I have known the company’s co-founder Tomi since elementary school. This was before the internet in the early 90s, at which point we’d already been interested in games for years — both video and tabletop. Growing up in the 80s my family had a Commodore 64, and I believe Tomi had an Amiga 500. I remember Tomi was usually the one who managed to get his hands on the latest cool titles. We often created scenarios for games like AD&D and HeroQuest. I had started “modding” games even earlier, as I remember crafting an extra bit of road with a couple of more estates to the board game called Hotel, and using a butter knife to detach all the tiles from the Labyrinth board so that every row and column was moveable.

In the early 2000’s we were involved with some video game related projects but nothing considering tabletop games, until in 2013 we coincidentally had both started designing a board game at the same time. This led to a discussion about us potentially doing something in the tabletop game industry, and in 2014 we decided to found Playmore Games Inc.

An important aspect for us was to combine the possibilities of digital content and board games. We both have backgrounds in IT and this was something we could already start to see happening in the Board Game industry, with titles like XCOM: The Board Game and the Unlock! Series.

In 2015 we published our own board game Race to the North Pole, and with that we visited several international game expos in 2015 and 2016. At those shows we pitched a variety of digital content ideas to many publishers. The one that resonated the most and pretty much universally was the “interactive tutorial”. At the time we pitched it as being like a video game tutorial which teaches you while you play, but for a board game. You know, a “skip the rulebook and play immediately” sort of thing. This seemed to be so interesting for publishers that we decided to pursue this avenue first.

We hired our first employees and created some prototypes. We tested these in practice at expos and conducted some surveys. According to our findings we determined that a good size of the audience prefers learning games from others. It seems that in the 21st century people prefer to be able to lean back and simply enjoy a new game. Perhaps a trend started by the video game industry by ditching the manuals in the 90s? Anyway, this easiness in getting into a game was the leading principle when we started developing the model for the Dized tutorials. By the way, we picked the name Dized as it’s the first and last letters of the word “digitalized”, and also a wordplay on dice. I believe we finally settled on the name when we were able to secure dized.com for a few hundred dollars, which felt like a pretty good deal.

So, the idea of a digital play-along tutorial seemed to be viable in theory but we wanted to test the commercial aspect of it as well. For this, we ran an Indiegogo (IGG) campaign in 2017. We chose IGG because running a Kickstarter (KS) campaign as a Finnish company was not possible, or rather would’ve required a lot of extra steps. The campaign did okay and Dized actually became one of the most crowdfunded apps ever.

We had however underestimated both the amount of effort it would take us to get the platform built, and the amount of resources we would have available. During the Indiegogo campaign we estimated it would take us about a year to get the platform up and running. And to be fair, this might’ve been the case if we would’ve been able to raise something in the millions, but a $150k campaign wasn’t going to get us there so quickly.

We did our best with the resources we had and were able to publish Dized Rules tool by the end of 2018. Dized Rules is basically a digital version of a rulebook that includes the game FAQ and a search engine. These rules are created on a browser-based tool and can easily be updated. The reason we focused on the Rules tool first was simply because it was the easiest part to get done, and something that could already on its own be beneficial for players.

The Rules tool was created because we had determined that the ability to ask any question at any moment of the learning process was important to players. With the Rules tool you can check a rule, no matter if it’s already been covered by the tutorial, or if you just simply want to know it. That’s why we felt that the tutorial alone wasn’t enough, and that the service should include the full game rules and an FAQ, all fully indexed, cross-referenced, searchable, and updateable. This is similar to how some games come with two manuals; a quick play guide and a thorough rulebook. We’ve learned that it’s quite difficult to create a single rulebook that is great for both teaching the game and acting as an efficient source material for solving rule-related questions. Thus we divided Dized’s method of providing rules into Tutorials and Rules, and started with the easier one to develop.

We had also gotten a decent amount of feedback during the IGG that more people would’ve backed the campaign, if it would’ve been on KS instead. Feeling that we might’ve missed some potential, and with the help of a recent investor who had a US based company, we ran a KS at the end of 2018. That’s also when the Dized Rules tool was published. And true enough, while the campaign wasn’t a runaway success, it did raise over $100k, which again was really good for a digital product.

With the crowdfunding campaigns under our belts and wanting to push out the tools as soon as possible we launched a private equity investment round in early 2019. We were aiming to be able to raise enough somewhat quickly so that we could deliver the tutorial tool by the end of the year. Unfortunately we did not hit the goals and instead of growing the team we had to downsize it, which naturally made the progress even slower.

We got the first version of the Tutorial tool live in the spring of 2020, just after the pandemic started. We were hoping to show our new content creation tools to many industry operators but the lack of expos made it a much bigger challenge. The pandemic also caused the global shipping prices to rise and we felt like the uncertain times made it more difficult to get publishers to hop on board to a new digital platform. At the same time focusing fully on sales was difficult as we were still fixing bugs and developing new features for our content creation tools. The industry survived the pandemic quite well overall, but for us the timing didn’t work since our product wasn’t ready enough.

Instead of officially launching the platform during the pandemic we focused on developing new and improving existing features. In May 2020 we published the Dized Rules on the web so that it was easier to share and could be search engine optimized. Until this point content had only been available on the iOS and Android apps. The first tool made tutorials were published in summer of 2020, and included Time Breaker, Carcassonne and 7 Wonders. In total we managed to publish 10 tutorials in 2020. Before this the few tutorials we had on Dized were custom made with Unity 3D.

In 2021 the lack of expos continued and even though the digital versions of them were quite well organized, they did not match the experience and success we’ve had at in-person shows. During this time we still continued on bringing more important features to Dized; all content including Tutorials was made available on the web, and we added localization support, so that any content created on the platform could be localized to other languages. We were able to publish 18 tutorials, which wasn’t nearly as much as we had hoped for, but at least it was an increase from the year before.

This year (2022) has been quite a challenge for us. We have continued working with a very small team and limited resources with the goal of getting the platform officially published, as this would also mean revenue streams. With a tremendous push from our team we were able to make this happen now in December, and somehow we even managed to double the speed of new content, publishing some 40 new contents to Dized this year! We’ve also seen the first DLCs (downloadable contents), which we call Extras. Dized Extras are used together with a board game for some additional content, like a score calculator, soundtrack, dice roller or even full blown digital game expansions.

So, we did eventually get there! Definitely not in the desired timeline, and not exactly with the size of library we were hoping to launch with. It’s frankly amazing that we were able to publish the platform at all after all this time. The thanks for that goes for the unbelievably amazing and resilient Dized team, our critically important investors (many of them from the board game industry), and the people who have constantly reminded us that what we do, matters.

Board games are an awesome power in the world and apart from being just for entertainment they do a lot of good for helping people deal with a vast variety of different challenges. A lot of inspiration and motivation can stem from knowing that you’re building something that could have a real positive impact in the world. And perhaps this is already happening, as in December alone players have seen well over 1 million tutorial steps on Dized, and we’ve had over 200,000 users on the platform this year. It feels like a promising start!

I’m sure more talented people could’ve made this happen faster. We didn’t really have relevant experience in running a company, working in the board game industry, or building a global brand. In the end we were just enthusiastic gamers with an exciting idea, who have learned a lot on the way. In retrospect there are many, many things we should’ve-could’ve-would’ve done differently. I don’t even fully understand how it is suddenly 5 years later that we got this out, although I guess the past 3 years have been a bit of a haze for many others as well.

Knowing now how long it took us to get the platform built we did our crowdfunding efforts way too early (well, unless we would’ve been able to raise a lot more that is). We also tried to achieve too many things at once which is probably mostly my fault. I believed it was important to get Dized out on all platforms, all languages, and serve every operator from publishers to retailers for it to truly be an inclusive platform. And to be honest, I still believe that, but I do admit we should’ve started with smaller goals and better focus to get to publishing sooner.

We’ve gotten amazing user feedback this year and for the first time it now really feels like this could actually become something. There is so much more we want to achieve with this platform, and hopefully with the sales now starting and some VERY exciting projects in the pipeline (some of which we cannot publicly even talk about yet), we are looking for a promising new year!

There are so many stories from over the years I wish I could tell, but I believe this post is already too long. Thank you for reading it, and please let me hear in the comments if you already have an experience with Dized, or what would you wish to see on our platform in the future.

With that I hope you will all have a game-rich (and rulebook-light) 2023!

Best,
-Jouni (CEO, Dized)

Dized Has New Features, a New Platform and New Content

A lot has been happening here at Dized. Well, “here” seems a bit misleading as I’m currently sitting alone at the office writing this because everyone’s working remotely. But nevertheless, things have been progressing with Dized every day. And yes, that includes weekends too.

For the better part of last year we were pretty much focused on the development of the platform and were now ready to start moving our focus to growth. We’ve been able to make the content easier to create and access than before, so let’s talk more about that.

New Features

In the beginning of this year Dized has gotten a couple of requested features. The app can now be used in portrait mode and it has a search.

Naturally, the portrait mode was always on the roadmap, the challenge was rather the implementation of it. It seems like it should be a simple thing but turned out to be more work than anticipated. This caused us to push the feature till later, as it was more important to focus on other things, like building the tools that allow the creation of more content.

Once we got the tools to a stage when the Dized library slowly started to grow we decided to take the time to implement the portrait mode.

The story for the search is the same, as the size of the library was small enough that it was somewhat easy to browse through it all without the search being available. Now that we’re looking to get more content soon the demand for the search grew, so we took the time to implement the search into the app too.

New Platforms

Dized Tutorials are now available on the web! This means people can access them with their computers too, though smart devices still require the Dized app. We weren’t actually planning on doing the web presence quite yet but at this point of our development the feature happened to be a low hanging fruit.

The Dized Content Creation Tools are used online with a browser, and they are so called WYSIWYG tools: What You See Is What You Get. So while we were creating the tools, we naturally needed them to have an ability to show the content as it will be seen by users in Dized. And once this had been developed far enough it was quite easy to bring the Tutorials publicly available to the web too.

We’ll be focusing next on Dized Rules so we can bring the best possible digital rules experience to the web as well. After that we’ll be looking at tools for localizing and translating the contents.

New Content

This year there has already been 3 more Tutorials to Dized: chess, Fluxx and Shobu. The tutorials have so far been for lighter games as the CCTs (Content Creation Tools) have been developed further. With advancements in the tool more complex games are starting to appear soon, with first ones being for Tokyo Sidekick, Cerebria and Scythe.

We are still in the very early stages of growth, but it’s already looking promising with the increasing speed of new tutorials. This is an indication that we’ve been able to make the tools efficient enough for it to be affordable for publishers.

One major challenge for getting the growth really going has been the pandemic. The expos have been cancelled and this has prevented us from meeting with hundreds of publishers. We are doing the work online but it’s definitely not as efficient as being able to show in person what we have and how it works.

And getting the publishers interested is just the first step. Someone also needs to create the content as publishers are typically too busy to do it themselves. This is why we’ve also been increasingly focusing on training more content creators. For this we have put together an online guide with a practice project that will get people started, and we also have a community on Discord where creators can ask questions and share ideas.

Making The Dreams Come True

We still have a long road ahead to make our dreams come true about improving the tabletop gaming experience, and about making the hobby more accessible and inclusive for everyone. Having gotten the platform to its current state the dream feels more achievable than ever before!

You can find the Dized web tutorials here: https://dized.com/tutorials

Now that we’re nearing the end of the year, it’s time to look back and reflect a bit. This has indeed been quite challenging for our team and in this post we’ll go through some of those challenges, areas where we aim to improve next year and also the achievements we were able to reach.

This is a somewhat beefy “end of the year” post and if you’re in a hurry please scroll to the end to check the TLDR SUMMARY (Too Long, Didn’t Read).

Our current goal is, and has been for all year to release a set of tools for the tabletop game industry that allows a cost efficient way to create and publish interactive tutorials. This Tutorial CCT (Content Creation Tool) has been our main focus in 2019 and the original goal was to get the tool released already in September. We however could not reach that goal due to reasons explained further on. Good news is that we have made progress all year long and even though we’re behind our original schedule, we are nearing the moment of releasing the tools.

One area where we wish we could’ve done better is our Communication towards our audience. It has been lacking this year and we apologize for that. We’ve tried to keep up with monthly updates for our backers and tell of our doings every now and then in social media. Obviously the burning question has been (and is) “when is Dized out?”. We haven’t been able to give out an accurate answer because we ourselves haven’t been able to account for the variables that have strongly affected the development schedule.

One thing that’s obviously clear is that we have been way too optimistic about our timelines. We did make progress all year long and things looked good, but suddenly it was September and tools weren’t ready to be released. During our initial scheduling we even accounted for the usual hiccups that come with software development, but this year has hit us with several big challenges, some of which took a long time to solve. So, in hindsight, we can say that our initial schedule was close to a best case scenario. With the numerous challenges this year we weren’t able to even kinda live up to it.

With Dized we’ve been having to do more greenfielding than what we were planning to. In other words, we’ve been having to develop many features no-one has done before. This means there’s no-one to really guide us when we have had questions and we have had to figure it out ourselves. One example of this has been building a smooth union between React and Unity 3D technologies. Dized content is built online using the React based Dized Portal with a web browser. Dized App on the other hand uses Unity 3D for better performance and user experience. In order to create the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) style content creation tool, we needed to bring Unity 3D to be part of the React environment. Might sound simple enough, but it took time to make them work together.

Another example of an unexpected issue was activating the In-App Purchases (IAP) function. This is an important feature as IAP is on of the main methods how Dized will make revenue and stay in business in the future. We activated the IAP and built the app but… it had turned off in the building process. We couldn’t figure out why. We contacted Unity 3D, and despite them trying to help us out the reason for it was not found. The final suggestion we got was to try and create the project from scratch, adding code line by line and see where it breaks. We didn’t really have the human resources to do this and as the app has thousands of lines of code plus the many libraries it uses, this indeed turned out to be one of those challenges that took a lot of time to solve. This had not been accounted for in our estimations and roadmaps.

We’re happy to say that human resources is one thing where we have been somewhat blessed. We have awesome employees and didn’t have any changes in the in-house development talent. However, due to financial reasons (more on that below) the crucial outsourced talent went through a few changes this year. This caused extra delays, not just because there were times when we lacked important talent, but it also takes quite a long time getting a new talent into the platform and service (if we haven’t stated it enough times yet, Dized is a big project). We’ve been trying to find and hire these talents to be in-house, but finding the experts we require has turned out to be quite a challenge. (In case you’re a Senior React or Full Stack Developer do check out our open positions!)

Raising necessary funding turned out to be particularly challenging this year as well. It’s pivotal to note that even though the crowdfunding campaigns have been (and are) really important to us, in terms of funding the campaigns themselves only cover part of the total cost of the development. The campaigns do however work as proof of concept for private investors and other funding sources. With the campaigns we’ve been able to show that the audience has an interest for a service like Dized, which has allowed us to raise the rest of the needed funding. There was actually a hiccup this year when during late spring it looked like we have all the necessary funding coming in from one investor, but in the end they asked for conditions we couldn’t offer. This meant that the deal was off and we had to start raising the funds from scratch. This caused a delay in our funding, but luckily we’re now almost at the goal.

Then there were things like moving offices, which is time consuming especially when you have to do it twice in one year. Our first move in March was to a smaller office in order to save money on rent, but that office turned out inhabitable due to noise from the downstairs gym and daily dose of sewer smell from an unknown source. Trying to solve these issues took time and since no resolution was in sight we had to move again this fall. We tried to navigate the moving around the development team so that their work wouldn’t slow down, but getting into and setting up in a new space always takes some time. For example, our development environment runs on our local servers, and moving a server room comes with some time consuming activities, such as reconfiguring the cable connections in a new place and figuring out cooling solutions for the new server room. But, we’re now in a great space (knock on wood) and ready to tackle 2020!

This brings us back to communication, as during all the mayhem this year we weren’t really able to focus on our audience’s needs — the audience who continues to support our cause! We had a person helping us out with social media and marketing during our successful Kickstarter campaign a year ago and some time after, but due to money saving efforts we had to cut back on marketing and focus our financial resources fully on the development. This meant marketing and communicating fell on people who were unable to take the proper time to handle it well. We aim to do a lot better in our communication next year.

Now, even though we had a lot of obstacles and problems, things are not at all that bleak as we’ve hit several important milestones and had a lot of accomplishments worth mentioning!

The team we already mentioned, but can’t stress enough. We have a fantastic team whose talent in interactive tutorial systems is world-class. There have been and will be unknowns but nothing we haven’t been able to solve.

Dized has been steadily getting ready to be released officially. We’re already testing the Tutorial CCT internally and soon they’ll be in the hands of the industry! We’ve brought our back-end up to date to support our creation tools and an update to the app itself has also been in the works. Releasing this version is just another milestone on our road and the development of new features continues.

During this year we’ve communicated actively with industry operators and publishers are excited to get their hands on interactive tutorials! This year alone we’ve met with over 300 publishers, and they are in a key role in getting the content out there. This is one of the main reasons we attend expos: to prepare the industry for Dized, along with meeting up with our community.

That’s our year so far. We’re not there yet, but we’re very close on achieving the dream we’ve had for a long time. We have hit many blocks on the way and had uphill battles, but with our dedicated team and support from our awesome community we’ve been able to overcome everything that has been thrown at us. We are excited to bring Dized out next year and get more tutorials!

Until then, thank you for this year! We wish you all Happy Holidays and a Wonderful New Year!

TLDR SUMMARY OF 2019

This year was challenging for us and we unfortunately couldn’t stick to the schedule we had set for ourselves. However, we were able to progress all the time and Dized is getting very close to being ready for serious action. For more information on the below points, please read the full post.

STUMBLES

• Lack of Communication. We weren’t able to present reliable roadmaps and sometimes even delayed communications in hopes that we would have good news to tell soon. We’re working on ways to give our audience a better idea where the project is going exactly. We aim to do better next year with at least monthly updates to our backers and weekly updates on social media.
• Failure to predict schedules accurately. We started this year aiming for a best-case-scenario release in September, but encountered more issues on the way that what we had been expecting. These mainly included limited resources in outsourced talent and several “bigger than usual” challenges in development. Also we had to change offices twice during this year.
• Delayed funding. We weren’t able to raise funds in the intended schedule causing delays to the development.

ACHIEVEMENTS

• Motivated staff. There were no changes in our in-house developers this year. The team’s skills on interactive tutorials and the creation of them is already world-class.
• Funding. We were able to secure necessary funding throughout the year.
• Progress has been made steadily all year long! Dized tutorial tools are already being tested internally, to be followed by external testing and then publishing of the tool — We’re closer every day.

Thank you for this year! We wish you all Happy Holidays and a Wonderful New Year!

We recently took part in a seminar by Paul Grogan, one of the leading “learn to play” video creators of the board game industry. He’s done a fantastic job of lowering the barrier of entry to the hobby and empowered us to play more games. He’s passionate about rules and he shines at teaching them. You can find him in most of the big expos where he spends his days (and sometimes nights) doing a fantastic job at teaching game after game, never tiring. And of course — on his online channel Gaming Rules!

Paul has been teaching games for over a decade, but as he admitted himself, it took him a long time to get to the point where he is now: getting people to play Through the Ages in under a minute in a live demo.

Listening to Paul talking about his method of teaching reminded us a lot of why we started working on Dized in the first place. Five years ago when we started demoing and teaching our own game, Race to the North Pole, we struggled to find the “perfect method” to teach the game. After a year of trial and error we ended up with the three primary principles that you can now see in Dized tutorials as well:

• Immediate Action — Typically you don’t need to know all the rules to start a game.
• Learning By Doing — Knowledge becomes a skill more efficiently when new rules are only taught when implemented immediately.
• Emphasis on Experience — First game is a learning game and the focus should be on enjoying the game and meanwhile learning the correct rules instead of trying to maximize the performance.

With Race to the North Pole we pitched the goal of the game in 30 seconds and then instructed the first player to start moving their pawns. The first turn for the whole table (full round) was done in under two minutes. People were playing immediately and having fun, rather than listening to us teaching rule after rule and forgetting most of them.

We wondered if this can be done with a device — can we create a smart tutorial that would mimic an ideal demo person? And now, after development and testing, we definitely know we can.

We hand-crafted three tutorials as a proof of concept and they turned out fantastic. Players loved them and publishers wanted tutorials like these for all of their games. But we were taken aback by how long it took to develop and create each of these tutorials by hand. Spoiler: it took a very long time.

So how do we create more tutorials, faster, cheaper, and with the same high quality?

Now that we have the theory worked out, and we’ve successfully proven that a smart tutorial can make huge improvements over a rulebook; how do we multiply these handcrafted tutorials? There are thousands of games released every year and to serve even a fraction, we’d need a factory.

This of course is where the Dized Toolset comes in. We are building tools that allow publishers and freelancers to easily create tutorial content. Our main objective has been to create tools that are:

• Simple enough to use by a vast number of people,
• Robust under the hood to allow power users more options, and
• Efficient in producing high quality tutorials.

Roughly speaking, the tutorial tool consists of two major parts: animation (and art) and logic.

Let’s talk about the animation and art first. For games that consist of just cards, basic cardboard, and standard wooden components, a tutorial creator will be able to get started very quickly. But we’ve also thought of games that have complex miniatures and/or non-standard components, and importing such assets can be done easily as well.

To understand how the animation tool works, here’s a small rundown. The art is all based on standard asset libraries (default dice, meeples, etc.) and graphics/models from the publisher that are directly imported to the editor. Animations are done by either the quick template animations (flip a card, throw a dice, move a piece in an arc) or by creating custom animation paths. All these are controlled on a timeline. Building a custom animation such as the one below, that has 4 moving cards, takes less than two minutes with the tool.

This part is actually less complicated for us to build, it just takes a long time to get it “just right”.

How do we create smart tutorials?

Our biggest technical challenge has been creating the brain of the tutorials: the logic editor behind them.

The flow editor is where you “program” the tutorial. It’s basically a big decision tree flowchart creator that has enough functions so it can perform all the necessary game logic operations.

Each tutorial is intelligent and it needs to know what to teach at any given moment during a game, so that in the end all the rules have been taught at the right time.

For example, in the Blood Rage tutorial, the second round brings two new actions that the players can use. At the start of that round we teach the basics of these actions and then give a longer description of them when performing those actions. Players won’t be able to learn the actions in the previous rounds and in the upcoming rounds they will only get a short recap, but not the whole explanation.

All of that logic is created in the flow editor mostly by just dragging and dropping objects around and connecting them in the correct order. Sometimes we need to keep track of things like “what round is it” — a counter if you will — and these are called smart objects that you can add to the tutorial flow.

So in the example above, if we have a smart object that is counting turns, when that counter hits 2, a part of the flowchart is unlocked that contains the explanations for those actions.

How do we teach you to teach us?

We strive to keep the tools at a level where the barrier to entry is low. Creating a simple tutorial for a game like Kingdomino should be a breeze for anyone who has basic computer skills. Even tutorials for tougher games like Blood Rage does not require any programming expertise, just a bit of logical thinking.

One of the biggest challenges is to teach the “Dized method” of teaching games. Moving the thought process away from “all the rules at the beginning” to “these are the essentials to get you playing and having fun right away.’’

We plan to have a torrent of material for our content creators to use: tutorial videos, blog posts, best practices documentation, and other online resources. We want to keep the content creator community in our Slack channel up to date, where everyone is encouraged to ask questions, get answers, and share their experiences. We’re planning to arrange seminars in the big board gaming expos around the world where anyone can come, listen, and learn how to use our Dized toolset and how to shape a successful tutorial. After all, there are hundreds of publishers who will be in need of content creators.

We’ve been building Dized for a long time already. Delivering the Rules Tool was a huge milestone for us and the Tutorial Tool is of course the next big thing. We’re expecting to get it to the hands of the developers later this year. When we publish a user friendly tool that can create stunning tutorials for players we just might create a whole new way of learning board games and, by doing that, make the hobby even more accessible and inclusive.

(And I finally get to play those dozens and dozens of games that are just laying on my shelf, as I haven’t had the time or energy to study the rules…)

When you’ve played hundreds of board games, it can be easy to forget that we all started somewhere, that once upon a time we were all new to gaming and new to reading rulebooks or teaching others how to play the games we now love. Phrases like ‘worker placement’ or ‘area control’ which are now second nature to us were once unknown words which left us feeling confused or overwhelmed.

There are thousands of games being released every year and millions of people discovering the hobby and playing board games for the first time, that may need a helping hand. I remember back to when I started playing board games, I would often feel overwhelmed when picking up a new game, trying to make sense of the rules, hoping it would all make sense. Even to this day, I can’t seem to learn a game or understand the basics of a game just from reading a rulebook. As somebody who writes a lot about games and plays a lot of games, there are often times I have felt silly for not being able to understand the rules of even some of the most rules light games.

During the Dized Kickstarter campaign, I have noticed people mention that rulebooks are not an issue and that anybody can easily learn to play the games that are on the Dized app. This is of course true for some experienced gamers and that’s fine. However, it’s not okay to make less experienced players or others who struggle with rulebooks feel bad or stupid. There has been too many examples of this and I wanted to address this issue.

When we say that certain games are easy to learn without any assistance, we create a barrier to entry, we turn people away from our hobby without even realising it and that is something we can all avoid. Compared to other household entertainment products, board games already have a pretty steep learning curve, even before considering the pressure of having to understand things quickly.

Welcoming new people into the hobby makes it better for all of us and one of the easiest ways we can do this is to help people who have trouble reading rulebooks. Providing different ways to help people learn all types of games, from Kingdomino to Twilight Struggle, can only have a positive effect on the hobby and community that we all love. When we create a more accessible environment, we create a place that new people can come and enjoy games without feeling judged or stupid.

Take Monopoly as an example, though many people may not like it, it has opened a lot of doors for the board game industry and opened a lot of people’s eyes to the world of hobby board games. So many people shame others for liking it or for the fact that it “isn’t a real board game”, but it’s a game that is getting people to sit down at a table with their family or friends and connect or gain an interest in games and look for whatever else is out there.

And in the end, this is what Dized is doing as well: making the hobby and different games more accessible, because everyone deserves to play more games.

-Katie
Dized Kickstarter Community Manager

[NOTE: This story is several years old and the Dized business model has somewhat changed since]

Dized Business Model

Questions about the Dized business model are quite common from both players and the industry operators. This post aims to answer those questions by explaining what the Dized business model is and why the current model has been developed.

Before we go any further though it’s important to mention regarding Rules on Dized: they’re free. Publishers can create and publish the rules for free, and players can use rules for free.

Dized Business Model

Dized will generate revenue mainly through a Platform Fee, which comes from the sales of digital content. On top of this, Dized will have other revenue channels including advertising and additional services for industry operators, but on this post we’ll focus on the Platform Fee.

Dized Platform Fee

The Dized Platform Fee is paid by the publishers. When a player purchases digital content on the app, Dized keeps a commission on the sales as a platform fee and the rest goes to the publishers. Exactly like the app stores do. However, in case a publisher wants to offer some or all downloads for free, Dized charges a small sum per download as the platform fee from the publisher instead, and in this case the player gets a free download. This means that every time content is downloaded, Dized makes a little bit of revenue as a Platform Fee, charged to the publisher.

Why wouldn’t publishers offer all the content for free? They can of course, but it should be remembered that someone has to create the content and it costs money. Publishers are spending resources to offer additional content and it’s natural that there’s a price for it. This can be compared to physical game expansions, which also have a price tag. And as stated above, publishers CAN offer the digital content on Dized for free, when they choose to.

Let’s use a game Tutorial as an example: the publisher can decide to offer a free download of the Tutorial for everyone who buys a new copy of the game. This is done with one time use codes found in new copies of the game. When the code is used, Dized charges a flat fee to the publisher. Now, if a player gets the game by other means and wants to learn the game with the Tutorial, they would buy it on Dized. In this case, Dized charges a commission of that sale as the Platform Fee.

Different Roles and Focuses

Publishers’ core business is creating and selling games (read: content). Anything that takes publishers away from that focus doesn’t help them with their business. Players are getting more and more comfortable with using digital tools to make their tabletop game hobby better, and Dized aims to help publishers offer content on the digital space as well.

The Platform Fee Dized charges covers a lot of things: the usage of the Dized Content Creation Tools, publishing content, digital distributing and further development of the platform. Dized focuses on ensuring that the content offered by the publishers works on the latest devices and with the latest operating systems. This allows publishers to focus on their core business: offering content to their customers.

Final Thoughts

The Dized business model is based on hundreds of discussions with industry operators and players. The players decide what content they deem to be worth paying for, and the Platform Fee is tied to the success the publisher has with their content. In other words, it’s fair for everyone and scales well.

It is of course possible that our business model may develop as time passes and demands change. Any future tweaks or changes in the future would only be done in order to achieve this simple goal: Making tabletop gaming better for everyone!

Content on Dized

Now is a good time to clarify the type of digital content (“content”) offered on Dized. The majority of the content available through Dized is meant to be used with a physical game, which is why Dized is called a companion app.

Dized is an app meant for everyone from total newbies to the most hardcore players. Dized content makes games more accessible with Tutorials, more usable with Rules, and simply more entertaining with Downloadable Content (DLC). Let’s learn more about each of these:

TUTORIALS make games more accessible.

Tutorials allow players to get into the game immediately by giving easy to follow step-by-step instructions. They present the information you need to know right when you need to know it, which allows you to start playing a lot sooner. Presenting the gameplay this way also enhances retention because you’re only learning the immediate rules and not getting distracted by everything else in the rulebook. And as we know, one of the most efficient ways to learn is by doing, or in this case by playing. Interactive tutorials can adjust themselves to the number of players, the desired skill level, and other applicable preferences so that you’re learning the way that your group wants to play.

This is what sets Dized apart from rulebooks or online videos, making Dized more like the friend at the table who already knows the game inside and out, who knows how to teach the game and make it fun at the same time.

RULES on Dized make games more useable.

Rules on Dized are living rulebooks that contain all the game rules including built-in FAQs. All the content is cross-referenced and searchable, allowing players to solve any rule related issues in seconds. The best part is that because content is made (or at least approved by) the publishers, the information is accurate. Publishers are always able to modify the content in order to make sure it’s up-to-date. This guarantees that all rule-related problems are quickly resolved. Playing with correct rules results in fewer arguments and more time spent playing the game.

It’s worth noting, that apart from other content on Dized, Rules are always free of charge for both publishers to create and offer, and for players to use.

DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT makes games more entertaining.

The ways in which digital content can improve gaming experiences are endless. This can start from simple tools to help with bookkeeping in games to adding full blown expansions for a game, and the market already has some great examples of games that have done this. Some of this kind of content can be in the form of score trackers and calculators, soundtracks and soundscapes, dice rollers and spinners, stats upkeep sheets, digital mechanics, extra content (characters, missions, virtual cards, etc.), game masters and even AI players for some games. It has always been an expensive and difficult challenge for publishers to create and maintain this kind of digital content, but Dized is aiming to change all that.

Dized Content Creation

All the content available on Dized will be created using the Dized Content Creation Tools (CCT). This is an easy to use online browser-based toolset that require no programming skills to create content. This content is created by publishers or other content creators hired by them, such as freelancers.

You might notice that, right now, there is a limited amount of content available on Dized. That’s because everything has been created by a small team working without the benefit of our fully developed Dized tools. The speed of content creation and publishing will improve dramatically once the full toolset is live. You can already see that we’ve increased the number of available Rules in Dized now that the Rules tools are available. Tools allow for much faster creation of content in the own right, and that’s before taking into account how content creation will scale once thousands of content creators can use them simultaneously.

Dized Founders Jouni and Tomi did a thorough live stream showing the Dized Rules tool. Watch the video here.

The publisher is always in control of their Intellectual Properties (IP) and, subsequently, the digital content being offered for their games. The digital content contains IP owned by the publishers, which is why their approval for the content is vital in the first place. This control also helps in keeping the information accurate, which is especially important when talking about Rules and Tutorials.

As mentioned earlier, publishers may also hire third-party content creators to do the work for them. This is essential as publishers are already very busy with a hectic market of new releases with a growing backlog of games that is over 100,000 titles deep on BoardGameGeek.com’s database. Anyone can access and create content on the Dized CCT, but making it available on Dized needs to happen through a publisher’s account.

The top concern when content can be created by thousands is that of quality. How do we maintain a high standard with so many contributors? We do so by following a review process at Dized. Content submitted for publication via Dized needs to fulfill certain quality conditions and will be reviewed both by publishers and by Dized. But even if lesser quality content makes it through, you, as a Dized user, always have the ability to submit feedback on content to alert us to any issues. If the content requires slight changes or is simply wrong, it can be easily corrected and updated.

Final thoughts

One of the big challenges of Dized has been trying to figure out the rather large mechanisms and processes that this article is only starting to describe. We believe the current model serves the industry and the players well, but Dized is always undergoing development and improvement, so our methods and models can change as we find ways to make the system better for everybody.

It’s a pretty massive project but the end result is worth it: more great game nights!

“Dized is such a great Idea! I wonder why no one has done it before?” This is one of the most common things we hear about our app and we used to think the same way. That’s until we actually started to create it.

You might’ve heard someone saying that software development is difficult and that schedules should be multiplied by pi. It sounds like a joke, because even if things took a bit longer than expected, surely 3.14159 times as long is more exaggeration than is needed for comedic effect. But, sometimes it turns out the “funny” part actually is that it’s an understatement.

Figuring It Out

In 2016, we figured out what Dized needs to be: an app that solves the rulebook issue with interactive rules and tutorials. We started the development and built the first prototypes of how we believed the interactive tutorials should work. We showed them to players and at the same time talked with many tabletop game publishers and other industry operators. During this we formed a plan of the service that would be most useful for everyone. We quickly gained a lot of interest and realized we were onto something!

We believed we had a good grasp of how the tutorials should work, so we started looking into what happens after players have learned a game with the tutorial. After all, tutorials are kind of meant to be used only once (well, we’ve come to realize that they do actually serve a purpose beyond the initial game). Normally, once you learn a game, you don’t need the tutorial anymore. However, even after learning a game, we know that there’s a lot that needs to happen to support playing a game over and over again. We wanted to figure out a method for that as well.

At the same time, we needed to figure out how all this can be built to be a viable business in order to keep developing the platform for years to come. This has been one of the big challenges, coming up with a model that works for everyone from players to publishers, distributors, retailers, board game cafes, schools, libraries and so on.

Making It Happen

With the funding, we added more people to work on development. It felt like we were getting very close to getting things published — but there was always something additional that needed to be either fixed or developed before we could make it available in a way that made sense. During the development, we realized that it was going slower than expected because we’re actually creating three new things pretty much from scratch.

First, we are bringing user manuals for physical products into a digital space. We have designed a method by which user manuals (rulebooks) can be easily produced and made usable for a wide audience in a modern way, with cross-referenced information and built in FAQs that are easily accessible, searchable and updateable.

Second, we’re introducing interactive tutorials for physical products. This didn’t turn out to be an easy task either, as tutorials are already quite difficult to do for digital products such as video games (go ahead and ask video game developers about this). We’re aiming a lot higher, as with a physical product there are so many things that can go wrong in the learning process — and how would an app even know about it? We’ve received great feedback for our tutorials, and players have asked why this hasn’t been done before as it’s such an amazing and seemingly simple solution. We know why — simple solutions are sometimes very difficult to come up with.

Third, it quickly became apparent that we cannot create all this content ourselves. In today’s market, an average of ten new games are published daily. Yes, that’s daily. We knew that the only way to make content available for all those games is to let others create it. That’s why we decided to create tools that allow publishers, freelancers and other third parties to create the content and publish it on Dized, similar to how the app stores work, or Steam for example. You probably guessed it already, but there are no off-the-shelf tools available for this, so yet again, it’s up for us to do the research, developing and testing, which includes a lot of rinse and repeat until it’s right.

And this is why the development has been taking a long time. We have been figuring out how to do three major things in a way that they work seamlessly together. We’ve written over 150,000 lines of code for Dized and have spent over 50,000 work hours building the platform and the service. That’s about 30 years of work for one person! We’ve made errors and we’ve had to change plans now and then once we’ve realized something doesn’t work. All of this has been done in order to bring out a service that we believe will fundamentally change the tabletop game hobby for the better.

Past the Point of No Return

Dized is a massive undertaking and maybe this post gives some insights why no one has done this before and why it’s also taking us a while to get it right. Luckily, that’s where we thrive: figuring out the unexplored and new. We’ve spent the past few years of our lives to this project and truly believe we can make tabletop gaming better for everyone, from total newbies to the most hardcore players. We’ve been able to build a company that now employees over 10 people full time, a team of professionals all dedicated to make Dized the revolutionary service we all believe it can be.

We’re honored to be the team that has a chance to make this happen, and we’re determined to do so! This following movie quote says it quite well: “That’s all it takes really… pressure… and time… That, and a big g*****n poster.”

On behalf of the whole team, the Dized Co-Founders:
- Jouni and Tomi

Crowdfunding is great! It’s a passion sport, as when one invests money into making dreams come true they immediately become emotionally attached to the project. That personal attachment is what drives crowdfunding and makes it such a powerful platform, but ultimately you are supporting a project and a team you believe in.

Why Crowdfund Dized?

Dized is a huge project. We’re not just making an app that has game tutorials, but creating a platform that allows a full ecosystem of publishers and select contributors to create content for players. This poses the classic chicken and egg problem, as for this to work we need both industry operators and players to be on the platform. The great response to our initial campaign on Indiegogo really got the industry excited about Dized, proving to them that you, the players, want Dized at your gaming table. That was our reason for running a crowdfunding campaign in the first place.

A lot of time, resources, and yes, money go into the development of Dized. Not all of that comes from crowdfunding. However, Dized’s success in crowdfunding campaigns helps us raise funds to continue our work on the platform while also impressing upon investors, lenders, and grant providers that Dized is poised for success. Your enthusiasm for Dized as shown through crowdfunding helps us secure the further outside funding needed to achieve our vision and make Dized a part of game nights everywhere.

Why Crowdfund Again?

Our decision to pursue a round of crowdfunding on Kickstarter was actually based on feedback we received during the Indiegogo campaign: a lot of our potential backers much preferred Kickstarter as a funding platform, especially as it is home to several successful tabletop game campaigns. However, we decided we should reach some milestones before launching another campaign starting with first getting the app itself out! We set ourselves three goals before launching the KS:

1. Make the app available for everyone. (Public Early Access)
2. Publish a Tutorial for a more complex game. (Blood Rage)
3. Get the first toolset out for the industry. (Rules)

We got the app out on schedule but had major delays with both creating the tutorial and with the online tools. Once we got the tutorial out in your hands, we received a lot of feedback about how the tutorial taught the game. On top of supporting different learning styles we learned that people simply have their own preferences. Some want more information up front while others just want to get into the game sooner. We received the message loud and clear: Dized’s tutorials must be able to adapt to players’ preferred learning styles. We felt this was an absolutely necessary change, but of course, fundamental changes add to our development costs — costs that we hope to cover with our Kickstarter campaign.

With our three core goals completed, we decided to launch a supplemental Kickstarter campaign, but the Rules content built with the tools just wasn’t available in the app yet. As a result of feedback from our community, we canceled that campaign and decided to re-launch once we had the Rules also available in the app.

Why Back Now?

A successful campaign will allow us to add Adaptive Profiles, which represents the ability to tailor the Dized experience to your learning style and preferences. Our Indiegogo campaign was instrumental in getting Dized to the point where we realized the need for this functionality, and the Kickstarter campaign will enable us to fulfill it.

In addition to allowing us to add further functionality, a second campaign further demonstrates to the industry that people want Dized. As a backer, you play an important role in showing the industry that this is the time for them to get their content on Dized. And now that we have the first tools for them to do it, it’s easier than ever.

With our Kickstarter campaign, we’re offering major discounts on future Dized digital content, promos for popular games (some exclusive to this campaign!), and a digital badge to display within Dized to show everybody that you’re a founding member of the Dized community.

If you backed our Indiegogo campaign, you might be wondering if you need to also back us on Kickstarter. Absolutely not! You have already done your part, and we are eternally thankful for your early support. What you can do, however, is help us spread the word about our new Kickstarter campaign and share why you’re excited about Dized. You’ve helped us build the foundation for Dized. We would be honored if you would help invite others to join in.

Why Wasn’t the Indiegogo Fulfilled First?

We also contemplated fulfilling the Indiegogo campaign before launching the Kickstarter, but this only made sense for the physical deliverables (more on those later).

During the development that followed our Indiegogo campaign, we realized that creating comprehensive and engaging tutorials without standardized tools was a major bottleneck. As such, we changed our focus to tools development so that we could accelerate tutorial development by providing those tools directly to publishers. We had every intention of delivering on all of the tutorials we had promised, but the tools approach simply made better sense for the long term growth of Dized. The scalability afforded by completing our tools development will, with the help of publishers, allow us to populate Dized with great content faster than ever.

Additionally, the Adaptive Profile functionality is an incredibly important part of Dized tutorials going forward. We want to have that feature locked down before we start mass production of content. And until that content is in Dized, the Dized credit digital rewards are not as useful. We anticipate delivering the Dized credits to both our Indiegogo and Kickstarter backers at the same time as their value is based on content availability.

Indiegogo backers also had to wait quite some time for their physical rewards. There are reasons why those items were delayed, but we’re happy to announce that those physical rewards are being shipped this month!

Dized has accomplished quite a bit through the power of crowdfunding and the support of our initial Indiegogo backers. There is a lot of backend development that’s not visible to end users, but here are some of the tangible things what we’ve accomplished in the past year with the backers’ support:

• Published Early Access for Android and iOS, restricted to only IGG backers
• Created and published Tutorial and Rules for Kingdomino
• Created multilingual versions of Dized and added the support for translated content
• Added translations in French and German for Kingdomino Tutorial
• Created and published a Tutorial for Blood Rage
• Opened up public access for Early Access for Android and iOS
• Created and published a Tutorial for ICECOOL
• Added German translation for ICECOOL Tutorial
• Developed and published the Dized Portal for industry operators
• Developed and published the Rules Tool for industry operators
• Did a lot of backend development to support all the things mentioned on this list
• Handled over one thousand Support Requests

I Want It All, and I Want It Now!

Any one crowdfunding campaign is exciting exactly twice: once when you commit to backing it and once when you receive your rewards. The rest of the time in between usually isn’t much fun as you mostly just want to receive your rewards. Depending on what’s being offered, reward fulfillment can be immediate for a mostly pre-existing product or years for something being created from scratch.

With Dized, we’re actually making a BIG dream come true, but dreams don’t come true overnight. This project has taken a LOT longer than we originally hoped for due to the changes we’ve made as we’ve learned along the way how best to position Dized for success.

We wish we could’ve managed the audiences and even our own expectations better. We’ve learned how important it is to frequently communicate our current and future plans and have already begun to improve this aspect of our development. We do however value our early backers and have always offered a full refund when someone has requested it.

We’re happy that our audience is so passionate about Dized. It shows that what we do really matters! As founders of the company, and having dedicated our lives to making Dized a reality, we do understand backers’ frustrations with the delays. We need this too!

Together, we’re making this happen!

On behalf of the whole team, the Dized Co-Founders:
- Jouni and Tomi

Our previous blog post covered the process we went through to create the Blood Rage Tutorial, and what we learned that we’ll apply to future content.

This time we want to introduce how Dized will use audio, something that dramatically differentiates our Tutorials from other ways of teaching board games.

A Dized Tutorial contains three different kinds of audio tracks: music, sound effects, and voice over. The soundtrack is essential to setting the tone and maintaining the right vibe(s) during the game, the sound effects to communicate valuable information during play, and the voice over to guide players through the rules.

The creation process

Although it shares some elements with the work needed for movies or video games, creating audio for a Dized Tutorial is a fundamentally different challenge. Since we’re pioneers in the field of interactive Tutorials for games, even the audio part is uncharted territory.

The first thing we do is find a style and genre that matches the world and atmosphere of the game — board games usually don’t come with audio material, so this whole process is one of discovery: understanding what the game is about both thematically and mechanically. As Blood Rage is heavily inspired by Norse mythology and Vikings, the audio for the Tutorial had to incorporate elements generally associated with these themes.

While the graphics, animations and game mechanics are indeed the core of a Dized Tutorial, audio is an essential means to enriching the experience and creating a particular atmosphere related to the game being taught.

In the case of Blood Rage, as you take new actions, new background music fitting the current scenario is played. For example, the Pillaging music suits battle scenarios. Every time an Age changes a new theme is introduced, adding to the overall experience.

Coordination is key

Coordination between musician and designer is an integral part of the process: where the music will be played, what type of music fits the game phases or scenarios, how does it need to be timed, etc. were all topics of discussion. Designing the overall experience is not a one person job — all parts of the Tutorial have to mesh together to form an inspiring and compelling whole.

The instruments of Blood Rage

As mentioned, we started to look at what kind of instruments would fit a Norse mythology/Viking themed game. In addition to computer-generated samples, we used a real Jouhikko. The Jouhikko, a particular kind of bowed lyre, goes back all the way to Trondheim, Norway in the 14th century.

Another unusual instrument used in the Blood Rage Tutorial is the Sami drum, a shamanic ceremonial drum typical of the Sami people of Northern Europe. Traditionally used to drift into a trance during spiritual ceremonies and divination rituals, we have used it to create just the right feeling during game phases leading up to a battle.

“But we don’t have an audio expert“

Of course, we understand that not every publisher has access to a recording studio or rare, exotic instruments. Once the Tutorial tools we’re working on are ready, we plan to offer the possibility to import pre-recorded tracks (custom or licensed), but we’re also looking into other options. First of all, we would like to provide a library of ready-made sounds and background ambiance tracks. Secondly, we’ll soon be able to connect available talents with publishers in need of a hand, and this will be available for all aspects of Tutorial creation. Lastly, text to speech technologies are evolving rapidly, and will soon be good enough to voice our Tutorials in a natural-sounding way.

It’s still early days though and experimentation is at an all-time high: the best is yet to come!

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