Dan Cassaro is a multi-faceted designer, known for his work with graphic design shop Young Jerks, and increasingly, for his game design with Weast Coast, a game company that he runs with Dan Christofferson and Meg Yahashi. In 2022 they released their first game,Snakes of Wrath.
Hi Dan, thanks for being on Toylike! Give us a quick background on your design career, specifically what brought you into the world of game design.
Hi TOM! So, I had been running Young Jerks with Dan for about 8 years before we decided to start Weast Coast Games with our friend Meg Yahashi. I've always enjoyed games, especially card games. They are a perfect little handheld expression of art and tactile design and if I'm being honest one of the biggest motivations for making games was that we'd get to design and illustrate them. Dan, Meg and the rest of the Young Jerks team would play some of my home-brewed card and board games during lunch, and after what was honestly years of playtesting we decided to actually make these things real.
As visual designers, the leap into game design wasn't that much of a stretch. We joke that game design is the final boss of graphic design. You get to build the worlds, make the packaging, write fun copy, and make promotional art, but you're also designing the social experience for people which is new and exciting for me. It's everything I love about graphic design and illustration, except the only thing you're selling is a good time. Hell yeah.
Tell us about Snakes of Wrath. Where did the idea originate? What are you most proud of?
Snakes of Wrath was the second game I ever came up with but it was the one that we had the strongest vision for how it should look, so we made that first. Having our first game feature 90 different multicolor plastic tiles probably wasn't the smartest thing to do from a financial standpoint. It was like, really expensive to make. But executing the design with that tactility and specific look was really important to us. The tiles had to clack and stack and be the perfect ivory color, and the whole thing needed to be in an annoyingly long old-fashioned board game box. People were so mad at that box for not fitting in their Kallax or whatever but the heart wants what the heart wants! I'm so proud of how it turned out. I really think that satisfying components and handsome visual design are great ways of getting people engaged, and keeping them engaged until the heart of the game emerges. We've also heard a lot of stories from people that bought it just because it "looked cool" and have since become really interested in the hobby. How nice is that?
Finally, can you give us a glimpse into what’s next?
Our next one is a little card duel called Desperate Oasis, which we're launching for holiday this year. It has really nice little square cards and cool animal illustrations and adorable wooden palm trees. There's a small ruleset but lots of opportunities for surprising, clever play. It also has some fun adjacency/placement rules that causes cards to move position, which adds an interesting spatial puzzle on top of the card battle. Great table presence too. We get a lot of "what's that?" when playing in public. Aside from that, we have 3 or 4 other nearly completed games that we are very excited about releasing.
Thank you for joining us on Toylike, Dan!
You can follow along with Weast Coast Games on their Instagram, and follow Dan on Twitter and Instagram.