thing about that is you get your finished, pristine productions, you know, you get your full boxes with rules, with components, with pieces, and you get people that, you know, prints cards on business cards, because it’s cheaper, put them in a plastic bag, and that’s the game you get. Okay. And the rules are online on a Google Doc. Yes. It’s this whole, just huge and varied field of creativity and passion and weird ideas and unique ideas.

Jason Hsieh (19:37)
Okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (19:46)
And people are so open to interacting with this, to, purchasing those games, to checking them out. You know, we’re thousands of games, every show that’s on twice a year. And that’s very much kind of the, the cornerstone of the Japanese in DC, right? As people that make those games. And, know, as someone who’s looking for games to, publish, you know, sometimes I’ll go up to the folks, I’m like, your game looks interesting.

I like, sorry, it’s sold out. I’m never making it again. I made 50 copies just for fun. It’s over.

Jason Hsieh (20:14)
Really? They don’t want to make more? That’s very interesting. Okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (20:18)
And it’s really nice to me to have something that’s driven by like profit, right? They’re not making like, even if I’m like, hey, man, this could sell, this is great. They’re like, I’m good. I made this game for myself. I finished it. I’m moving on to the next one. know, so it’s, it’s very much not for everyone, of course, you know, but there’s such a focus on creativity and making unique and interesting games and just showcasing them to the world.

And it’s something that folks are now starting to organize in the West. There’s a couple of people that are doing a great job who have come to game market or been familiar with game market and are trying to do the same in America and in Europe. But it’s still very young. It’s still very niche.

Jason Hsieh (20:56)
OK, OK, Be a good website to check out more information for our listener for the Japanese version.

Jacek Mackiewicz (20:58)
That’s something else.

So if you are interested, you can check out the game market website. They have an official website. It’s just a game market.jp. Warning, it’s all in Japanese. your browsers have the translate functionality. And I think they have a small section like for English visitors, click here.

And there’s always Game Market Spring, Game Market Autumn, so the next one is coming up in November. We have some very cool titles that I’m very excited about, we’re releasing two new games.

Jason Hsieh (21:28)
I haven’t been to one of those game market in Japan, so when you attend those, are they all indie designer or is it also bigger publisher that’s attending?

Jacek Mackiewicz (21:36)
It’s also bigger publishers. So you do have booths of people like Arclight, the organizers of the event. You have people like Hobby Japan, you have your bigger indie games like Oink Games, like your Sashi and Sashi, Jelly Jelly Games we’re there as well. But those are definitely like the minor aspect of the show. You you have like 10, 20 big companies and then hundreds of

Jason Hsieh (21:58)
Smaller design,

Jacek Mackiewicz (22:00)
Did you like pop up tables? You know, like no decoration, just like here’s some plastic bags, here’s some boxes. You know, I wrote with a marker the price. Here I am. Let’s talk about my game.

Jason Hsieh (22:10)
Okay, okay, very primitive, okay, very interesting, so, okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (22:15)
very cool.

Jason Hsieh (22:17)
Thanks

for sharing that.

Jacek Mackiewicz (22:18)
I recommend checking it out because it’s so different. It’s just such a different approach. And it’s part of the thing I do, right? It’s before every game market. The really cool thing is on game market, they have a database of all the games that are submitted. anyone that has a booth, you can find information about their game online, which is really nice. So I’ll just spend weeks opening every single game and being like,

Jason Hsieh (22:34)
Okay.

Which one you like, okay?

Jacek Mackiewicz (22:40)
Based on the information they provided, does this sound good? It’s hard to tell sometimes because the information they provide can be like, know, one paragraph.

Jason Hsieh (22:48)
Yeah, I see.

Jacek Mackiewicz (22:49)
Or they can go overboard and give you like six pages of detailed text and every interaction.

Jason Hsieh (22:56)
Okay, that’s a very interesting insight. What other scene that you noticed that’s very interesting, like very different or very unique in the Japanese board game industry versus the Western board game industry?

Jacek Mackiewicz (23:06)
I think there’s a trend again on inspired by size on trying to do a lot with little. don’t know if I said that right, but I think you get the point as a couple of years ago, a game really blew up internationally called Love Letter.

Jason Hsieh (23:21)
Love letter.

Jacek Mackiewicz (23:22)
very popular game now. It was originally a game market release. for any of you that are Love Letter fans and you’re finding out, there you go. came from a Tokyo game market and was picked up by a big publisher who saw the potential. It’s a very simple card game. There’s only a couple of cards. And the base premise is you’re trying to deliver a Love Letter to a princess and you know, you have one card in your hand. Every turn you draw a card, you play one of two cards.

Jason Hsieh (23:45)
Hmm, okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (23:46)
That’s all you do in your turn. The cards all have to do with eliminating each other in some way. So you can guess a number. If anyone has a number in their hand, they’re out. You can compare numbers. If your numbers higher, the lower person’s out. You have a card that’s like, if you have number X or Y, you have to play this card. And of course, if you discard the highest number card, you lose because you wouldn’t want to get rid of the highest number card. That’s the gist. Very simple game. Just numbers one to nine.

Jason Hsieh (24:08)
Okay.

Jacek Mackiewicz (24:13)
or eight in the original. And that was kind of one of the spearheads of this trend in design of how can we make interesting and fun rules very few components, very polished, just the rules with a small amount of components. And that’s a trend you see a lot. I mean, ourselves at Jelly Jelly, we have a couple of games that come in small boxes and the components are like 18 cards, 16 cards and a couple of tokens.

And that’s another thing you were asking me what’s one of the challenges. And when things deviate from the standard rules, that tends to be not so light. So for example, you the card does A, but if you have card B, then there’s the C. But if, you know, the situation is D, then it actually does E.

Jason Hsieh (24:54)
Yeah, multi-layers,

Jacek Mackiewicz (24:55)
Yeah, which can be fun, but here they’re like, no, it shouldn’t be confusing. I often hear that actually that’s too confusing. That’s too difficult.

Jason Hsieh (25:02)
I see. I try to keep it simple.

Jacek Mackiewicz (25:04)
So that’s definitely the trend. And you do have your Japanese publishers that do bigger box board games and a lot of components and a lot of complicated card effects. But it is typically just one single idea that’s very focused in on, very combed in on. What can we do with this mechanic and this mechanic only? And that’s still been the trend that’s kind of slowly making its way into the West as well. they all kind of started with Love Letter a couple of years ago.

Jason Hsieh (25:29)
Okay, okay, okay. Got it. Thank you so much for sharing that. I’ll definitely check out that game as well. So as we’re wrapping up today’s interview, if you have to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s getting started, within the toys and the game industry in general, what would that be?

Jacek Mackiewicz (25:34)
Go eat ask it fun

good question. mean, based on my own experience, just reach out to people. Worse than that can happen is you won’t hear back. And that’s the worst case scenario. In my experience, people that work in this industry are super friendly, they’re super open, very supportive. So if there’s any question you have, there’s anything you’re struggling with.

Even if I don’t know the answer, I can maybe find someone who does know the answer. it’s important to remember that there’s a whole support network of people because we’re all in it together. We’re all trying to figure it out together. If people are trying to enter the business, I think that would be my main thing is just reach out to people that do this thing already. There’s so many creators of all different shapes and sizes. You will find someone who can.

point you in the right direction or maybe even team up with you. I mean, recently, I just reached out to someone I was a fan of. And now we’re working together on a game, know, just kind of accidentally. So again, worse than that can happen is they’ll say no. And the other thing to remember is these things take time. You know, we’re not talking video games, it’s not like five, six years to produce a video game. But, you know, these things take time. So

Whether you’re listening to it as someone who’s interested in working in board games or anything like that, making a prototype, testing it, playing it, ensuring it works, showing all the rules are fun and that it fits your market and that the art style is good. And then you have to go through production and you have to check the production is correct. Then you have to go through shipping and everything. It’s a long process. So don’t rush it. There’s people there to support you.

and people to reach out and yeah message me if you want I’m available I can help on in the right direction yeah

Jason Hsieh (27:22)
Okay, so for our listeners, want to learn a little bit more about your companies and a little bit about yourself. Where is the best place to find you online and find your company on?

Jacek Mackiewicz (27:31)
Sure. So Jelly Jelly has many different avenues as we described, where we do a little bit of everything. I do want to point people towards our newest venture, is Jelly Jelly International. That’s jelly2intl.com. Jelly2 because Jelly Jelly and then INTL short for International. And that’s an initiative I launched to try and help highlight Japanese designers. And what I was just talking about Tokyo Game Market. I reach out to indie designers in Japan.

We get their games, we translate the rules to English, we make sure that you can play it. And we send you the original Japanese game so you have access to unique Japanese games that you won’t get outside of Japan in English. let’s go to the website where I’ll be focusing most of my time at the moment. Currently reviewing some very cool Japanese indie games that I’m hoping to have up on the store soon.

And we have articles and interviews with Japanese creators, the Japanese approach to making games, to designing games, to getting games ready for game markets. Maybe even a podcast in the future, who knows. And then if you want to find me myself, I’m at Twitter at Papa Polsky. Because Polsky was my nickname at university and I was often a father figure to my to folks around me. So I’m at Papa Polsky. Feel free to…

say hello.

Jason Hsieh (28:38)
I see. Okay. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you so much for your time today, sharing all the stories and the journey and some of the challenges that you face in the Japanese board game industry. And just like I mentioned, you’re the first guest coming from all the way coming from Japan. So thank you so much for being on.

Jacek Mackiewicz (28:54)
Of course, thank you for having me. I hope I was coherent despite the early morning and my lack of caffeine.

Jason Hsieh (28:59)
No, you’re totally fine. And thank you for our listener for tuning into 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 in 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’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joy 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.