EPISODE 28: Scott Hoffer
While Scott Hoffer professes to be the worst player yet to appear on The Setting Trick, he caught my attention as the developer of an iOS app called Tricky Bridge. Presently only available on iPhones and iPads, Tricky Bridge has become my go to destination for anyone who is interested in learning the game. The ACBL Education Foundation helped make the app’s series of 37 beginners lessons free. Hat’s off to both the Ed Foundation and Scott, you’ve answered one of my prayers!
Episode Highlights:
2:00- Tricky Bridge and how it came to be
9:48- Tricky Bridge’s retention rate with users
11:53- Apple’s massive stamp of approval
Contest - Who is the Apple Editor playing Tricky Bridge???
19:33- Scott’s company Forklift Studios
Meadowlark Bridge - Rodney Ludwig, the AI engine behind Tricky Bridge
21:18- Computer Bridge World Championships
26:03- Idea behind the Bots in Tricky Bridge
31:03- Grant from the ACBL Education Foundation founded the learning portion of the app
33:38- Please advertise the app to any young person interested in learning bridge
43:23- Thanks to BridgeWinners for helping provide feedback on bugs and crashes
48:43- Scott’s ideas about the best way to stream bridge
50:03- Scott’s acting career
50:46- Yale student, Reese Koppel, is a Tricky Bridge Intern
53:13- Robert Todd from ACBL Foundation
Transcript:
John: Welcome to The Setting Trick, Scott Hoffer, founder of Tricky Bridge.
Scott: Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
John: You are, doing the Lord's work as my friend, Catherine Wharton likes to say , I've been praying. Look, not literally, but I really been wanting an app that I can point people towards where it's you go to this app and it'll teach you bridge. You don't need anything from me.
Like I, all you need is like the app. And, that's, that's a huge thing for the game too, to get it, to get it in the hands of, the next generation.
Scott: I love to teach bridge. And I am always pitching it to my friends. when they ask, how do you play? the response is often,W do you have five sessions we could set up? And I, so I just thought there's gotta be a better way. and it seemed like bridge could really use something free and interactive, that would at least get them off the ground.
Like we're not creating intermediate it's, really just turning beginners into newcomers. But yeah, that's the idea is just to give them some way in that didn't seem to be there before.
John: and looking at your LinkedIn profile, you left, you left your previous job and I think it was, March of 2018. did you do that, did you already have in mind that you were gonna create a bridge app or was it something that just came up after.
Scott: I wasn't sure I left for other reasons, but I pretty soon after leaving, I thought, if I'm going to do this, it's probably going to be now or never that I make this app. and it just seemed like the right time I was, You know, it had been in my mind for a couple of years but that was really when I started writing down ideas and figuring out how do I build a team?
Is this going to be good enough that I can actually make it and feel confident that it will do what I want it to do? So it really started in earnest after I left my last job as a publisher, as a games publisher. And it just took off from there.
John: And what iteration of it, is this, did you start and stop before you said you'd been thinking about it for some years.
Scott: Yeah, this is basically the version that exists now is what, that was the start of this iteration. I had mostly been thinking about. What kind of lesson plan we would need to have and just started playing around. I have a friend who's also a game designer and started playing around with different ideas of like lesson length and order of operations and things like that.
And slowly, it all came together. one of my specialties in game decide I'm a game designer by profession working mostly in iPhone games and web games and do a lot of tutorial design, which is, onboarding design for other games, genres, word games, puzzle, strategy, whatever. and I knew I just wanted to apply that experience.
To bridge, because the principles all apply, clarity, ease of use, user experience, and reward structures. So that all started early 2018, put together the initial lessons and just started to prototype and iterate. So we did a lot of testing with the first six lessons, before we really decided, okay, this is the way to do it. And now we just have to pump out the rest of the 37.
John: So there are 37 ladder lessons in the free beginner module?
Scott: Yes, there's 37, which really aren't enough. There really needs to be more, we're, we're teaching you the very basics of play and then the basics of bidding and then the very basics of standard American. Bidding. So you're learning things like high card points and why it's important to have an aid card fit in a major.
If you can find one, you're not learning any artificial bids yet. I would love, we've actually written more lessons. We just haven't implemented into the app yet. Cause it's, it takes a long time. and it's a lot of programming and it's a lot of arts, so we have more that we'd love to do, but right now there is a little bit of an abrupt jump from the end of less than 37 to bridge, to duplicate full, tournament bridge. we have a practice mode that they can experiment in after their lessons or during their lessons. we encourage them to play around. We have a cheat sheet, which is like an interactive convention card that explains a lot of the bids that we don't teach, like transfers and stamen and such, but, we're not teaching them all of those bids yet.
So I would love to do updates in the future that actually teach more of that so that we have a smoother transition from learning to, swimming and full bridge.
I hope we can add more lessons in the future so that we teach more of the basics to have a smoother transition into full bridge.
John: so I have gone through, I think, the first nine modules in the beginner and I thought one thing that was cute, I thought was that how you introduced the dummy?
Scott: Oh yeah. He, your partner, short circuits and you have to play his hand for him. So it seemed logical to introduce it through a storyline element. Yeah. yeah, we try to do more of that. the storyline right now is really lightweights. It's just like a cute narrative frame. It's really not meant to be the driving force of the lesson plan.
It's just one of the things that are helping pull you forward a little bit and providing a little bit of engagement, scaffolding to make sure you're having a good time. And the presentation is compelling, but that's one of the only cases where we actually linked the storyline to the actual lesson content.
I'd like to do more of that because it makes it more seamless. But yeah, that was the idea.
John: I also just discovered that, tricky taught the, the two people who are mockingly saying that they'll come back and play against us when we can bid a grand slam.
Scott: So yeah, there's supposed to be this whole backstory, to the robot's lives. And these sort of soap operatic relationships between these bridge playing rival robots. so there are more characters that get introduced later in the lessons, basically every 20 lessons or so you enter a competition, which is where you go to another bridge club.
And play against the proprietors of that club. And some of them are robots. Some of them are human. You play against some Brooklyn hipster bots called bridge stirs less than 20. Then there's this like rich. lady and her robot, assistant that you play against in 37, then we have the coughing doctors who appear in lesson 51 and then there's, we've written the whole sort of narrative. That's actually one of the things that was heartbreaking about only getting to launch with the 37 lessons is the story stops. And it's what happens? We want to, we want people to be able to play through the whole. The whole storyline and actually reached the conclusion, but that also means putting in the rest of the lessons.
So it's good motivation for us
John: So you have 50 plus lessons that are RD like coded out or whatever. mostly finished, except for they're not in the app.
Scott: So they're written, like the dialogue is written and the storylines are written, but they're not coded. some of them are missing arch. The original idea was a hundred lessons. and we were in production. I was like, Oh, there's no way we're going to get through a hundred in time for launch.
37 is enough to get them the rules of bidding and play and just to get them started, let's do that. And then if we have the chance let's, do more, so hundred was the original idea. Hope we get there at some point because yeah, there's many more characters and much more story and much more bridge to teach.
So that would be ideal.
John: Do you know how many of the app users have gotten through the 37 lessons?
Scott: Yeah.o let's see, we have really good drop-off at the beginning, it's 5% leave after less than one, which is actually really good. you have to remember that two things.
One is that all of our users, the huge, a huge, vast majority of our players so far are, have installed the game because Apple featured it, Apple recommended it on the app store, which means that most of these people had no interest in bridge coming into it. They just downloaded it, because Apple said it was a good app.
So people, so most of these people aren't coming in really eager to learn a difficult card game. I think they're just curious to see the app. So to get really any push through the lessons is really good. About 40%, 42% of beginners do wander into the full bridge duplicate modes. So they're curious enough to actually start poking around and full bridge and figuring out bidding and things like that. So there's definitely curiosity and engagement. The number I'm happiest with, first of all, we have about 15,000 beginners in our first month. and we have really good day one retention, which is the measure of the percentage of people that come back and play again the day after they download the app, that is a big metric in the free to play mobile game world that tells you how good the first impression is players are getting, I think 35% day one retention is the benchmark.
And we are above that with our beginners. That was one of my big goals because short-term retention is one of Bridge's biggest problems. It's really often not fun enough at the beginning. It gets really fun, but people tend to drop off at the start. So just keeping enough of those people around, to the second day and beyond was a big goal.
John: You said on bridge winners that you thought that you had a hot game before tricky bridge was something that had something to do with how you were able to get so highly rated by Apple.
Scott: So I was a publisher, which, meant that I was part of the team that was, pitching Apple on new games that we were helping develop or distribute. And I knew, I had the experience of trying to convince them. that they should play a certain nap, but it was good enough to warrant their attention.
But you really don't the people who make these decisions at Apple are very cloistered. You really don't get to talk to them, especially not anymore. They've changed their process but I think the fact that I had helped publish their game of the year runner up a few years ago, helped convince them just to play Tricky Bridge.
But they get something like 3,500 apps a week or something, and they have to choose 10 to feature at launch. And of those, they choose three to feature at the top banner and Tricky Bridge was number one for the week. So I could not believe it. I knew he had a good app and that I had a leg up because I had published games that they liked in the past, but I could not believe that they put bridge on the top of the USA games page.
It got 60 million impressions and I wish I could say they all downloaded it, but bridge is a hard sell.
John: 60 million impressions. Did you find out about it just by seeing it on the list yourself or did they?
Scott: Yeah. They don't tell you. They don't tell you anything. It just happens or it doesn't. And I was running up and down the street. I called every single person I've ever. I was, I couldn't believe
John: Oh, my gosh.
Scott: It was bittersweet because everyone wants to be featured at launch, of course, because then you get your app gets a lot of exposure.
And the whole point of this project is to give bridge exposure. The thing is, I think if we had been like a candy crush style app, like a match three or something, branded something that was not so niche as bridge we could have expected between 50 and a hundred thousand downloads.
In our first week, and instead we got 10,000, so bridge it's still...nd part of that may be that our app store graphics weren't optimized enough. We weren't making good enough impression or people were confused about the nature of the game but it's really tough to sell bridge, even if Apple is giving it its biggest stamp of approval.
It's really hard. Yeah. There was a good start though. It was just what we wanted. and they keep featuring the app, which is great. We were in new games. We love, we were in a list called indie games we love that's independent games. We were number one in that list.
We were number two in the list of re-imagined classics. we were somewhere on the list of what to play this week. they have these little editorial features that sometimes last a day, sometimes last a week. And you just want to be in as many of those as you can. So someone at Apple loves this.
John: You don't even know who it is.
Scott: Nope, no idea. They are anonymous. There's a group of USA story editors who make these decisions. It's a small group, someone there played the game and they play, I could see that they were playing it. Actually, the thing that happened, they played it and they crashed. And I was mortified total. I was like, Oh my God, they're never going to feature the game.
Now I totally messed this up. They had a technical problem. And then I couldn't believe it. They opened the app again and played for another 30 minutes. So they forgave us for that bug that they ran into. so we got very lucky.
John: e should make the goal of this podcast episode, finding out who that person was.
Scott: Oh my God, I have to send them flowers or so I have to thank them but it's really hard to get in touch with
John: It's literally one individual from the sound of it. Cause it was one person playing the game.
Scott: One person, it seemed like one person played it. I know that there were more people from Apple that were playing it because they had to approve the billsA but as far as I know, only one store editor who was actually making the call. About whether to feature the game, played it for any length of time.
And they usually play for four minutes if they play it at all. In this case, they played for an hour, which was a lot, that's how I knew something was up. I was like, Oh, they're still playing the game. They crashed. And they're still playing the game. Obviously we fixed that crash, but I was so sad for a little while, until it turned out that they forgave us.
John: If any setting trick listeners have any idea who this person is, please come forward. Did you? You must, but you must've solicited Apple in some way or did this all is just part of...
Scott: yes. So yeah. the one thing you can do now, they have a website where you can submit a pitch and that the idea is you're just putting it in front of them to make sure basically increased the, they could still feature you, even if you don't do this, but it's much more likely that they'll remember you or, they may or may not look at your pitch.
So I pitched a really hard on the idea that bridge is this really important card game. And I had all this, as the original e-sport original shoutcasters in 1920 on radio and two covers of sports illustrated. And I just basically was like, and we're trying to save it from extinction and the app store can help, and I don't know if that resonated with them or if they just liked the app, but I tried every angle I could to get them to help us.
John: How did you find out that you were a number one?
Scott: it just opened, you really just have to open the store and look, they shuffle things around during the week but that was how we just kept refreshing the store. 5,000 times the day of launch, and then it just appeared, and it was North and South America.
I don't think we were featured at all in Europe because we are not localized. We're not translated yet.
John: So what day was your actual launch day?
Scott: October 8th or October 7th
John: How did you come up with that?
Scott: I was just estimating how long it would take to get through our 37 lessons and finish the duplicate, portions and the robot AI. and hat was pretty much it. The other thing was that there was a launch of Apple's new operating system that was overlapping with our original launch date.
And that turned out to be bad because Apple won't feature you much when it's trying to feature its new operating system or a new phone or something. So we pushed back a couple of weeks just to be safe. we put in a couple of the new features from the new operating system. Like we have a widget that I don't think anybody uses, just to try to show that we were using all the Apple, the new Apple features.
It makes it more likely that they'll support you. It was fun to put it in a widget and other little things like that. And, yeah, that was, but there was a lot of effort, a lot of focus, a lot of anticipation around whether we could get that featuring from Apple.
And
John: did you think when you started the project in April of 2018, when did you think, what was your initial launch target?
Scott: Oh, like a year and a half. I've been in this business long enough that I should have known better. I really thought, Oh, we'll just template the lessons and then crank them out and it's going to be no problem. And, first of all, the team was part-time. and that made things a little slower.
I was working part-time as a consultant on the side, so we were not, and when we're all remote, even before coronavirus was forcing us to be remote, no one was in the same room together. we were going pretty slow for awhile. But yeah, it definitely took longer than I really thought it would.
It always does.
John: Yeah, your team has got a, I saw some that some saw there was somebody in Armenia.
Scott: yes. There's people in Armenia, there are people in Sweden, Ukraine, and then in the U S there was, a couple of people as well. And then Rodney Ludwig who's the creator of the AI engine is based in the U S as well.
John: What's the name that he competes under in the, world bridge computer championships?
Scott: Meadowlark. So they won the world championships in 2000 and then he, I think, stopped working on it for a while. He's been on and off on that program for something like 40 years. And, then he retired and he came back into it and I called him and said, can we play it? Can you please help me?
I'm trying to make a bridge app, but I can't go this AI. I thought about coding it myself. I tried it for two minutes and I was like, whoops, Nope, this is never gonna, I'm never gonna be able to do this. We need to get someone who's already built an engine. And Rodney has been really great. He's brilliant.
And he's been working really hard to, I think we have fixed 385 bugs in the bidding engine since we started, so it's been a lot of work and we're still fixing and optimizing and we'll keep doing that as long as we can.
John: What made you choose Rodney's?
Scott: I was hoping to work with someone in the U S just. To make it easier. And, it just seemed like it would be a good match and he was honestly the first person I called and when he said yes, I just said, okay, search over. We've got our AI, let's just do this and yeah, that was pretty much it, it all went a lot easier than I thought there aren't that many really good AI engines in bridge.
They're so hard to code. They take so long. I was the only spectator at the world championships for computer bridge when they were in Orlando a couple of years ago, it was just like me with a foam finger being like go USA. And all these other guys were like, who is this person? Why is TPO?
John: Was Rodney the only US American?
Scott: Let's see.
No, I don't think so. Rich Baron wasn't there. I don't remember. It was just me. I was so out of place. But I was totally fascinated. it's just this room of these people are just sitting in this room in front of their silent, and the computers are worrying and, they're taking a really long time for every bid and they're simulating a million different layouts but it was still a really interesting, to see, the different groups and hear them talk. So it was fun it's like a little it's its own little world. They all know eacother. And, I, I don't know. it was just interesting to observe for a little bit but yeah, working with rod has been really great. So we got really lucky that he was, onboard.
John: Were you already on board with him at the event? Or did you go to the event looking to...
Scott: yes, we were. We were already working together and I was going to meet him in person for the first time and support him. and, yeah, that was the idea.
John: So there's a couple, I have a couple of questions here. our crack intern, Michael Xu did some research on you. And I know that we joked that you joked about this, but he did discover. That in your ACVL playing record, he only discovered a total of six sessions. So do you not play a lot of actual duplicate or?
Scott: I've certainly played more than six sessions, so I'm, I'm an intermediate, I'm definitely the worst bridge player that's ever been on the show. I have been playing for 30 years, but it was never part of my social life, and I would try to get friends involved occasionally I would get a friend to really take it seriously. And I would drag them to a newcomer event at a national we'd have a great time. But mostly it's playing duplicate. When I visit home, play at my parents at a local club. I played one knockout. I, I'm just so I'm, the role I'm never going to be star player.
I love it. I, and I talk it up all the time, but my contribution to bridge is definitely going to be more as an evangelist than, as, an amazing player. I would love to play more though. my dream is to be able to have my social life include bridge a lot more often.
And the thing that I'm missing, like most young people play bridge is that critical mass of friends where you have enough people around you play at all times that you end up playing when you're at a bar or you end up playing when you're all just together. I've never had that.
And, then duplicate, I mostly play online now. Even before coronavirus. I was mostly playing here and there online. So it's been a while since I've been in a club. Yeah.
John: Do you play on bridge base?
Scott: Yeah. I play on bridge base. I've played on fun bridge. I've tried a bunch of the different services. they're all great. The thing that tricky bridge is trying to do is just. help create a new audience, not for me than for them, just for anybody. Just, the goal is just to get more people into the game generally. and I found that there is a lot of great stuff, both educational material and just opportunities to play for people once they knew the rules and very little for people that were really just starting out. And that was the sort of the gap that we were trying to fill. especially cause the, the very beginning of the game is so important, that first impression is so important in bridges. It's so hard to make fun quickly. it's not the steep learning curve, there's plenty of complicated European board games with 50 page rule books that are really popular right now. But those games tend to be more fun to learn and bridge than the very beginning of bridge. and in those cases, in those games, you have a better, you create a sense of mastery that.
Starts to accrue more quickly than it bridge, where it takes a while before you really start to feel it click. so anyway, that was the idea is just to try to make it fun as fast as possible. And that's an important part of any free iPhone game. Anyway, the players have nothing invested. They will leave the second, they are bored, confused, or overwhelmed, and they will never come back.
So there is a huge amount of time spent iterating on the first six minutes of the game.
John: How did you decide to do it as a bot? where did that happen in the process? Cause it's a bot called tricky bridge.
Scott: I just, I always enjoyed robot bridge and I was like, I know we're going to have robot play. we're not going to start with synchronous multiplayer human bridge because it's very high pressure for a new player and it's, we can just, we can get a lot more adoption of full bridge.
I think if we use robots instead and I thought, okay, if we're going to do that, let's give them personalities and storylines just to make them a little bit more charming than your average, robot with a vacant stare so that's where that came from. And I'd always wanted to see bridge robots with personalities.
I've been playing with them so much, so now that's, it just seemed to make sense for the game.
John: We should play on BBS sometime.
Scott: Sure terrible. You're going to, you're going to have an awful time.
John: Come on, man. that's not the attitude.
Scott: All right. You're right. Where it's going, where it's going to be fun. No, I love to, I play with my dad sometimes on BBO. I really need to get back into that club play. I sorta have just been away from that world. Bridge has been on my mind nonstop for what the last three years, but I haven't been in the community much, so I do need to get back into it.
John: Yeah. There's cause there probably be a lot of word of mouth, you'll get the chance to interact with, I'll be one-offs but it's Hey, I started this game, tricky bridge. Cause I'm pumped. Like I've told a bunch of people about this and it's it's solving a problem of mine for sure.
Scott: Yeah. thank you for spreading the word. Before COVID we were going to go to Montreal. We were going to go to the ABCs and set up a booth and we, really try to, spread the word ourselves. without that possibility I'm restricted. for tricky bridge, the next thing we need to do is test out things like Facebook ads and ads inside of other mobile games, the traditional way of scaling up the audience size for any mobile game is to run these digital ads. And we need to test those out, to see if we can do that as one of our sources for new players. And then of course, more grassroots stuff to try to get a word of mouth going for the game.
John: Do you think this is something that can be lucrative for you? Or are you just doing it at as a lover of bridge?
Scott: I would be very surprise if this ever became lucrative. The revenue goal is to earn enough really from the duplicate players that we can keep paying for the servers. So we don't shut the game down and ideally enough that we can keep paying a team to do ongoing development. the goal was never that the goal is always scale, for beginners because the lessons are free.
The app download is free. The practice mode is free. It's unlimited, it's full bridge. there's no pop-up ads in it. The goal is always to create this perfect user experience so that we give the best possible impression of bridge to a mobile audience, a young mobile audience, really all ages. we have to earn some revenue, and the only way that I was willing to do that was by charging for the duplicate modes.
Really the tournament's so that the experience bridge players could essentially subsidize the free education of the beginners. that was the general idea. I would love for it to be, if we can earn enough that I can actually keep working on this full-time that would be ideal. That remains to be seen.
We'll see if it goes well enough,
John: Yeah. in some respects it seems like maybe, you had your big shot with the, with the Apple featuring it'll be it's. I wonder if it's possible for you to get back up to that level of like new potential engagers or maybe it's like the superhuman idea. I'm a superhuman email client, which I love.
If you have a Gmail email, I just highly recommend superhuman, but their deal is they have a waiting list. So they're looking for people who are going to be like. Candidates to use superhuman, and maybe there is something about the word of mouth and the bridge community spreading the word to like the right candidates has, will be a lot higher hit rate than what you saw with apple.
Scott: Yeah, no, that's certainly a possibility. the main way that we would scale is most likely by working with publisher, like the one that I used to work for. they're basically really sophisticated digital marketing agencies that not only create the ads and optimize and run them, they pay for them.
and then they take a cut of the revenue that's earned from players who click through the ads and play the game. That is my next step for, giving a try to ongoing, installs to really just keeping up that stream of that fire hose of new people coming in. but yeah, I'm open to anything it's gonna take a lot and it's probably gonna take a lot of luck, to really give it the blast off that it needs. And to make it sustain over time.
John: what can you tell us about working with the ACL education foundation?
Scott: Oh, they've been absolutely great to us. so I pitched them on the app. in March they let me talk for an hour. They were, they turned around really fast and gave us this huge development grant, which let us finish the lessons. so I was. Super excited about that. They've been really supportive.
They, put us on their social bridge, online website. They've been sending emails to everybody. They're telling everybody about it. They're really trying hard to support us. and so that's, they've been really one of our most important. Partners in this, which has been great. So I'm keeping them up to date on how the game is doing and what our plans are and all of that.
And they're trying whatever they can to, help us out.
John: so was that a meeting that was supposed to take place in person that ended up taking place over zoom?
Scott: yes. Yeah. I think the original idea was I was going to meet them at one of the nationals and cause they have their board meeting. at those events and I ended up doing it over zoom. they were great. They asked really great questions. I wasn't sure if they would say, they're not like mobile game developers.
I wasn't sure if they were going to get it, but they really did. And they asked great questions. Christian Frederick, the executive director, I, was talking about engagement and she was like, what are the channels for re-engagement for 14 day lapsed users? And I was like, yeah, You sound like you've done this before? yeah, so they had great questions. They, yeah. It's just been a really good relationship.
John: did you reach out to them
Scott: Yes. Yeah. I sent an application for a grant, and obviously what the grant supports is just the free educational stuff. that's what all the grant money goes toward is production for the beginners.
Yeah. And that's what we had left. We had, I'd purposefully done the tournament stuff first, and left that for the end, in case they would end up supporting us. So that's how it worked out.
John: And is the AI like I've gone through the first nine lessons on the site. Is the AI involved in, at that point?
Scott: No. Oh, it's not really involved at that point. Those lessons, especially at the beginning are highly scripted. the AI is really mostly for the duplicate modes and for the practice mode, which you unlock as the lessons progress. And then once you finished less than 20 and you understand what the bidding is, it, the practice mode becomes full bridge with the full robots.
so it does become. Hey, the AI does become a big element there. but it's not a big element in the early lessons.
John: if you are going to, speak to our listeners directly, what is the thing that our listeners can do for you as a call to action.
Scott: what's really, if you know any young person that has been on the fence about learning bridge, but might be even a little bit open to it. Tell them to download tricky bridge. It's free on the app store. That's all you have to say. And a young person knows what to do. They do have to have an iPhone or an iPad because we're not on Android yet, but if they have one of those devices, just tell them to download tricky bridge and give it a try.
It's free. and we'll try to do the rest. that's the main thing that. the bridge players can do now. They can also play it themselves. That helps us out too. but really the, just spread the word it's really, for all ages. There's, there were some people getting the impression.
This is like a kids training app. It's really not meant to be that. it's meant to be all ages friendly. And most of our users so far seem to be adults, but it's, I think it's rated nine age nine plus right now.
John: Yeah, I played it. I tried to break it, not to break it, but just to see, there was a hand where you have to knock out the ACEs in both of your suits. And so I like played all of my one suit, I guess it was clubs to see if there was, if I was setting up a club winner for the defense, but that was not the case.
Scott: If you find a way to break any of them, please let me know. I know there's problems, there's still bugs in the app. We're always fixing, if there are some people there's occasionally really frustrating. There's like rare crashes that will happen on any iPhone game where one person will have a problem that we can't reproduce.
But if you can actually find something reproducible in the lessons, do you let me know? Because it means other people are probably running into that as well.
John: What's the best piece of feedback you've gotten since you launched.
Scott: The best review we got was someone who they said, I downloaded this app because I thought it was about building bridges. And now I play bridge. that was my, probably my favorite review, but, the best piece of feedback we've gotten, we've got a lot of great feedback from the bridge winners community when we did our beta, I think I just, I really appreciated people saying I, I've tried for years to get my girlfriend to play and now she finally does, things like that have been.
That's what it's all about. it's been great hearing little stories like that on Reddit or on forums or by email, or in the app store reviews. I'm trying to think of what feedback we got that was like super help. Oh, you know what the most interesting. Piece of feedback we got from the duplicate players for the bridge winners is originally, we have all these like rewards that you get for completing the lessons.
You unlock these packs of card cards and card backs and things like that. And the duplicate players hated it. They were like, this is too much like a video game. I don't want any of these rewards. I don't want experience points. Stop it. And so we actually changed it so that you do get all that stuff. It just doesn't appear in front of you.
you don't have to suffer through the animations. You just go onto the next hand, which they're like, we just want to play bridge. We don't want silly rewards. so those rewards are still there for the beginners, but they're not a part of the duplicate experience.
John: My friend Nabil Edggton, said that he'd like to be able to skip through a lesson if he,
Scott: Yes. Yeah. Especially for the advanced players, we should probably put in a button that just lets you unlock all of them so that you can go through right now, you are forced to play through. Part of that was a sneaky way. Like we have certain rewards that you can only get by completing certain lessons.
And it was a sneaky way to force the. Advanced players to play through the lessons to see how effective they were. Hopefully then be more likely to spread the word to the beginners in
John: how you, right now, you're only available on iOS. how much of a commitment is it to get it on Android?
Scott: it's a sizeable commitment. We are built in the unity engine, which makes it a lot easier for us to port it to Android. but there is a bunch of work that has to be done to do that. And I am. Still prioritizing, should we be fixing bugs bef before we do that, it should be rushing to Android.
Plenty of people have asked for it on Android. I'd love to, I'd love to do that. it will depend on how the next few months go and whether we'll have the resources to keep that level of production going. Yep.
John: So what is your funding status? what can you share about your funding status right now?
Scott: we've, we got our grant, which allowed us to finish the game and now the next step would be that part, publisher partnership, where they would be investing a bit and not just the marketing, but potentially also in ongoing development. and we would really need that to keep going. we're doing fine in terms of being able to pay for.
Keeping the servers up and keeping the game in shape. but to have a full team doing ongoing, production, we would need some help from a partner.
John: how do you end up with teammates in Armenia?
Scott: so I was consulting on another video game and they had people on their team that were Armenian software engineers. So I was working with them. And when that game got sold, I asked if I could just scoop them all up. And they said, sure. so that was how that started. And then they pulled in more people themselves.
and that was pretty much it. I just happened into them and they were great. They've been really great.
John: so how many people are on your team? Would you say? Like in
Scott: I think about 14 people have worked on this game. In some capacity. We had a few artists who were temporary contractors. the core team is about five or six people, including Rodney on the AI and, one art director and a few software engineers. and. But I think about 14 people probably have worked on it in some capacity.
John: what, what would you give yourself if you were grading your, your yourself on the entirety of this?
Scott: What would I give myself? I'm pretty hard on myself. I probably give myself, I don't want to sell the app short and be like, Oh, C plus, don't play it because it's good. It's it has good metrics. the per user metrics are really good people, really like it, it's doing a job that I don't think is done in any other digital product.
and I was really happy about the app store featuring, so I'd say, I don't know. I'd say. a for getting it done,
John: Yeah.
Scott: B plus on that could go to an a, if we added more lessons to make the experience more complete. but we have, yeah, we've got that retention. So that was really the goal. That's probably how I would grade myself is through those core metrics engagement.
The users have given it a 4.8 out of five on the app store. we'll see if we can keep that up. but it's a good start.
John: have there been any gut punches in this, process since launch or pre-launch?
Scott: You mean like really bad moments where I like out the whole thing was going to cave in. Oh, absolutely. before Rodney signed on, I was like, and I was like, thinking about trying to code AI or how we would get the robots going. I was feeling awful. There was a point where, early on in the lesson iteration, I didn't like it at all.
And I was like, what am I doing? It's never gonna work. watching Apple crash when playing the app was probably my worst moment, because so much had led up to that. And then just to have them have the app close and their face was just absolutely mortifying. but it's been, other than that, it's been surprisingly smooth.
We haven't had any really bad shakeups in the team, we didn't have any. Technical disasters that really set us back. it's, I'm really grateful that we were able just to hold it together and especially with the foundation's help, get it done roughly when it seemed like it, roughly in time.
and so if I had to do it again, I don't know. I'm not sure what I would change. I might. Do even more testing, with a wider array of audiences. I tried to do a lot of play-testing, but you can always do more
John: how did you know that the person that Apple was playing the game
Scott: I was monitoring. We can see in our charts, That there's someone there. We don't see personal information like your name or your, we don't see any of that, but I could see general location and someone in the U S was playing a production version that was not live on the store. And the only way you can do that is if you work at Apple.
So I knew there was someone there was playing it. and it was roughly around the time that an editor would play it when making a decision. It was like right before launch. and then when we were re featured a few weeks later, that same person came back and played again to check on the app.
And,
John: do you know that the same person? like, why do you suspect it was the same person?
Scott: see that or the system could see it was the same device ID.
John: Oh, wow.
Scott: it could have been a different person playing on a company. IPad. That was just shared between people that's entirely possible. Yeah. I don't know. We don't have, we don't have personal data on anybody.
John: but you went, you did, you said you did a beta with, bridge winners. th that was pre app store.
Scott: Yes. That was before we realized we had a test flight version, which is how you distribute beta. Apps that are not live on the store. And we invited anyone who wanted to play. we got a few hundred responses. it was really good. I think even some big names open the app. I never, I didn't necessarily get feedback from everyone, but, people were curious and the people who did write us back were really helpful.
They found a lot of bugs, that there were so many problems in the bidding at that point. apart from just like crashes, bots were passing cubits. It was not a pretty set, but they were really patient. the players are really patient with us because they understood that we were not finished. And a lot of it was testing the lessons and trying to get people to tell, the younger folks in their lives to try it out and send us their feedback.
And the feedback on the early lessons was really good. The feedback on the later lessons was pretty good. But we had, as the lessons get longer and teaching bidding and stuff like scoring, which is really hard to teach in a way that's compelling. we got more feedback on those lessons.
yeah, the scoring, Oh, that lesson probably took less than 25. We try to make it as visual as possible. It's really hard to teach the relationship between the trick score and the game bonus. and the effect of doubling and he's I don't think we don't even teach doubling. In that lesson, but just trying to make everything visual and animate it so that it just makes more sense.
And it's a little more fun to absorb, because otherwise it's just, it's so deadly, it's too bad because the score, understanding the scoring makes bridge so much more fun. but when you're learning it's no fun at all. It's just so it's hard to deliver it in the right package.
John: What was the core tenant? Like you have to score a hundred points to score a game, or,
Scott: Yeah. the trick score being a hundred or higher, how that, what that does to the game bonus, which has turned it on. and then, teaching the different trick scores for different suits and things like that and giving different examples. I think we split out the game bonus from the original lesson on point scoring.
I think the game bonus is a separate lesson. and we try to. we've added into understanding why you would bid a game level contract, how you know, to bid one. just talking about it now, there's so much more we have to teach. It feels like we're just scratching the surface, but that's the idea is there are a lot of resources out there once you get the rules.
and we just needed, I just wanted to provide those rules in a package that more people could enjoy.
John: So it sounds like your dad is a ACL member and your mom.
Scott: they are both ACL members. they play, they played fairly frequently. they're not experts. but I really enjoyed, I go into the clubs with them and the occasional, tournament, and they really got me into it initially.
John: what's your VBS screen name?
Scott: What is it roadshow as an antiques road show?
John: All one word or two words.
Scott: I think it's all one word
John: do you know how many master points you have?
Scott: I have, I don't know, 50 something. I have some gold points from when we won the one knockout tournament I was ever in. I really enjoyed that tournament, not just because we won, I literally love knockouts. I wanted to do those again, but, I need a team, and I need to be better at bridge. someday I'll, up my game,
John: Have you listened to any of the other, episodes here on the setting Trek?
Scott: Yeah, I've listened to pieces of a lot of them. Do you ask, because are you asking if I understand what people are talking about in the.
John: I was thinking, I'm thinking like I've been wanting to have a setting trick tournament, like for a while. And then I was thinking that if if we played in the sh like Walt Shaffer as the episode that. We just published, last week and Walt runs this game on BBO, which we've now we call the Schaefer game, but he called it his star game, but it gets played like Bob Hamman and some hall of Famers used to play in it.
Regularly now they plan it more sporadically, but I'm just wondering, what would be a good if you and I were to play together as a partnership? we could just play in an all speed ball, but I'm wondering like what would be a good place where we could play, where we could like, showcase, what you're doing could stay, we could see like the, or maybe we could just record it and we could see what your level is.
Scott: Oh God,
John: Little fun for
Scott: I don't want you to see what my level is now. It's been too long. no, yeah. And whatever I would do anything. I'm not sure if I'm really the selling. for tricky bridge, if my bridge scale is definitely not the selling point
John: yeah, you're, you have a passion for the game, and you call yourself an evangelist, that's, that's something that resonates with me and I'm sure a lot of bridge players, would share your story
Scott: Yeah, no, I, that would be really great. Yeah. Anything I would participate. we definitely, yeah. More events where we're talking now about streaming bridge streaming on Twitch and. YouTube. and I know that bridge is still looking for the right format for that to make it compelling to a wider audience.
That's something I've been thinking more about. That's something I would feel comfortable doing. Because I could be the, connection between someone who's a lot better than me and the people watching, who are just wrapping their heads around it. I'm pretty good at talking to the newer players and helping them understand the thought process.
But, whereas we would, then we would also have, an expert who's much better than me who is they're dishing out, all the super deep and interesting reasons why they make the decisions that they do. something like that. I don't know what the perfect format is. We haven't really started experiments, with it, but it is important.
you see how many other games have benefited so much from being fun to watch on streaming, Ridge? I don't know. Maybe there isn't the perfect format. We don't have our version of speed chess with a Grandmaster. I don't know. it could mean we just need different personalities to give it a try or we need a different format.
I don't know what it is, but I'm curious to experiment with it and give it a try.
John: what else did, so you were on a TV show. You were in a
Scott: I used to Moonlight as an actor, in the old days. so I was on, I was a CoStar for one episode of ugly, Betty, if you've ever heard of that show.
John: I've heard of it.
Scott: Yeah. I play the Ralph macho, the karate kids accountants in that episode. that was my big role.
John: Was this an LA thing or a New
Scott: Nope. It was in New York. I was living in New York.
I think I was in graduate school and I would basically, as an actor, I would do TV commercials for extra money. And I just happened to get an audition for this one part, but it was a lot of fun. I don't really do that anymore.
John: I saw your Yale graduate.
Scott: Yes.
John: What, what was your experience like? it's a great, it's a school has got a great reputation,
Scott: they had a little bridge club while I was there. It was really little though. apparently it's doing much better now. My product intern, Reese Koppel, who's the former King of bridge. he is the bridge captain now, and I think he's done a fantastic job of getting a lot more people into bridge. at Yale, which is really great.
I think he's basically created a team of duplicate players. but, by himself, he's been running a lot of the social media stuff for tricky bridge and he helps. Me with pouring over the analytics and figuring out our roadmap and everything. So he's been really great. He also has his own teaching site, ACE bridge.org.
but I think he has helped revitalize bridge at Yale because it was not a big extracurricular activity while I was there.
John: It just takes one person. It's amazing how that is. obviously this kid's got enthusiasm for it. having being the King of bridge and Michael zoo, our intern actually mentioned Reese. How did, how did he come on the, the tricky bridge team?
Scott: how did he, I think he just reached out to me. and I was looking for someone to fill that role and, he was like, I'll do it. I'll do anything. And he was great. He's really smart. He's a really good bridge player. He's really into promoting the game. and yeah, he's been a big asset for the project.
John: were there other names, then tricky bridge? Or how did you decide on a tricky bridge?
Scott: the name of the app? Why did I decide on tricky bridge? I F if you're into mobile games at all, you've heard of flappy bird. And there is a lot of games. Okay. So this was a super viral, little, tiny, casual game that one person made and it got downloaded like 500 Brazilian times, across the world.
flappy bird, the name gave rise to a bunch of other like steppy. I dunno, steppy pants and crashy cars and things like that. So this was just like, I didn't think that much about it. I just thought, bridge is tricky. You have you play tricks in it. So why not tricky bridge? I think I only got a weird look from one other game designer about that.
Dan they're like, that's what you're calling your app, but everyone else seems to have been fine with it. I don't know. I'm happy enough with it. We were able to get tricky bridge.com is our URL. So as long as we have that, As long as we have that, I think it's a fine name. It's as good as any.
John: Was there someone at the foundation that was really championing, the game or was it really a collective effort that everybody
Scott: Robert Todd was super helpful in the beginning because he really, I think got me in the door, and helps set up the meeting where I was pitching the foundation on it. He's been a really big help. he's been great. He understands a lot of. Stuff about digital, marketing of bridge and things like that.
So he's been great, but they've all been, the whole group has been helpful. Actually getting back to the name for one second, it just made me realize that one, one piece of feedback I got from someone was that people think bridge is really too hard to be fun. That's the impression that some people have, so maybe it should have been called.
Easy bridge or simple. I think easy bridge is already a name, but simple bridge or not that hard bridge name that implies that the game is actually as hard as people think it is, are as hard to learn as people think it is. So maybe that's the one thing I should have thought about before calling it tricky anyway.
but no, just kidding. But the foundation, yeah, they've been really great. Robert was helping get me set up at the beginning.
John: Cause there was a, there's a, a guy named Joseph Blas who passed away recently, who was, I think, on the ed foundation. And I just wondered if you, if you came across Joseph at all.
Scott: I don't think so. I think, no, I don't think I had any interaction with him.
John: Yeah. he was an older gentleman. He, had a pretty amazing, career coming from Poland to the us and, had some real high level teams winning the rising or the major events and those, I didn't know him particularly well, but he was, we were friendly and, and I think that, I think he was on the board of the ed foundation.
I haven't met the new, director yet,
Scott: I think the, yeah, there's a bunch of new people there. I think. even Reese's on the board now also, I think he's the youngest member.
John: your guy,
Scott: Yeah. he joined after I had interacted with the foundation. he wasn't on the board before.
John: That's a prodigious young man.
Scott: yeah, he was great.
John: college and he's on the education foundation board.
Scott: Sure. I needed, always good to have some young representatives.
John: Good for the ed foundation, like for doing that.
Scott: yeah. no, they do good work. but anyway, yeah.
John: all right, so let's wrap it up with, anything you wanna say before, before we sign off.
Scott: No, the bridge community support with tricky bridge. And I really appreciate you telling me, you've been telling people about it. That's really what we need is just. more word of mouth all the time. So I'm going to do my best to develop it even further and, and then share the results with the community.
And hopefully there'll be something that, will have an impact.
John: I think you are already, I know that I'm able to tell, I had lunch with a friend yesterday and he's been playing tricky bridge, another friend. I went and did a demo of bridge slash who'll. Are you familiar with who'll? I did a demo at their house one day and she's just yeah, they're not interested.
And so I sent her a tricky bridge and now they're playing her twins are playing.
Scott: Oh, great. That's great.
John: definitely, it's Def you've definitely made bridge more accessible, already.
Scott: Good. that's the idea. And, I'll, I'm going to try my best to, just leverage any resource I have in the industry to make it work. Yeah. We'll see. To be continued.
John: Yeah. Tricky bridge. Download it. Come on. People.
Scott: Download it today. It's great.
John: their, Hey, tell your friends it's free. So did you listen to that? You should listen to the ultra for the crystal Lankan episode, if you haven't already
Scott: Oh, I thought I listened to it. I didn't. D did you mention tricky, Virginia?
John: In the outro and the, after the
Scott: I thought I listened to it and then
John: maybe I did it in Tom car. No, I think I did it on trick anyway. I don't know, but I definitely did it on one of them. You got to listen to all the episodes now.
Scott: I'll be right back. I'm going to go listen to all of them. No, thanks for mentioning it.
John: Yeah. you're solving my problems. that's, that's how you get love here on the setting trick. All right, man. it's been fun. we're going to play, I'm going to follow up with you. We're going to play bridge online sometime
Scott: Okay. Let me know.
John: and, introduced me to reach two. I'd like to, I'd like to meet him if you,
Scott: I will.
John: All right. Fellow bridge lover. So Scott, thank you so much, man. it's been fun.
Scott: Thank you, John. Thanks again.