Board games are a broad category in which many creations fall. Dustbiters is quite atypical in a few ways, as it is a card game with no other peripheral goods, and it is also designed to be a quick and fun alternative to classic tabletop titles which require a lot of set-up and reading. Cars are at the core of the experience, and each of them has unique art and abilities that add a lot of personality in terms of gameplay.
Game Rant spoke with the Dustbiters Team, which is comprised of three indie developers: Terri Vellmann, Jan Willem Nijman, and Robbie Fraser. The three have each made a plethora of successful games in the past, including Minit, Broforce, Disc Room, Heavy Bullets, and more. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: What is the origin story behind how you started working together on Dustbiters?
Nijman: Back in 2016, I was on a road trip with some people, including Robbie, in Mozambique. It was a beautiful trip. We spent two weeks kinds cruising up and down the coast, but also getting there from South Africa was a very stressful border-crossing. We had this wonderful trip. Being game designers, in the evenings we would play card games and other stuff. After a week or so, we just started making something new because that's what we do for fun. Dustbiters was just that, and it was the result of being on a road trip, playing these at night.
It was a very simple idea: "Why don't we take this game, which is inspired by Mad Max, it's about cars, and we strip everything else. It's just cars. No landscape, no tiles, no dice, there's nothing because we only had paper and pen, and that's what we made the game with. That's how the very first prototype started. A bit before that, Terri and I had chatted about card games, actually. Terri had made a game called Pusher Kings, and just said "Hey, if you ever want to make a card game together hit me up." This was also in 2016. So I told Robbie, and Robbie was like "Yeah! Let's try and get Terri on board," and Terri was like "Yeah, this game is really fun." That was the origin story, the original start. Then, we playtested, and friends of ours liked the game even with all these ugly, scribbled, thorn paper cards.
Then later, with Terri's art, we did the proper print-it-yourself session with lots of people. We realized this was something good, we needed to fine-tune it and make sure we'd find all the bits of it that weren't fun and remove them. Any cars that weren't great, too. We're all working on other stuff too, so we took our time, we basically said "We're not stressing about this. Whenever you have time, work on it." Over the last five years, we just wrapped up the game and tried to make it a reality in this stress-free way. That's the whole journey summarized real quick.
Vellmann: There was definitely a vibe of "No stress, just do it when you have the time, take it slow. We'll talk every once in a while." It was never a project we just focused on above everything else. It was always a fun thing we would do on the side, right up until the Kickstarter campaign.
Q: Was a tabletop card game your first idea for the game you were going to make together?
Nijman: There was actually a not very good game that we tried making before. We had a box of Rummikub, it's this classic tabletop game. My grandma used to play it a lot. It's with numbers, and colors, and things you have to match. It's a cool game, and we tried to make a single-player solitaire dungeon-crawler out of that. I don't know why, but we did that, and we played Rummikub. We did have a lot of fun making something on the trip, and the next night, Dustbiters was the first idea.
It was never something we thought, "Oh, we should make it a video game," and it was also never something that wasn't about cars and this theme. These were just the perfect circumstances and combinations of inspiration. From the start, it was very clear we wanted to make this, and we were just lucky that it worked. Sometimes you have an idea, and sometimes it's terrible. This one just felt like it made sense.
Q: How did you come up with the world of Dustbiters in the first place?
Nijman: I think we talked about how the original inspiration was Mad Max, and then we handed it to Terri and said "We totally trust you. Can you make art for this?" I think that formed a lot of the setting too.
Vellmann: Yeah, but also the cards already had names, maybe not their final names, but they had names and they had mechanics. A lot of it was really just kinda wild, crazy, and fun, not like super-aggressive or serious, even though the world has a post-apocalyptic vibe to it. That led the whole art style and that drove the theme. I think it was near the end that we thought it'd be fun if this was a subculture inside this world, and they're there doing it for fun. That's why we came up with the 'outskirts of civilization' theme, instead of being the entire world just like that. We just wanted it to be fun, interesting, with each car having personality, just surfing this giant sandstorm.
Nijman: We also realized that with everything happening in the last two years, the pandemic, the climate change, that we didn't want to make a post-apocalyptic game, even though it's inspired by post-apocalyptic media. We wanted to make something that it's fun, rather than something that's depressing.
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Q: Who would you describe Dustbiters to people who haven't heard of it?
Vellmann: A very important side to Dustbiters is that you can set it up and start playing really quickly. So, if you have someone over, or you're meeting a friend, it's more like spending a couple of minutes over the rules and start playing, experiencing the game in full. It's not a game that you got to set things up, read the whole rulebook and have a lecture about how to play the game. After that, it's just a really fun, really quick [experience]. Things turn around all the time.
Every turn it seems like you're going to win, but then you're going to lose, then something happens that you were not expecting. It's a very surprising game. It moves very fast, and there's that feeling that every time a match ends you immediately want to start playing again. It's how I'd describe it. The rulebook is short and straightforward because a lot of these mechanics are in the cards, but you can read those as you start playing, and after a while, you learn all the cards just naturally. You get a lot of the rules just by playing.
Nijman: I think it's also something none of us liked in tabletop games, that if you're spending a fun night with friends, we don't usually want to spend two hours learning how to play and play a really long game that you lose because it's new. It was very important to us that Dustbiters is something that you can explain in five minutes, and then get into quick matches and play. You don't need to learn it. You just play it and have a good time right away.
Q: Did any of the games you made in the past influence your work on Dustbiters?
Vellmann: My role was mostly the art and the game was almost done. When I started working on it, for me it was more taking advantage of the things that are specific to the medium. So the art style that I can do since there are no animations, they can have a lot of detail, or just think about the colors, that kind of thing. Just the fact that it's something you hold physical rather than digital, all of that is very different than the other games. I also made it very refreshing and also kind of special.
Nijman: I actually feel pretty similar there, in that it was so refreshing and inspiring to not work on the computer. For us, to fix a bug, you pick a sharpie and you add something new to the text on top of the ugly paper card to test, and then you play again. Fixing bugs on the computer is a whole other hellhole that you have to dive into, so it was all very inspiring. You learn so much from every project and you take that with you to the next one, but for this, just the fact that it was so different and that it was a physical thing, I think it inspired and motivated all of us in many ways.
Q: Which games, be it video games or tabletop games, were a source of inspiration for Dustbiters?
Nijman: I love a lot of 70s' cinema. Like, one of my favorite movies is Sorcerer, and it's from William Friedkin. It's about these criminals in Nicaragua who have to drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerin through the jungle, and the whole movie is really tense, really heavy. Guys driving trucks and being terrible people. It's really good, and it's one of my favorite movies I think. Stuff like that, even though you can't really see that in Dustbiters, just making something cool about that vibe around cars is really nice.
I think the game captures that really well in the art, but also in gameplay, it feels like a movie, it's very quick for a tabletop game. One turn feels like a shot out of [Mad Max] Fury Road or something. It feels a lot like an action movie, so for me, at least, movies were a big source of inspiration.
Vellmann: I also thought of Wacky Races, you know, the Hannah Barbera cartoon because all the cars have very specific personalities. I know it's a child's cartoon, but it's really good.
Q: What were your expectations going into the Kickstarter campaign?
Vellmann: We really had our minds set on having the cards produced. That was the main thing that we wanted to see happen. Both the prototyping and the final production, whatever scale they ended up being, we just wanted to see it happen.
Nijman: Absolutely. The fact that we made it made us so happy, that's a big success. The game is going to be in people's hands. That's exactly what we hoped for. I think it helped that we took our time with everything. Even before the Kickstarter, we spent a lot of time asking people who had done this before for advice and also look for the perfect manufacturer to make this game. We didn't want to have to deal with production, shipping, and all that. When iam8bit got involved, there was a good feeling that we could do this. We took our time and prepared everything, but it was still scary – you're putting this Kickstarter out there, everybody can see it, maybe you don't make it and the game is not going to happen. But it did super well. We're all really grateful.
Vellmann: There is also this weird space and time where people can get in, get the game now, and we don't know what's going to happen in the future. Someone could find the game a year from now, but we did something just for the Kickstarter. Maybe we'll be able to still offer it later on, but we don't know right now. It's a special few days for the game and for us.
Nijman: It is also produced with high-quality boxes and cards, and maybe someone's grandchild will find it in sixty years and say, "What's that?" That's not going to happen with video games. It's amazing.
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Q: How did you come up with all the different cars, including bikes and horses, and all their different abilities?
Nijman: The horse was actually designed by Kitty Calis, whom I worked with on Disc Room and Minit, and she said "You have to have a horse." Everything else, Robbie and I just wrote down on the first day. A giant list of ideas of things we could try with the cards. Most of them were very bad, but we tried them all. Any card that wasn't fun we threw away. If you keep doing that for a long enough time, in the end, you're only left with something that works. Something that's fun and interesting.
We had to make a lot of hard decisions, where a bunch of cars that we really loved were too powerful or they broke the game. Thinking back on the minimalism of Dustbiters, the fact that it's only cards with no extra stuff, anything that didn't work well we took it out, even if we were attached to it. It was a matter of trying everything and reducing it until it was perfect.
Q: Which car is your favorite and why?
Vellmann: Mine is the Mind Manipulator, I just called it.
Fraser: I was going to pick that one as well.
Vellmann: I knew you would. It's the trickiest one. It's the one you got to watch out for the most. You can use your opponent's car as if it was yours. You can pick any of your opponent's cars that's in the convoy, so you can use their car, take out another car, or something. It's really tricky. They might have a car that they're setting up, and you can mess everything up for them. It's really unpredictable, and you can keep on creating these weird chains between a bunch of different cards, so it's a really fun one. It costs one action – you use the power of this card, and you use the power of one of your opponent's cars.
Fraser: Right up there with the Mind Manipulator is the Mimic. The Mimic functions exactly like the car in front of it. The reason why I think that's so interesting is that it can become a different card every time something changes position, and you can use that to your advantage. You can use your other cards or your other actions to shift the board's state around and change the power that the Mimic has. It's my next best choice.
Nijman: My favorite card is the Spiky because there's a dog on it.
Fraser: I thought you were going for the horse.
Nijman: The horse adds a little extra into the mix, but Spiky has a dog.
Vellmann: I almost said the Necromancer, I like that as well because you always have to look for the car that's going to get trashed next, and you can really change the game as well.
Nijman: The cars are all unique, and you don't reshuffle if you run out of cards. It also means that if your opponent has your favorite car, you won't be able to get it unless you do some trickery with your cards. Once the cards are gone you can't get any new ones and you can't draw anymore. There is one car that picks up cards from the scrapyard, but if that car is destroyed there is no way to get more cards into the game. It's a fight until the very last car standing.
Fraser: What I like about that is because one car is always destroyed by the dust storm every turn, it means that there is a finite amount of time a game can last. It can't go on forever. The end is definitely coming, and the game builds up to a climax, which I like.
Q: Which was the longest game that you experienced, and which was the shortest?
Nijman: It's a bit like chess. You can take a long time making the perfect decision if you have players like that. When I play, personally, they never last longer than 15 minutes, but I like to play very dangerously.
Q: Are your real-life vehicles included in some form in the game?
Nijman: I don't think any of the cards are based on your cars. [To Vellmann] You have a car, right?
Vellmann: Yeah, I have a car. It is really boring, it doesn't have any spikes on it, no flags, it has all the doors in place. Terrible. So, no.
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Q: Have you considered porting the game to digital platforms?
Nijman: I think it would kind of defeat the purpose of having made a physical game. Obviously, we'll never say never, but to me, it was so much fun not having to touch a single line of code for this project that even the idea of programming it ruins it for me, but I don't know how you two feel about that.
Fraser: Yeah, I agree. I also think that the game works best as kind of a tiny portable thing. You can bring it to a party, you can play it while you're waiting for a meal at a restaurant, something like that. I think it's very casual. I don't think it would be the kind of thing that works well to download on Steam.
Q: What are your plans after the Kickstarter campaign ends?
Nijman: We spent almost six years removing cards from the game and grinding it down to 21 cards. I think, for me, this is Dustbiters. It works really well and it's great. We don't have any plans for expansions right now. It would be very nice to see it arriving in stores where people are able to play it, but the game itself feels done to me. It's good, it's there, it's Dustbiters.
Vellmann: We have a thing in our Kickstarter where people can get a custom card, a unique one just for them – a single card that's going to get printed just like the other cards. That's something we're going to do right after the campaign, but it's just going to be a few cards for a few people. Then, just really the waiting for our final decks. It's just going to be some waiting after the Kickstarter.
Fraser: I agree with JW. I think the game is finished, and it would be hard to design more content for it. I think it's the type of design that works so well because it is streamlined and only the best cards are there. The games are short and the quality of each game is really high. I don't think it's the kind of game that works better if you make expansions for it. If we did more with it, I think I'd like to see more distribution side of things, get it in stores, making it more available to people rather than changing the game itself.
Q: Do you have plans to make more tabletop games?
Nijman: It's hard to go on beautiful road trips now to get inspired, but we don't have any plans right now. This one took six years, and it was very spontaneous, it just happened. We took our time and we tried to make something beautiful, and now we're at the point where it's happening. I think the fact that it wasn't something where we sat down saying "Hey, we're going to make something together, let's think real hard about what we're making," but it just happened. This is part of what makes it so nice.
Vellmann: I feel like, with games, you have so many more ideas than you have the possibility to execute them, like, it takes longer to finish. It's really hard to say which ideas in the future we'll go ahead with and be excited about. So yeah, it just comes naturally.
Q: Is there anything else you want to add?
Nijman: I just want to add that during Dustbiters, Terri and I met on Discord with Kitty Calis and Dom Johann. We started a game together [Minit] and we released it. So it was nice, with Dustbiters from before that. It's really lovely to have this happen.
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Dustbiters is set to release in November 2021 for Kickstarter backers.