Days of Wonder

I know.

I was just talking with Eric, the founder of Days of Wonder, who's come back to the business now in his 60s after selling the business and coming back because he missed it.

And he was, there's only so many years you can go and sit on a beach or just relax.

I want to do things.

yeah, they clearly are getting better and better.

So I think that there's opportunities for leveraging the AI in a way that makes us more creative and empowers us to do more things.

Like, for example, the board game lab that Eric Hauptmann was from Days of Wonder has just launched as a beta.

He used AI to build a tool that lets people prototype way faster.

It's fucking awful.

So if I were to list the Battle of Hoth game, I took a picture of it, right? And I upload it to eBay, and then when I go to actually describe what the game is, I click a button, and it, like, spits out, "The Star Wars: Battle of Hoth game by Days of Wonder is a thrilling and strategic game designed for two players." The challenge is, A, uh, A, this is not that great, but B, I could just go to ChatGPT and get this.

This saves me like thirty seconds of time.

It saves me no time.

So next up for me, I'm going to put this in a little bit of a category here.

This is my kind of Days of Wonder kind of like collection, so to speak, where back in the day where Days of Wonder pretty much just produced one game a year and they were their own company.

And they did it well.

they did it so incredibly well.

So, yeah.

I mean, just collecting... games from a particular company in a period of time, uh, has become a thing just because it was, it feels like for me, it was like their, their heyday, right? Their golden age.

Um, days of wonder still produces amazing games, but not like what they did back in the day.

Um, they were, they were the thing.

yeah

it's that kind of time when they brought out a number of games like this i bet small world was around that kind of time memoir 44 came out in like 2004 or something they had these these kind of you know chunky boxes um it's a good kind of era for days of wonder that where they brought a number of games like this

um but all of those games that you've mentioned actually are a little bit complex but not like still i'd consider fairly Gateway games.

They've done, they've done well with all of that.

Now, I found this to be a fascinating press release.

I got this from Eric Hollimont, and you don't probably know who he is, but he is the founder and first president of Days of Wonder.

He called me.

I remember this.

You're old.

Anyway, so he started the company and did very well.

Before he ran Days of Wonder, he had ran software, which he said was kind of boring.

He liked gaming.

He's a longtime listener.

He says, for names, it's probably Days of Wonder.

That was on my list.

For logos, the old Matagot logo is by far my favorite.

This is a racing game known as Heat.

Pedal to the metal from Asghar Alexandrov and Daryl Scold Peterson from Days of Wonder.

This is just a fun, fun little racing game.

Deck building-esque.

I mean, I am mentioning my friends here in these, but seriously, I think those are like two of the best out there.

Now we'll go to the bigger companies or subsidiaries of Days of Wonder, I thought was a very lovely name as well.

Now part of Asmodee, of course.

Fantasy Flight Games always struck me as a good game.