We spoke with Jouni Jusilla, the CEO and co-founder of Dized, at Gen Con 2017 about his Indiegogo campaign for Dized - the ultimate companion for board games. Below is their promo video for their campaign. When meeting Jouni, he was telling me about their contest called the Throne of Games. The winner for the raffle drawing that they held at Gen Con 2017 received more than 100 games and throne worth in all about $4,000. After getting a photo with the throne, we asked Jouni about Dized:
GaGG: What is your inspiration for building Dized?
Jouni: Well, I like to play games, but don't like to study. We've been around for three and a half years. The original idea was we wanted to do something with board games and the digital aspect of them. And when we went to these big cons, we talked to a lot of publishers, and players, and retailers. You know, all the industry operators and realized that the rule book is a huge issue. Board games are popular and the niche is growing and the market is getting bigger, but it's still a niche in a way that the funny thing about it is the board game is a common household entertainment product. But give me an example of another similar product that's meant for your household entertainment that requires you, in 2017, to study a manual for an hour or half an hour in order to use that product. So that's a major issue! Because there's a lot of people out there who should be playing games and want to play games, but learning the rules is so intimidating. And we can see that video games did this years ago. And we started looking into this and realized that we have the technology and we can build an app that's like the friend at the table, who knows what's going on. Who knows which rules they're going to teach you right now so you can play, and know what rules I can save for later on. And we started building this smart tutorials to board games and noticed that, yup, this is exactly what people want. And that's why we're also launching this campaign to be able to make this faster and and better and have a substantial library of these interactive tutorials as soon as possible.
GaGG: What will be your backers takeaway from your app?
Jouni: The first time you you play, we can actually give you a good experience. You'll understand why this game is so cool. And this way, the game wouldn't be ruined because your friend didn't exactly know how to tell you the rules, or they forgot to tell you something, or if they just plainly explained something wrong. So there are so many reasons why playing the game for the first time wouldn't be a fun time. But we can help with this!
GaGG: Would people be able to request the type of games they see in your app?
Jouni: Of course! So this is part of the issue. Today, there's about 7 games, on average, being published every day. There's so many new games. Even if we have a hundred people working on this tutorials, it wouldn't be enough to save all these big projects. So in order to avoid this bottleneck issue, we are building a tool set that would be a web-based set of tools that would allow publishers and developers to build their own tutorials.
So the same way that you build websites- you don't program. You go and use a few drag and drop things and end up with a beautiful website - that's what we like to do for these tutorials.It's very easy to build these tutorials using our tool set. and we can have hundreds, if not thousands of people developing tutorials at the same time. Which means every day, there will be new content added to Dized. So it will be a very useful service for a lot of players out there.
GaGG: For games that are a bit more extensive like Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons - how would that work for their advantage? Because they're a little bit more complicated.
Jouni: Well for example - we have signed up Scythe (game), which means we can do more complicated games. And actually more complicated games benefit more from a service like this because you can get the player into the fun part immediately and then teach these rules gradually while they are already playing, and while they're already having fun. And I can say specifically because I have played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. I haven't played Pathfinder, but for role playing games there will be a lot of cool features that Dized can also do. Because this is not just the app for tutorials - it is the ultimate companion app! For role playing games, we'll have character builders available, background, story builders and things like these. For miniature games, we can build painting guides - tutorials on how to paint your minis disguised as a coloring book, kind of. And then just, all right - just show me how to paint this mini to look like this. Like a 3d animated tutorial as any other tutorial that we build. And for boardgames we're offering a lot of digital mechanics. expansions, downloadable content - all this. So it will be the ultimate companion app. And one cool thing is the local player search - you'll be able to find players local to you who play the games that you are playing.
Dized has included a bunch of well-known and highly anticipated games for each of their attained stretch goal through out their campaign!
Only 24 hours left to go! Click on the image below to back the project now!
