Last week we got a chance to chat with Cameron Reid and Curt Covert about Smirk & Dagger's new co-operative poker game, Hell of a Deal. We explore the game's unique mechanics, design process, and thematic influences, offering insights into creating a game that captures the thrill of poker without real money.
Mike Dunn: Hey there, Mike Dunn with Gaming Trend here talking to some folks about an exciting game that is currently on Kickstarter, Hell of a Deal. Hell of a Deal is a cooperative poker game that has pits you, the players, against the devil himself and his minions. let me, without further ado, let me introduce our guests. We've got Cameron Reed and Kurt Covert.
Cameron, Kurt, guess Cameron, let's start with you. You are actually the designer of this game. Tell us a little bit about your role on the game and just kind of how you came up with the idea in the first place.
Cameron Reid: Yeah. So the idea kind of stemmed from like the, you know, the inception of the idea was I went and played some poker with some friends and you know, everybody pitches in 20 bucks and it's, you know, it's supposed to keep the stakes in the game because you know, like nobody can play poker without at least a little bit of money involved. Otherwise everyone's, you know, all in on a pair of twos and it just kind of breaks down.
Mike: Right
Cameron: And I have a very competitive group of friends. so, you know, whenever there's money involved, everybody gets a little chippy and like it kind of, for me, it took a little bit of the fun out of the game. You know, it was like, okay. Everybody's in for 20 bucks. So you can't, if you leave, you're leaving the 20 bucks. But then every, you know, somebody inevitably had to leave and they're like, Ooh, can I cash out? It's like, no, can't cash out. You know, so there's all these like kind of weird, I don't love involving money with my friends. So, yeah. So the design inception for me was like, how can I recreate the
feeling of playing a poker night with buddies and not have the stakes be tied to money. And so how can we recreate that in a game format? And so yeah, so I'm the designer on the game. So I kind of worked on that for a couple months and then brought it to a speed pitching event where I met Kurt and Gaten and pitched to them. And then, you know, over a couple of months, we chatted about it and they ended up taking the project on. So it was very exciting.
But yeah, so I was kind of the designer on the project.
Mike: Nice, that's a nice handoff to Kurt. Kurt, talk about, talk about other than just being Smirk and Dagger being the publisher, talk about some of the, what you brought to the table, so to speak, when you guys were working on this game.
Curt Covert: Sure. yeah, Gaten and I were at Unpub, which is a designer show down in Baltimore, where we go to kick around some of our own titles, but also there's a whole bunch of designers with their brand new games they're working on. And so it's actually pretty great for prospecting to see if there's something we would be interested to bring in the line. We saw Cameron and he pitches this idea of a poker game.
Against the devil in hell, you're trying to like win your way out of hell and they all cheat, so you have to cheat just as hard if you want to have any chance of winning. We were pretty much sold almost at that point. The game would have had to like really disappoint us because that idea was really compelling. And when we sat down...
Mike: Ha ha.
Curt: It really delivered on that and Cameron had mentioned like, you know, his one of his original design thoughts was a cashless poker game. Now I'm actually a poker player. I love playing for for money. I love to hang out with my best five buds. And yeah, I sure it's my.
Mike: ...and fleece them for all they have, yes.
Curt: ...or leave my 60 bucks behind and still feel like I had a great night. But the point is, yeah, when you add cash to the table, playing cashless poker takes a lot of the enjoyment out of the game for whatever reason. The stakes matter to make the game interesting. And the magic of what Cameron created was that it felt just as high stakes without the cash on the table. And it's an amazing magic trick that he pulled, putting your soul on the line rather than your cash. And I think, you know, because when we first thought about cooperative poker, well, first of all, what does that even look like? Well, the fact that you're playing against the house is, again, a pretty interesting feel. It gives you the feel of playing at a casino versus playing with your friends because, you know, the house is
They are, it's, they're already leaning in a little bit. You know, we already know that the house has an edge. Well here, they're cheating their asses off. And so, but now each of us can win against the house. Each of us can lose against the house. So yeah, you're playing poker. There are a lot of games out there where like you bring in poker mechanics and that's cool. But like this is, I'm actually playing poker and I feel like I'm playing poker.
But there's no cash on the table. And I think that's pretty neat. Now you asked, like, what did we bring to the table? Well, so Gaten and I, when we brought the game back with us, which was a beautiful prototype, by the way, we brought it back to the house and we started thinking about, we already love it. Where are the gaps and opportunities that are going to help take this from a prototype to a final product? And I think Gaten had been kind of early in, is there something that can be done with the bosses? Cameron had a whole series of bosses, and at that time they were scaled in difficulty. And all of the bosses largely made the game harder as their implicit, you know, how do they impact the game? And yes, they should make the game harder. They should cheat hard.
Curt: But I think Gaten was like, what if rather than just harder, what if they change how you approach the hand and try to make it just a little bit more interesting? Like how does this hand different than handling last hand? And I think that as a design impetus to take it to the next level is where some of the bosses really started differentiate and some of the gameplay really like you have to like stop and say, I need to think of differently about how I approach this hand. And I think that's probably the one thing that we really helped with to push a little bit forward.
Mike: Nice. Nice. Cameron, how was that on your end in terms of the design process?
Cameron: Well, I thought it was super cool. This is my first foray into designing games, so I got to learn a lot on the job and it was really fun to go away and then come back every month and a half or two months and see how much had been changed. But everything was so true to the vision of the game. There was big changes, obviously, especially across the whole game. A lot of little mini changes that add up to a lot. But it was all stuff in, I think what Kurt's saying, that just made the game better.
And that was super cool to kind of experience and also get to like every once in while, go down and do it. like a design charrette with them and just kind of go through and brainstorm and like, do you know, what's this design challenge that we need to solve this time? Like what, how, can we address this problem we're having? So I thought it was fascinating. I love, I love the design process. And so, yeah, I loved where they took it. Like everything was like spot on with like the initial vision. just, everything made it better. So.
Mike: Very nice. Now let's talk about some of those mechanics real quick. I have only played one other cooperative poker game that I'm sure you guys have probably seen called The Gang. Having tabled this over the weekend, what really struck me as like the biggest difference between the two games is how much more poker-like
Cameron: I'm not familiar, I don't think.
Curt: Sure.
Mike: Hell of a Deal feels like it feels like a poker game, whereas the other game felt like a different kind of game that was using poker as its main conceit. guess talk a little bit about how you guys came up with the, or Cameron, I guess this is more to you, how you came up with this approach towards cooperative poker.
Now I know you wanted to make a cashless kind of game, but in terms of how the players work together.
Cameron: Yeah. So I did actually, it's funny, I had started working on it, I think in November of 2024. And I actually don't really know when the game came out. It was shortly thereafter, I think I could be wrong with my timeline, but I did actually get to go see it at, I want to say Unplugged, Pax Unplugged. And I played it and it is like a cooperative poker game, but it, to me it was, you weren't really going through the same steps of poker.
Mike: Yeah.
Cameron: ...like you were it kind of felt like a cooperative deduction game. It's a very good cooperative deduction game like don't get me wrong but I was like I really still want to be doing like the poker actions the you know the betting the folding like waiting for the flop those types of things so that so that kind of reinforced that I felt like I was on the kind of the right track there and then
Yeah, with the cooperativeness, I mean, I personally love cooperative games. Like I get very competitive. I'll play competitive games, but like I tend to get a little overboard, right? So I have the most fun with the cooperative games. But to me, it was kind of like, how do we set people up to kind of like, you know, it's the magical idea of like, everybody has that fantasy of going to a casino and counting cards and like, you know, like, chucking a card across the table to somebody to set up a straight for them. so there was those kind of big moments that I tried to sell the game on. Like, how do we reinforce the big moment? It's like, it feels so good in poker to get a straight. In normal poker, that's like a, it seems like it's a rare hand. Like, I don't know what the percentage off the top of my head is, but in our game, it's like, you're constantly setting up two pairs and above. And it's just, it feels so good. We're like, I got a flush, and you can manufacture these big poker hands.
Mike: Right.
Cameron: ...to beat another big poker hand. So I think there's a lot of energy that is in that, like part of poker. Cause like, I mean, what's the percentages of like a Royal flush? It's like, I don't know, like 0.05 % chance or something, right? So, like raising the, the kind of the floor of I'm not either, trust me, I'm not either. But trying to give opportunities to have people like kind of more consistently be scoring those larger hands. It just feels.
Mike: I'm not an odds guy. Never tell me the odds.
Curt: Ha ha!
Cameron: ...very powerful and that was the kind of message that I wanted to convey and like reinforce through the cooperative nature of it. Like you can help your teammate like set up chain wins. we trade these two cards, we both get straights from a nothing hand. And I think those are some of the biggest like best moments.
Curt: Yeah, one of the ways that I conceptualize that is for a lot of games that are using poker mechanics, they're bringing poker into board gaming. And I think this game brings board gaming into poker. And that, I think, is like the quintessential difference. But I think as a player, and particularly if you're passing familiar with poker,
Mike: like it.
Curt: The fact that we have like elevated everything, the cheating nature of the game does mean that you're gonna legitimately get higher and higher scoring hands. And the emotional hit of that is pretty sweet. And I think that's what helps propel the fun of the game. The other thing is, and I'll say this, in general, again, I love poker, don't love Texas Hold'em. And the reason is that I want to play poker. And with Texas Hold'em, very often the best move is fold. It's usually the smartest move. And when you've got a great hand, then you start really gambling.
I love dealer choice games because I love wild cards. I like the crazy games because I want to play poker. And what this does is it takes Texas Hold'em and it makes it a game where, you know what, you're insane if you actually fold before the flop because there's so many upsides, so many opportunities to cheat. You better see the flop because you can probably make something great out of it.
Mike: Yeah, and I also think one of the key selling points for Hold'em is that you're playing the other players more than you are the cards in a lot of occasions, right? Like you're playing button position, you're playing, you're kind of teasing out like, I think that player has something good and I need to like back off or I need to push hard because I think they're weak even though I have like garbage in my hand, right? Of course you can't do that with cooperative poker, right? Because that that relies on bluffing so, so much. And exactly, exactly. So what I did find interesting was kind of like we would start playing towards that default hand.
Curt: Right. The house is never folding.
Mike: ...we were like, all right, as long as we can defeat that, we've got a chance. But then sometimes those pocket cards that the minion has or that the devil has actually make a better hand. And then you feel like, oh crap.
Curt: Yeah, and for the listeners who have not seen the game, yeah, each boss not only changes the rules of the game, but they're certainly dealt in a hand. They've got their two cards or sometimes three, but each of them has a default hand, a bare minimum hand. So it could be two pair trips. It could be a straight to the 10. And those are significant hands to have to beat and that's why we all have to cheat in order to elevate our game to get there. But yeah, all of a sudden you're like, yeah, bank on the fact that he's only got trip eights. I've got that beat, but then you don't know what they're gonna end up flopping and showing, so.
Mike: Right, right. Yeah, those trip nines might not be that great. But, well, cool. Now, Cameron, I did look at the Kickstarter, your Kickstarter bio on the page, and it says that your favorite gambling card game is actually Blackjack. What? Why wasn't this a Blackjack game? I'm curious.
Curt: Yeah. Ha ha ha!
Cameron: Well, you know, initially it started as like, again, like the poker night thing, the trying to, you know, get people around the table. I do, I do play blackjack a fair amount. I, I, I'm a big war gamer guy. So I go to, there's some big events out in Las Vegas and in Lenox city. So I've had some really good memories sitting around with some buddies at a table after we played nine hours of war games and we're just sitting there having a good time playing blackjack. So I do like blackjack's different game.
It is funny though, is already, Blackjack is already an inherently cooperative game. So it kind of does make sense for a game like that in this kind of hemisphere to exist. But it's just, I just started with the kind of the poker game, you know, just to kind of recreate, you know, buddy poker night. And that's just kind of where the game started. But I do like Blackjack, so.
Curt: Well, and what he's not telling you is he's already thinking into the future about where this could go, Blackjack in Hell, so...
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Wouldn't be nice if someone was working on that, you know, so.
Mike: Nice, well, he. Well, I did pick up on that, so. So let's talk about the Kickstarter real quick. You guys have been running for what, about a week, two weeks at the the. One week so far.
Curt: One week so far. Yeah.
Mike: And so that means you guys probably still have a lot of stuff to reveal. Is there anything that you can talk about knowing that this interview is probably going to air in about a week?
Curt: Yeah, so we are going to be announcing, well, today or tomorrow, so a couple days ago in Radio Land, we're looking at a solo game. And this is something that we identified a need for late in the process.
It became apparent as we I started thinking about how we're going to market this game and who really is the potential audience for this game. It's probably not your die hard poker fan like you know if you love Holden and being in a casino. This is probably not for you right. You know there is no cash on the table and it's a little it's a little fiddly right. For for someone who just wants to play the odds at the table and bluff. But it is for people who are one board gamers who love poker, but also people who got introduced to poker through like, Balatro. So, Balatro is a really interesting game that people have become addicted to that you are building your deck with all kinds of ways to cheat and do things. This game doesn't do that, but if you like Bolatro, you're probably gonna like this game. And therefore, we're like, well, If that's how you came into poker, people are going to want a solo experience. So then we started thinking about, well, if that's true, what are we going to do in order to have that make sense? We don't want to play a second hand. That's going to be clunky and nobody wants that. But we had to identify, well, what are the things that other people are really giving us? Because it is me against the house. My poker hand has to stand against the house. But what I get from other players is potentially I can swap cards with them. There's a whole reveal chip where I can reveal cards to let people know what I'm doing. Like we don't want that ship to go dead. There are things that other players might do during the game through various ways that they're cheating and power ups that might end up giving me a benefit, the table of benefit. So how do you replicate that?
Mike: Right.
Curt: without having to play a second hand. And all of a sudden, we realized, you know what? We actually have that tool. Back in development, when we were trying to balance the game, Cameron had an idea which got abandoned, but was perfect for this moment. So Cameron, I'm going let you take over.
Cameron: Yeah, so we had like what Kurt was saying, it started as a way to balance out the different player counts because at 234, it kind of changes the dynamics of what's happening at the table in this game. So I had initially come up and shown this kind of idea and I just called it gamblers. And so they're little spirits that sit at the table with you and kind of fill in for those empty seats in your in your real life game. So it's like if you have three players, you'd have one gambler if you had two players that have two gamblers. And basically a lot of the power and the fun of this game is having those cards floating around that everybody has that you can reveal to players and share around and also everybody contributing these kind of these powerful effects which in our game is called favors. And so initially it was kind of like, do we adjust for that player count? And so this was what that had started as. So basically it's all these kinds of cards which are kind of making a bit the boss idea of like, there's a guy sitting at the table and he's got an ability that you can kind of utilize. And it becomes an extra resource and it holds those extra cards for you that you have to kind of like peek at and look at and use your action economy to kind of reveal. it's so, it preserves the kind of core element of sitting at the table in the full cooperative game of two or four players of you got other people sitting there contributing powers to your ability. You don't always know what's in their hands. So sometimes you have to take the opportunity to reveal those cards. is that gonna help? I take that risk with that action? I've got basically four actions generally per boss. One of them, is that gonna be looking at their hand? Do I think that they could have something? And then also the very interesting puzzle I think that we've landed on of they've got some action economy that...
If you choose to use it and you use all their charges on it, they walk away from the table. Their purpose is fulfilled. So it's a question of how early do I burn these abilities and when do these guys get away from the table? And do I need to hold these for the final boss or am I going to take too much punishment? Do I need to utilize them now? So I think we've kind of landed on some really cool puzzle that actually fits really well into kind of the design brief of like how do we capture the essence of the cooperative game and stick it into the solo mode.
Mike: Nice, I can kind of think about it thematically as, like one of the souls that was consigned to hell of a bad ass poker player just kind of sidles up and is like, mind if I join? You know?
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's it's fun thematically too. It's like those are all the players of other games we're going to be playing who'd lost, right? It's like their souls trapped in the game Jumanji style and it's like so.
Curt: Right. Exactly right.
Mike: Well, I mean, I wonder if you could like maybe like, I don't know, this might be a little too like down the poker nerd hole, so to speak, like kind of make plays off of the names of like famous poker players.
Curt: So that's interesting. What we ended up doing was we have like the drifter. We've got the, yeah, the fixer, the, you know, so things like that. those, exactly, yeah. Yeah. And, know, so for example, one of their abilities might be you've got one charge that they can do and they can take one of their cards and swap it.
Mike: Yes, the archetype approach. Yeah. Nice. Speaks to the mechanics that they bring instead. No, that's a smart, smart play. Smart play. Definitely.
Cameron: Yeah.
Curt: ...for a card in the community hand, which is a pretty powerful ability. Now, if you do that, you played it at the right time and it turns your hand around, but then that gambler leaves. He only had one charge. So next hand, you won't have him or his cards that he was holding. So, you know, Cameron and I were just playing yesterday and we had to say, well, you know what? Do I want to do this now? Let me actually, I'm going to wait till the river because if I use this now,
Mike: Nice. Yeah, yeah.
Curt: I've lost his cards for the next hand and they don't show up every single hand. You get one at the beginning. You get another to join the table in round three and another in round five and it's a six round game. So you have to kind of really plan and make and I think make critical decisions and this is I think Cameron this is what you were talking about yesterday. You're like I feel like I have interesting choices based on the economies that we've set up.
Mike: Nice, nice. So another comparison that I can't help but come to when looking at Hell of a Deal is a favorite game of mine from the last decade or so on the video game side. It's a little game called Cuphead. I actually reviewed it for Gaming Trend.
Curt: Huh.
Mike: Yeah, it's been something like that. I mean, it's been a while since I reviewed it, but it has become a classic and one can't help but look at Hell of a Deal and think, this reminds me of Cuphead, especially because at the end of Cuphead, you're going up against the devil in a casino-like environment. Was that intentional or did it just kind of come about that way?
Curt: So when Cameron showed us the game, the game was much, I would say, looking. The names of the minions, I mean, they were actual demon names, you know? And the art was all black and white, almost woodcut. They pulled out of scripture, basically. And we're like,
Mike: Nice
Curt: Okay, that's probably just a little bit too heavy. But so we.
Mike: I say, I kinda wanna see that version of the game though, it sounds cool.
Curt: It was definitely cool, but I was like, will this sell in the South? I don't know.
Cameron: There's a couple art pieces up on the Kickstarter on one of the updates that you made. if you're interested in looking, yeah. Yeah.
Curt: that's true. Yeah, you can take it. Yeah. But in any case, so I knew that we were going to evolve the art and we wanted to make sure that the the fun spirit of the game. This is not a heavy poker game. It's it's tension filled like intentionally, but but it is it's fun poker. So that spirit had to kind of shine through. Now, originally we were looking at
Mike: I'll have to check that out. Yeah.
Curt: Hasbin Hotel as a potential influence because that was, you know, it was based in hell and it had that nice modern edge to it. And I even reached out to the creators, but it turns out they had their own board game to launch. but in any case, yeah. So in any case, we were like, well, all right, so not Hasbin Hotel. But
Mike: It happens.
Curt: then we're like, yeah, you know what, if this was, obviously we know of Cuphead. Like if we could be somewhere in between those two things, like somewhere between Hasbin Hotel and Cuphead as a visual vibe, know, one will probably like, you know, so many people love both of those things. Like they'll probably find a nice home of familiarity here. But I think when we actually we found we found an artist and that's honestly what what tipped the whole thing. I was looking through artists and I do that by scouring different portfolio sites Facebook all kinds of things and I came upon a Facebook page for Leon Lim and what the first thing I saw was a black and white all his work was black and white black and white rubber hose style animation like Cuphead, but he was like his vision was Digimon and Pokemon.
Mike: Yeah, I can see that. I can totally see that. Yeah, very cool.
Curt: And there was this image of Gengar and Haunter. And I was like, my God, like I can see these as like the little demons in Hell that you're playing against. So I looked through the whole portfolio. He had someone who looked a lot like Demona and my vision for her as like a lounge singer kind of a demon. was like, this guy's gonna be amazing.
Mike: Very nice.
Curt: So I said, I reached out, asked if he was interested, and I said, everything you've done is basically color. Can you, black and white, can you do color? He's like, no problem. So, yeah, that was kind of the reason and how we came to the art we did. But I think, well, I think it's going to be very reminiscent of Cuphead. I think it ends up being really its own thing. It's it's yeah, it's it's not I think Cuphead really did like Fleischer proud by, you know, they created inanimate objects as characters. They they they they did a lot of that kind of fun thing. And we were very much more focused on how do we make demons fun and interesting. And what we told what we told exactly and what we told Leon was here's the vision. All of these characters
Mike: absolutely. Cuddly fun demons. Yes.
Curt: ...have to be wickedly charming. And if you can nail that, we've got a game.
Mike: Nice, nice. Well, I mean, just, I think it's a perfect aesthetic for the game, just from what I can tell. And like I said, I'm a huge fan of Cuphead, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, especially since they kind of drew from prior influences anyway. it's all good, it's all gravy. But yeah, no, it is, it I...
when you said the Pokemon thing, like that was like the missing, the missing piece of flavor. I was like, this, this has a very, especially like the little ghosts. There's like a very Nintendo like feel to it, right? The souls. Very cool. Very cool. the little ghosts are great. Yes. So, all right. Well, I guess I have one more question for y'all. I know on the stretch goals, you guys are,
Curt: Yeah. Yeah.
Cameron: We love that little ghost.
Mike: ...unlocking new bosses and new favor cards and such. Anything interesting and notable coming down the pipeline for more goodness that you can tease.
Curt: Goodness. So tell you what, we have a a really special big announcement. It's not going to be a stretch goal. But as we get closer to the end of the campaign, we're going to drop just a flat out surprise on people. So it's, so we're holding that back for for the announcement day, but there is going to be a pretty big announcement towards the end of the campaign that people should be well,
Mike: Okay.
Curt: They... I don't know, depends when they hear this. Either we'll have already announced it, or... or it's coming tomorrow.
Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike: You'll either know what he's talking about or you'll be like, what's coming? What's coming? So yeah, excellent.
Curt: Yeah, but it's very exciting. we decided early on that we knew it was going to be part of the game. We developed it all along. And I think people are going to love it. But we didn't want it to be a stretch goal. This is just something. This is our gift to the fans.
Mike: You want it? Yeah. It was, one of those things where you're like, this has to happen. Stretch goals be damned. Right. Literally damned, I guess in this case, but
Curt: Yeah, exactly right. But, know, and quite honestly, yeah. And I'll just take a moment to talk about some of the materials too. Because we've had some questions about like, well, I mean, is this the Deluxe? this just like, I mean, these are like, and I'll show you like these chips are like, they're legit chips.
Mike: Okay, yeah, please do.
Curt: These are 11.5 gram poker chips custom designed and people like well, I mean This has got to be deluxe right and the neoprene mats inside the box like that created a basically a whole poker table like You didn't have to go that far, but I always felt that we did now one Cameron spoiled us because when when he made his prototype
He had these big neoprene mats and real poker chips on the table for us to play. And I don't care if you have ever played poker, the idea of playing poker with a cardboard chip or anything less than a real decent poker chip, why bother? No one wants to do that. So we're like, no, it's gonna have to be a premium board game. So, no, there is no deluxe.
Cameron: Yeah.
Mike: Right.
Curt: This is the way it's going to be in retail too. And it'll be $10 higher cost when you get actually like into the retail store. So backers get a $10 off incentive for being part of the campaign. But yeah, it's going to be a $75 game in store. But again, nobody wants to play with sub quality materials. So we decided, no, we're going to plant our flag and do it right and give people the experience, the poker experience that they really want.
Mike: Yeah, no, just to kind of speak to that. remember when I was setting it up on the table this weekend, like one of my players was like, man, do we really need to know what like the turn is and the river and all that? I'm like, hold on, hold on. And it actually helped, right? Because it gave us a visual reference to like core poker rules, but it allowed us to kind of offload that cognitively to the table.
Instead and kind of focus on the way that you were monkeying around with the rules, right? The way that the cheats were working and and kind of the goal within the context of the game itself. So I think I think it's a good call. I also think that it's it's it is a way to kind of help teach non poker players poker as well. Like when I originally played the gang, I thought, well, this is a great way to teach hand hierarchy, right? But like, I feel like this actually goes at the the root of like, this is how you actually play poker without all the cheating stuff, at least not the overtly cheating stuff. Right.
No, fantastic. Now, so this is going to come to retail eventually. I imagine there's a few other things on the Kickstarter that are more Kickstarter specific. If you back it now, like you might not get this in retail, like some of maybe some of the stretch goals or some of that, or it might be available separately. Would that be an accurate assessment?
Curt: Not quite. Very often campaigns will make Kickstarter exclusives and God forbid they make it content. I think most of us are board gamers and most board gamers are completists. So you can really upset a lot of people if they can't get the fun content, if they feel like they missed out. So we do not do that as a company. Now what we ended up doing is, The idea of sleeving a poker deck makes my skin crawl. we definitely did not... And poker decks, if you play them, I don't care who makes the poker deck, eventually cards will wear out. So importantly, you can play this game with any poker deck. It doesn't matter. There's nothing special about the poker deck itself. And those are the cards that get the highest use. So...
Certainly the game comes with a custom poker deck with all kinds of, you know, fun art on it for the the regals. But we wanted to let people, you know, if that poker deck wears out, give them something else. So we created a two deck set that are foil in nature. So the back of the cards, there's a gold foil and there's a red foil. And I mean, that's
That's pretty sexy. They're even like, you can't see it here, but this is a edged foil as well. Yeah. So those decks are an add-on. And we will make those available even post campaign. But for backers, we wanted to do something a little special, because the pricing that we have in the decks, we had just a little bit more margin we we could enhance it for backers Which is different than when you put it out into retail so with that extra margin we were able to make a full-sized dealer chip and That's really the only exclusive of the dealer chip in the game is beautiful It's serviceable, but it's the same size as the standard poker chip so the the the larger dealer chip is part of the add-on just for backers
Mike: Okay, very cool, very cool. And I gotta say, the cards that came with the prototype that you sent us, I was actually pretty pleased with the quality of them. If it matches that quality, you know, it's better, it's...
Curt: Well, I'm delighted you said that. The prototype was not the quality that I wanted. I was actually very disappointed with that Poker Deck when I first got it. So in any case, obviously, know, bicycle and casinos have a propriety. I don't know if you know this, they have a proprietary ownership to the varnish and the card stock that they use. So.
Mike: Hahaha I didn't know it, it doesn't surprise me even a little bit. Yeah.
Curt: Yeah, yeah. So, so there's no way to 100 % replicate those cards. But printers, you know, they certainly know their their stuff and they they approximate as close as they can. That type of quality. so that's that is the goal is to have a casino style deck. Knowing that we don't know exactly how they do what they do so.
Cameron: Yeah
Mike: Right, get your bets in now. Get your bets in now. Well, that's awesome. I gotta say just like, mean, the game definitely feels feature complete. It sounds like you guys are still working a little bit on the solo mode, but it's like, I mean, in terms of, you're not working on like the mechanics anymore. You're working on like the materials and the components and everything. So yeah, and it definitely feels like a complete game on the table. So excellent, excellent. Well, gentlemen, thank you once again. And yes, definitely go check out Hell of a Deal. It's on Kickstarter right now. And I will see you at the table.
Curt: All right. Thanks, Mike.
Cameron: Thank you.
