I’m chatting with Shawn and Navi Drake of A Couple of Drakes, known for games like Dead Belt, Court of Blades, HEDGE, Fe Borg, and more!
Adapted from a conversation on May 30, 2025 This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Alex: Thank you so much for coming and talking to me today.
Shawn: Absolutely, our pleasure.
Alex: What is your role in the RPG space?
Shawn: We are a Couple of Drakes publishing. We are a tiny little publishing imprint doing all indie games that we ourselves create. I’m Shawn, I do about half of the writing and half of the ideation, and Navi does everything else.
Alex: Some people I talk to see themselves as game designers, while others see their other roles as being more prominent.
Shawn: We are definitely game designers, first and foremost, but not indie scene darlings or anything like that. Just craftsmen, toy makers.
Navi: That’s absolutely true. We love games, we’ve always played games, so we create games that we want to play. And that’s really the bulk of it. We don’t go after trends. We don’t try desperately to get awards or accolades, we just kind of put our heads down and make stuff that we actually enjoy, that we actually believe in, and we play. Because that’s the whole reason we created it.
Alex: It sounds like you’re downplaying this, but you’re both prolific. Just in the last few years, you’ve released Court of Blades to wide appeal, Hedge is coming out soon, I know I’m forgetting other projects that you’ve done.
Navi: We’ve been very lucky in that we have a tight knit community that has been responsive to our brand of weirdness. Folks show up for us, regardless of what we put out, because we jump around a lot. You know, solo game, here’s a Forged in the Dark game, here’s an OSR game. Folks really never know what’s going to come next, but we’ve gathered this really cool community that’s like, “Whatever the Drakes make, it’s going to at least be fun to read.”
Shawn: The idea is that we begin with love, and you can feel that because it comes through in tone. And that’s basically the grand unifying vision is we fall in love with stuff. And then we make stuff and then people, to our delight, seem to respond to it. So, like I said, craftsmanlike toy makers, not necessarily trying to innovate or push boundaries or anything like that. Instead we just chase joy and pass it on to other people.
Alex: I like that you say craftsmanlike I believe — correct me if I’m wrong — for Dead Belt you handcrafted those zines.
Shawn: Yeah, we sure did.That was an investment in time and labor the likes of which I don’t know that we would ever do again just because it was released to what did we do? Like 2,200 people times six zines? I don’t remember.
Navi: Something painful. It was too much. I loved that project and I loved it upon launch and I’m like, Oh, this is going to be so cool. We’re going to make so many zines and whatnot. And then I think what actually happened was there was a disconnect between the vision that we had presented and what people on Kickstarter often expect. So there was a little bit of like, “Oh, this is not a professional quality printed by a mass printer project. This is clearly a real zine printed in someone’s home.” And some people didn’t like that. So at that point, I was like, well,let me tell you something I’m never doing again, because that so so much labor— and some people absolutely loved it and absolutely got it.They understood like the point was that like, it was supposed to be like a zine, like a traditional old school zine, but oh my goodness, I wouldn’t do that again, that was painful.
Shawn: So the initial pitch was here is the zine full of rules and here is your zine full of oracles. And here is a zine full of additional oracles. And then because of the way that stretch goals went, we had three books that were themselves self-contained scenarios. So we had three additional zines for every pledge. And then there were some people who wanted the zine keeper. It’s almost like a traveler’s notebook cover that we hand-crafted and riveted.
Shawn: We had to heat press each one of them with fabric interfacing to hold the laminate onto the PLA cover. And then all of the line kits that we sent along with them
so that you could stitch it all together were hand cut, hand measured. Every bit of it was well, there were no shortcuts. We did the thing 2,500 times.
Navi: But it was certainly a giant art project and some people were super on board and some people super weren’t. So that was, that was kind of a downer.
Shawn: There are always parts of me that are like, I want to do that again, but I want to limit it to like a hundred.
Alex: I’m curious, you mentioned that some people were disappointed by that. Was that a misunderstanding on their part, or did that goal change during the Kickstarter?
Navi: Anytime that somebody else is disappointed, I have to assume that the failure is on my end. I took photos of the project so that they could see, and explained that these were handmade projects. But I think that there is just also an expectation on Kickstarter because a lot of companies now use Kickstarter as a pre-order machine for stuff that they’ve already created, that’s already mass produced by big production.nThat’s very different assembly line, very professional. I think that it was just a failure to completely articulate that this is intended to be an old fashion, old school, handmade, homemade zine project.
Shawn: I mean, it was said that we were printing it at our little, home print studio and we had pictures and things. You could look at it and decide whether or not it was worth — anyway, she’s way more gracious than I am. I told you what I was going to make. The fact that you thought it was going to be a professionally printed product, after I said that I, the game designer, was going to print it for you and then send it to your house, I don’t feel like that’s…
Navi: Why aren’t you perfect at everything? Design the game, lay out the game, market the game, print the game, ship the game, and make sure everything is in perfect condition the whole way and on time!
Alex: The two of you are a design team. Shawn, you said that you do about half of the ideation. What’s it like to work as part of a team?
Navi: How is it to work with me? He’s harder to work with than I am.
Shawn: Oh yeah, for sure. I have the artist’s temperament and I have these grandiose ideas and unless it’s perfect I don’t want to commit it to paper. I have to stare into the middle distance until I figure it out. She wants to iterate quickly and she keeps me moving forward and failing fast. Honestly, it’s a very complimentary process. But like any process, it hits stumbling blocks. I can’t imagine doing this work without her.
Navi: ‘Cause I’m a joy.
Shawn: Ehhh….
Navi: A fucking joy!
Alex: Do you have projects where it’s like this is a Navi game or this is a Shawn game, or is it always this is a Drakes game?
Shawn: They always start off as one of ours. They become Drakes games.
Navi: Not always! There’s a couple of games we’ve worked together from the beginning. Especially jam games. There are a few games where he took the lead, or I took the lead. Those exist. It’s fun watching people try to guess which ones they are, like who designed which one.
Shawn: We won’t say though.
Alex: I’m currently working on the final Cyberrats game with two collaborators, and several people I bounce ideas off of. Patrick [“Boog” Sinnot] sometimes will disagree with me, and he’ll say something like, “Whatever you write down for this rule, here’s how I’m running it in my home games.” Do you ever lock heads where you’re at a true impasse of your different approaches?
Navi: I don’t think that we ever get to impasses where we disagree because I tend To move fast and break things. I’ll put down some basic rules and I’m like, here are the placeholder rules. These are rules for this thing that we know we want to have happen. And this is not smooth or pretty, but it’s fine. And often Shawn will noodle on those things and tighten them up while I’ve already moved on to other parts of the game. So we don’t really butt heads a lot. Every once in a while we’ll have a disagreement on something.
Shawn: I get precious, is what she’s saying.
Navi: And Shawn will be like, no, no, this is the idea. And I’ll be like, fine. And I’ll bust out a giant pile of dice and prove why in actual play, it doesn’t feel good to do.
Navi: It also works really well for us as a married couple, we’re really good at letting someone win, right? Somebody is going to take a step back and we’re going to agree that this is the best idea for whatever reason. And if there is something where we’re both looking at the other’s idea and saying, “No, that’s wrong!” then we stop, and we work out a new version that works for both of us.
Shawn: You have to understand, Alex. I run games. I very rarely get to play them. She plays them, and very rarely runs them.
Navi: That’s true! I only run play by post games, because I like the breathing room to think and have a clever response as a GM. I don’t think well on the fly.
Shawn: The part where we lock together is ease for the GM, because I’m always trying to make game a joy to run—
Alex: That’s evident! HEDGE is one of my favorite convention games for that reason.
Shawn: That’s great! Hooray! Making a game a joy to run is looms largely in my head because if I don’t make the game seem effortless, then I’m going to put people off,people who would want to run. Typically the best way to play a game is to offer to run it. But that creates blind spots for me as far as whether it is a joy as a player to take part. I can make it fun and flavorful, I can’t necessarily make sure that the mechanics are going to feel good from the player side. And that’s where Navi absolutely cracks them out of the park.
Alex: I always tell people who are running Kickstarters or preparing to do that, that you should go and run your game for other people, because people can’t tell the difference between having a good time and a game being good. So it’s great for marketing, but there’s that double-edged sword of like, wait, everyone walked away from this having a good time. Is that because I was running it, or is that because the game was good? You know, could someone else produce what we just did?
Shawn: I have been notable on record as saying that a about three foot long piece of string in the right hands is the most entertaining thing on the planet. But, you know, if it’s not repeatable for everybody, then it’s not a good toy.
Alex: Are you referring to a specific toy?
Shawn: No, just the idea that an incredibly simple thing in adept hands with a good imagination can be really fun, can be the best game you’ve ever played. But at the same time, include enough in the system, in the toy, to provide interest on its own until everyone’s on the same page.
Alex: Another thing I appreciate about the two of you is that since I first encountered you on Twitter, you’ve been very open in sharing your processes and helping other people, including me from time to time. I’ve picked your brains or Navi, you helped me with an InDesign issue once.
Navi: I found when we came into the community that there were a lot of very excited people who were happy to talk about their game stuff, but there weren’t a lot of people who were supporting the side of like, how does the, how does this actually get made? So I wanted to be a ladder to help people come on up here. If you want to make games, this is my process.
Shawn: (Lawrence of Arabia voice): I am a river to my people!
Navi: Yes! I wanted to be a river to my people. I wanted to say, if I figured something out, it was hard to figure out or took a lot of time to figure out, but now it is wisdom that can be passed on quickly. I wanted to give that as quickly as possible because now I’ve just saved you like two weeks of your life figuring out this thing.
Shawn: We build a healthier community the less we play “I’ve got a secret”. The more we find out with our face, the more that we struggle with, the more that we overcome, the more we can share to people to spare them some pain. Because at the end of the day, there are plenty of stumbling blocks that keep people from making something cool. And the more of them we break down, the more cool stuff there is out there.
Alex: The “Holy shit, two cakes” theory of game design.
Shawn: I fuckin’ love cake!
Alex: You mentioned that’s been your approach since you came into the community. How long have you been releasing games?
Shawn: Our very first game was October of 2019. The first thing we published was Roofballers for the Unusual Suspects jam for Blades in the Dark. We had been working on Court of Blades as a project for a friend of ours that wanted to play Blades in the Dark—or was willing to try Blades in the Dark—, but did not care for the idea of being gutter scum.
Navi: She wanted a romantic theme. We said, “We could do that, no problem.” And before we knew it, we had a book. It wasn’t an intentional thing. We didn’t come into game design thinking we are going to be game designers that will publish our game designs and share them with other people. We very much came into it with, we’re longtime gamers, we love this game, these mechanics, we’re talking about Blades in the Dark. Our friend doesn’t want to be gutter scum. They want to play something romantic. Let’s just hack this.
Shawn: We shared it with our weekly game group on a whim, and realized, “Oh, this is 392 pages, this is a book.” It got to be a big enough project where just putting it up on Itch didn’t feel like enough, so we started yelling about it.
Alex: Do a lot of your games come from that same place of inspiration, of building for a particular person you know?
Navi: A few of them have been games where I’m like, this is something I want to play. Nevermind everyone else. I want to play. Because I have more confidence in myself as a game designer now, so I can make something from scratch. I can build a new system if I need to, or I can grab an SRD because I know a bajillion games, so I have this monster-sized toolkit. Whereas with Court of Blades, it was a random situation of this is the game we have that we want to play, but we need to tweak it so our friends will play.
Shawn: We love a good SRD. It invites you, like, how would you, how would you use this to approach whatever it is that you’re grooving on at that time? Because all, all my ideas come from, like, the fertile mash of everything that I’m reading and watching and listening to.
Alex: I shamelessly stole the downtime questions from you from HEDGE, and shoved them into Cyberrats, and they made the game better.
Shawn: Killer! All of us are constantly innovating and improving and iterating off of everybody else’s stuff.
Alex: Blades in the Dark wouldn’t exist without some of the Bakers’ work.
Navi: Or even Burning Wheel, God bless it.
Shawn: To dust off the old chestnut, it’s a conversation, right? Not just the game itself, but the hobby itself is a conversation. We’re all engaged in a tumultuous back-and-forth as to what is fun, and how do we approach fun, and how do we mechanize fun, and how do we ensure fun?
Navi: Some people make art, some people make games, and some people make games that are art. Every game doesn’t have to be a statement, but they often end up being that way. I design from the perspective of just trying to have a lot of fun. So don’t accuse me of making art! But Shawn will make art!
Shawn: I am trying to advance a thesis with everything that I’ve designed.
Alex: I love that dynamic. What should someone expect when they pick up a Couple of Drakes game?
Shawn: Our watchword is we keep our promises. When you read the pitch, the idea behind the game, when you read the back of the book and it says it has everything you need to X, Y, and Z, the mechanics support the framework. What you see on the cover, is what you will be, what you will do. We don’t leave the heavy lifting to whoever is running the game. Everyone who plays will immediately get the tone just be reading through their character options.
Navi: If there is a defining feature of our work, it’s not that the games are similar to each other, or live in the same genre, because we bounce all around and try all different stuff. It’s that whatever we put out, it’s going to be rich in tone. It’s going to set a very specific tone right out of the gate, and you won’t have to guess what the game is intended for, or how it’s supposed to feel when you play it.
Shawn: Tone heavy, mechanics sharp. And Space Fey!
Navi: And sharper over time! We are learning things!
Shawn: All those lessons we are passing on to the community, they’re hard-fought, and every one of them makes us a little bit better at what we do.
HEDGE is PWYW on Itch, go play it.