Meet Hasbro Women Innovators of Play Challenge winner Natalie Podd from Confident Games

Thanks for making time, Natalie. You’re probably best known to the industry as one half of the Confident? team… When did you go full time on that?
I went full time on Confident? about two years ago. Ceri and I launched it in 2018, but for a while it was very much a side project — evenings and weekends. Ceri went part time first, then eventually full time, and I gradually tapered down my other work until we were both fully focused on the business. It was a gradual but natural transition.

And in terms of those jobs you were doing, you were both actuaries. It doesn’t matter how many times you explain it to me, I still don’t understand what an actuary does! Shall we try again?! Ha!
Ha! An actuary basically predicts the future using numbers. You assess risk based on historical data — lots of spreadsheets! I’ve always enjoyed that side of things. And actually, there’s a surprising amount of crossover with running a games business: analysing problems, evaluating solutions, ranking options — all part of our decision-making now.

Perfect! And in terms of your games to date, first there was Confident? – still my brother’s favourite game! Then you did Tug, which I think is wonderful. What other titles have you got?
We also have Speedy Pants, a fast-action card game where you race to match pants to the right laundry baskets… But the rules change as you go to keep you on your toes. It’s a bit younger-skewing than Confident? or Tug. And we’re just about to send our next game to the manufacturer: In a Nutshell.

And what is In a Nutshell in a nutshell?
It’s a mix of a word game and a trivia game. You try to answer questions using the fewest possible words from the question. So if you heard the question, “What animal is the king of the jungle?”, that should be pretty easy, but what if you just had, “Animal… King!”or maybe just, “Jungle”… What would you answer then? It also comes with a really cool box with sliding windows… You take turns to slide windows one at a time – ideally revealing the least helpful word for the other team.

Oh, that’s very cute! And the cards are very long then, are they?
Yes! They’re very long cards, and they’re designed with four questions on each one… You can read them that way up, then upside down, then flip it over and then upside down again. And so there are 500 questions in the box.

Great design! That’s something I think you and Ceri do really well… The games are great in their own right, but they also look fantastic and have a really cute thing going on. Now… You recently won an accolade of some note! Tell me what that is and how you got involved.
It was the Hasbro Women Innovators of Play challenge. I think I saw it on Mojo, actually. I thought it’d be great to enter a game idea into it. As you may know, they did a big webinar on the day they announced the competition, so I listened to that and then decided to come up with an idea to submit.

Oh, you created something specially for it?
Yes, and that meant an unusually fast turnaround… Hasbro opened it in October, and their submission window ended in November. So I ran through my backlog of ideas, settled on the one I was most excited by and thought would best fit their criteria – then submitted it to Hasbro…

It was interesting to work to a different brief and get the design ready at a sprint – starting from a solid idea, but then getting quick designs done, creating a sizzle video and pitch deck. Then, not long after submitting, I got a call from Tanya Thompson from Hasbro who told me I’d won! It was an amazing surprise. Since then, I’ve sent them a physical prototype to test out and had some good feedback.

As I would hope since it won a competition! And on that, remind me what the prize was – beyond a $10,000 cash prize…
Beyond that, there was a trip to Hasbro for a full day’s tour around the offices. They flew me out to Rhode Island where I met with so many people across the business, and had a one-to-one mentorship session with one of their heads. They packed so much into our day and really did make it such a special experience… I also liked how, when you met all these incredible people, they would say, “This is your day! What do you want to know?” So it felt like the experience was really personalised.

Amazing! What a fantastic opportunity…
It really was, there were so many insights and it was very inspiring. And it’s happening again; the Hasbro Women Innovators of Play is happening again this year. So I’ll give that a plug because it’s an amazing opportunity.

It sounds it! I’m very excited to see what happens next. Of which, what’s next for Confident?… Beyond In a Nutshell, I mean.
We’ve always got new ideas in the works. One I’m playtesting now is very different to anything we’ve done before. It’s one of those games where you think, ‘Why has no one thought of this?! Someone must have thought this… Someone’s going to think of this; we need to be quick!’ Ha! So I’d love to launch it asap and I’ll be playtesting that with every single one of my neighbours because they’ve all got kids…

Is that with whom you playtest? You go banging on the door and say, “Come round for a playtest!”?
More or less, yes! Plus we’ve now got a board game club in our village that we’ve just started in the local pub. We just bring loads of games that we own; things we’ve picked up in Nuremberg or Essen that maybe people won’t have played before or don’t have easy access to. So people play those, and then we also slip ours in for playtesting. Also, we recently launched Tug in seven different languages through a partnership with Goliath… We also have Spanish, Romanian, Hungarian and Baltic versions launching this year.

Alrighty. Great update, Natalie. As always, you’re firing on all thrusters – to wrap this up! What’s the most interesting thing on your desk?
Glad you asked! It’s a tiny wooden giraffe — a bit like a Christmas tree ornament. I got it from a market stall in Tanzania, after climbing Kilimanjaro. It usually hangs on a nail on my wall behind me… I bought it partly to remember the trip, but also because I had a spare nail and needed something to hang. That’s how I do my decorating!

Ha! Capture the memory and fill the hook. What a poetic way to find it as well. Why climb a mountain? Because it’s there… Why hang something on a nail? Because it’s there! Fabulous. Thank you so much for your time, Natalie. Always just a joy to catch up with you.

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