Billionaire, Board Game God and Tech's Hidden Disruptor (2019)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/04/29/meet-matt-calkins-billionaire-board-game-god-and-techs-hidden-disruptor/

by fogus • 6 years ago

105 49 6 years ago

forbes.com

colmvp• 6 years ago

The fact he has Gloomhaven to the right of him made me chuckle. I've only had one chance to play it, and it took hours of fumbling around with the instructions with my friends (who also hadn't played it) but once we got the hang of the instructions it was very, very fun.

prepend2• 6 years ago

I liked that, to his left, he had Fortress America, Shogun, and what I think is Conquest of the Empire, the three other games in the same series as Axis and Allies.

Aeolun3• 6 years ago

Personally I was pretty happy to see Risk. Not many people seem interested in playing large strategy board games.

pixelpoet2• 6 years ago

I thought this article would be about Demis Hassabis, but I guess he's not a billionaire.

CamperBob2• 6 years ago

Wasn't he thrown out of a Go tournament for running a bot? Seems like I read something to that effect.

pixelpoet2• 6 years ago

Well there was his company DeepMind developing a Go AI (AlphaGo / AlphaZero) that can beat pros, at least 10 years before anyone though it would be possible.

He doesn't strike me as the kind to cheat at tournaments, being one of the best general game players of all time as I recall.

gazzini• 6 years ago

The segue from winning at board games -> winning at business is great, but then it goes into slightly too much detail about Appian.

I‘ve accepted that native advertising & PR are everywhere, but still... I wish it could just be a cool story about a billionaire board game champ (awesome!) without the embedded enterprise software ad (lame!).

[edit: typo]

MithrilTuxedo• 6 years ago

That was my takeaway too. What games?

I assume the author of the article wouldn't have recognized the names of any good board games.

busterarm5• 6 years ago

Sekigahara, as a board game duel, is an experience approaching the divine. It is a very, very, very fine game.

Pictured behind him is a fine collection. A lot of great and interesting games, though I would have expected more war games...stuff like Fire In The Lake, Sword of Rome, etc.

cthalupa• 6 years ago

Sekigahara is excellent, and yeah, I am surprised there is not more of a GMT collection behind him. After having designed Sekigahara, it seems like most everything they publish would be up his alley.

Which reminds me, I need to go look at what GMT has in P500 now. It's been a few months...

busterarm5• 6 years ago

Heh, this article also prompted me to order some new things, like the new edition of Labyrinth and the P500 for Sword of Rome, which I've wanted for a while.

That Risk is present in the photo but not Diplomacy is a tragedy. :D

Schwolop• 6 years ago

It seems a fair few tech entrepreneurs and folks in the software industry are also into designing games. I have several in the works, and one that’s very slowly building a following: https://www.drtomallen.com/half-the-battle.html

thecupisblue• 6 years ago

I believe it's because our brains get dopamine out of successful predictions - more so than others.

cableshaft4• 6 years ago

I'm in the software industry and I design board games. Of course I used to develop video games before that, so it wasn't a huge leap, although I didn't really have the urge to start doing it until I had gone down the board game rabbit hole for a few years and played hundreds of modern board games.

I have one game signed, but not yet released, by a publisher, and another game was selected as a finalist in the Cardboard Edison design contest this year.

It's basically a lot more fun way to do system design. You can take a lot of the same processes and apply it to board game design.

rhlsthrm• 6 years ago

Can you give an example of how you can apply software system design principles to boardgame design? Genuinely curious.

zingar• 6 years ago

I followed links to find out more about the games referenced and I’m astonished to see a two player game that advertises 180 minute duration. Anything that long would have to be multiplayer to justify its existence in my schedule. Terra mystica is hitting the multiplayer sweet spot at 90ish minutes, and I’m a beginner.

busterarm5• 6 years ago

A lot of two player war games are a full 8 hours of play for experienced players, if not multi-session.

In my Battletech tabletop (which is a very simple game...) group, with 6 players around the table and a full day we can usually only get 12-15 turns in, without advanced rules.

That's partly why the "Grinder" format is so fun. If there's such an event at any conventions you attend, I strongly suggest trying it.

cableshaft4• 6 years ago

It's a war game. War games are allowed to be that long.

I've played games of Terra Mystica that have taken 3+ hours, just depends on the group. Although they were at least 4 player games.

Twilight Struggle can easily take that long, and it's only a 2 player game. If it doesn't take that long, someone probably lost early on, or both players know the game really well and can play it quickly.

Longest multiplayer game I've ever played was Diplomacy. We played for 12 hours, and had to call it early at that point. Even with it being that long, I felt the game was going at a breakneck pace and I didn't feel like I had hardly any time to grab food or go to the bathroom, because I had to talk to everyone and figure out what the hell to do for my next turn (and make sure I heard as much as I could from other people talking). It was an awesome experience I'm not in a hurry to do again anytime soon.

busterarm5• 6 years ago

In college we would have marathon weekends where we'd stay up for three days and play multiple games of Diplomacy, Big Two and Mahjong.

We generally ended up with a 2 or 3 player victory in Dip after about 7 or 8 hours. Very rarely did we push those solo victory games, but we would play a few times a week besides those weekends.

I must have played 50 in-person Diplomacy games in one year and another 100 or so online. It became an addiction. Lost thousands playing mj too.

Fun times.

spapas82• 6 years ago

The company I worked for before ~ 8 years (a bank) was using Appian for a bunch of its non-core workflows and actually was in the process of using it even more.

Appian is a strange beast: It's a BPMS written as a Java web application that has an in-memory kdb (the db of the K programming language which is well-known in HN) for storing all process data.

The greatest advantage of Appian as compared to other workflow systems I've used (Activiti, jBPM etc) is that it offers a really complete environment for creating a more or less complete workflow without the need to write code. So you can actually teach non-technical people to do it. I remember we had a couple of Business Analysts that were creating very complex workflows back then. The didn't have any technical knowledge; their background was mostly on economics. Of course, for integration with legacy systems or relational databases or doing some tricky UI you'd still need a developer. But most of the work could be done by a not so tehnical guy which is the holy grail of such systems. Also, it was a really complete system where you could rather easily implement all your workflow needs (workflow design, user tasks, notifications, exceptions, integrations, reporting, authorizations, business rules, subprocessing, parallel execution etc). After some initial configuration you'd rarely need to touch code unless you needed some custom bpm nodes.

Appian was also claiming that because it was using the kdb as a database backend it was very fast. I don't have an opinion on this; it wasn't slow but wasn't blazing fast. And also when the kdb size grew too much (we're talking some tens of GBs) it was taking a really long time to start (half an hour or something) and needed the same amount of memory from the server (IIRC we had 64GB back then) because it needed to load the kdbs into memory. Also I remember that we had a constant fear that the kdbs will be compromised somehow (for example if the server rebooted unnormally) and we'll lose data. Or maybe I had that fear; I was never able to "trust" it as I could trust the good-old IBM DB2 database the bank had. Concerning data-loss, we had a bunch of incidents that were related to having configured appian as a cluster; after we switched to a single server it was better. The good thing (or maybe bad because I was never able to learn K) is that it had a complete API in Java so we didn't actually need to touch the kdbs; I remember with awe however when we had a support request where an Appian engineer was using K to actually query the kdb and see the status of our server.

In any case, the main drawback of Appian is how expensive it was. I don't remember how much but I remember that the bank had a special agreement to have a low price for Appian (don't exaclty now the details); buying it fully was too expensive even for the bank (!) (especially if it was to be used by all employees since it had a per user fee).

Beyond all these, I belive that Appian is a solid product and deserves its success in the enterprise world.

bob1029• 6 years ago

We are providing similar services to several financial institutions using a first-party solution we have developed over the course of the last 5 years. Our approach for enabling non-technical people to impact the business is on a radically-different side of the spectrum though. Instead of "no/low" code with fancy UIs and modules, we went in the other direction. We asked the following question:

"Can we reorganize the codebase in order to expose common business concerns in such a way that non-technical people can reason with them simply by viewing the source code?"

The answer so far has been a resounding "Yes". We proved that there was extreme amounts of value in non-technical people being able to read the current state of the business implementation. Using functional business rules instead of imperative ones makes all the difference in the world. E.g. "if(CustomerIsAMinor) {...}" vs "if(customer.Age<MinorLimit && someothercondition) {...}". Using C#8 and having the ability to use functional paradigms as well as things like pattern matching also enable us to write highly expressive code that non-technical people enjoy reading. Also, really basic stuff like splitting important points of focus into class partials can make it 10x easier for non-developers to get into that 1 focused file and understand what is going on (e.g. MyBankWorkflow.CustomerValidations.cs).

But we didn't stop there. We then asked this question:

"Could non-developers make changes to certain areas of the codebase?"

We have done a few trials with our project managers and are finding that they are more than capable of: turning a new branch in GitHub, checking it out locally, opening Visual Studio, updating a parameter listing or resource file, making a commit, and then submitting a PR for review (typically by an actual developer). As confidence with this practice grows, we will further expand the "safe" areas of the codebase (i.e. what non-developers are allowed to edit).

Ultimately, we are trying to move into a direction where the development team is more of an internal consulting group rather than the means by which every line of code must be authored. The other view of this is that highly-intelligible source code is also useful for quickly ramping new employees and growing the team. We are beginning to view our codebase as not just a tool for the developers, but something that anyone in the organization should be able to work with in some useful way.

If you think more broadly about this cyberpunk reality we are sliding into, this is the only reasonable path. You have to enable everyone in your organization relative to the technology. You cant afford to slap a Fisher Price UI around every scary technical thing you run into. Tear down your silos and do not be afraid to show code to your project managers or even customers. Start writing your new business apps with these ideas in mind and you may reap some very unexpected benefits down the road.

irrational• 6 years ago

I see Concordia right behind his head. A man of good taste.

But I also see light party games like Dixit, so he doesn’t just play cerebral euro games.

Ftuuky• 6 years ago

Unrelated to the article itself but that fossil behind him in his home is gorgeous and super cool.

Billionaire, Board Game God and Tech's Hidden Disruptor (2019)

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