Sometimes you just want to spar when you're playing games.

Let's see what it is all about.

Let's get started.

Sir.

I will live with perseverance in the spirit of Taekwondo, courtesy for fellow students, integrity within myself and to become a black belt leader.

Welcome to the ATA Nation podcast.

Ladies and gentlemen, instructors, teachers, students, masters, grandmasters of Songam Taekwondo, welcome back to the ATA Nation podcast.

We are thrilled to have you with us.

What are you thinking about these bi weekly or bi monthly fortnightly?

Ooh, we need to bring back the word fortnight.

This is episode 135 and I am your host, Senior master Zach Hayden.

It is a pleasure to be with you talking all about things in Songam Taekwondo and ATA Nation across the world.

How have you guys been doing with your belt ambassador campaign?

We have had so many great ambassadors at our school.

On our next episode, I'm going to be shouting out some ambassadors that we've gotten that we've heard that they've done an amazing job.

So has your school been doing the belt ambassador campaign?

How's it going?

We would love to hear.

We the idea is just help, you know, change people's lives.

I one of my, not one of my highest ranked student, he's going through the mastership process this year.

He came in to martial arts because of a buddy event.

His friend brought him in and now he's married to someone he met in Taekwondo.

He's going through the mastership process.

He's got a bunch of kids who are also in Taekwondo with us.

It is just changed his life.

You could change people's lives just like that by inviting them class.

Wouldn't that be great?

Now another way to introduce somebody to martial arts, maybe get them warmed up to the idea of martial arts before they come in to their first class, maybe is have invite them over and have a little game night.

Today's episode is going to talk about all this really cool new card game created by an ATA master.

So let's, let's talk.

Special guest interview.

ATA Nation.

I am super excited to be back with you today.

And we have Master Hayes.

How are you today, sir?

Doing great, sir.

How are you doing?

I am wonderful.

I saw this thing online.

This, this card game.

We're going to get into it.

I've got some questions.

I'm excited about it.

But before that I just like to go a little bit into everybod origin story.

A little bit.

How'd you get into martial arts?

Sure.

Yeah.

So Christmas in 1992, I received the Christmas Present that we all enjoy, and that's karate lessons for Christmas.

So I started in 93 in Montgomery, Alabama, under Chick Mathis, who.

Who was under.

Under Grandmaster Soon Ho Lee.

And.

Yeah, so I trained in Montgomery for several years before moving to Mobile and.

And opening up our.

Our own school.

And been kicking since.

Been doing it ever since.

Oh, that's.

It's so neat to see how many people.

You know, we've got some people who start in other styles and whatnot, but how many people I interview that are all ATA born and bred, which is just super cool.

Yeah.

It's been.

Been that way forever.

And I don't.

I don't.

I don't know anything else.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Well, people have been seeing it online.

We're recording this before Christmas.

This will go out.

People will hear this a little after Christmas.

But you guys over there have this card game coming.

Tell me about this.

This combo master game, right?

Yes.

So combo master.

It's funny because this past year I've been working a lot to.

To create weekly missions for our students that are character development type missions.

Okay.

And I was trying to tie in some type of card game element to it.

And so card games had been on my mind, and I just woke up one morning and I was like, ATA sparring points.

ATA sparring rules.

This is completely not a character development mission.

But this would be such a fun game.

And I stayed up all night developing the concept and the cards.

And usually my projects get like 80% done, and the last 20% never gets done.

Oh, hey, I am right there with you.

I understand that, but.

But I knocked it all out that one night, and we printed about the test cards on some card stock and started playing with my family, testing it out, and it's.

It's pretty fun.

Okay, so are you.

Do you guys.

Do you have a history of, like, playing card games?

Is that a thing that you guys do?

You have, like, the.

My family is a big fan of all the exploding kittens.

The taco one where you throw the burrito.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You guys play card games?

Is that something you're into?

Yes.

We have tons of games.

We.

I'm a fam.

We have a family of five.

So we've always have family game nights.

And.

And I'm just a competitive person all the way around.

And so anytime I have a chance to beat my kids at a game, I'm all in.

Okay, so you come up with this idea, sparring card game, which I think is super cool idea.

We'll talk about, like, rules and stuff in a second to kind of get the idea of it.

You sit down, you.

You create this game.

You go to test it.

Like, I know most games get, like, tons of play testing.

Strangely, my brother has a friend who.

That's like his.

To play test games.

Yeah.

Which is like, that's.

That's a fun game.

Right.

But how did this play testing go?

Did you.

Did you have to modify things?

What did people.

What were their thoughts originally?

So it was.

It was nice, too, because I had a camp that we were hosting for.

For our students.

We had about 40 or 40 or 50 people at the camp that weekend.

And it was.

So I brought the game there and.

And let them play test for us.

And the biggest thing that we had to adjust was just how many cards do you start with?

How many?

There's a particular wild card that makes everybody else in the game have to draw three cards.

In the beginning, I had too many of those in there because everybody had the entire deck in their hands.

So we had to adjust.

So make sure that it works the way it should.

Okay, so give us a little overview of how I play this game, because I just love the idea of not only playing, like, a card game that's sparring stuff, but it makes me think that also, like, it will help students, like, especially newer spars, kind of understand the idea of.

Of offense, defense, how, you know, I yell at him in class all the time.

You've got to do combos.

You can't just do one.

Like, is this going to help me get them to do combos then?

So I think it does.

I think it helps them understand basic offense and defense.

It.

It follows again the ATA point system.

So I can play a kick card, or I can make a combo and play a head kick, which would give me two points instead of one point, or I can make it a jump head kick, which would give me three points.

So.

So I think it does help them understand the basic concept of sparring.

I love that, but I can go into.

Yeah, yeah.

Let me kind of walk us through how to play a game.

Sure.

All right, so think about uno meets martial arts.

That's what my instructors are saying.

And so you can play two to four people.

Everybody starts with five cards, and the goal is to get rid of your cards first.

And so basically, if.

If I played first, I would play an attack card, an offensive card.

Different punches and kicks are in the.

In the card options.

And if I were then to do an offense on you, then you need to either defend it.

And if you can't defend it because you don't have a defense card, then you have to draw a card, which means I scored on you.

Gotcha.

And then my hand gets bigger because I have more cards, which means I can't win as easily.

Correct.

So.

So then you turn around.

If you.

After you go, then the next person online is attacking the next player.

So you're always attacking the next player around.

But it changes because sometimes you do have a defense card, sometimes you don't have a defense card.

There are also block and counter cards.

So this is kind of cool.

If I were to do an offensive card on you, you could do a block and counter, which would negate any points.

I wouldn't get any points for on you, but you're actually scoring points backwards on me.

Okay.

The play continues the way that it normally goes.

The direction.

Now when you say I score a point, are we keeping track of points somewhere or is that.

That is the.

You have to draw a card, which means I basically scored a point.

Points are always just draw cards.

So if I scored three points on you, then you're drawing three cards.

So your hand's getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just like Uno, you.

You got a.

A billion.

A billion points.

So you've got these block and counter cards, which is basically almost what.

Like if you think in Uno, like I stop in reverse, but you don't change the reverse of order a little bit.

But I'm just attacking back that person.

They.

Then I can.

If I.

Let's say I get attacked, I'm going to.

I don't have a defense card.

I.

They score a point on me, I grab a card.

The next per.

Then I'm done.

Right.

The next person goes and attacks the person after that.

Right.

So when you play a card or you draw a card, that's your turn.

Gotcha.

And then it keeps rotating around.

And there are also other cards in there, like they're warning cards.

So maybe you don't have a defensive card, but you have a warning card.

If I punched at you, you could put down.

It's called a throat punch card, which means you punch me in the throat, which I don't get the point, but I get a warning point.

So it kind of works like a counter punch.

Okay.

So if I play a warning card, what I'm saying is you.

Your attack was actually illegal.

You hit me.

I got you.

Oh, I love that.

Yeah.

And there's.

There's low, low blow.

So that's like a Low kick card.

There are.

They're timeout cards, which are skip cards.

So it's funny about these is I was asking my.

My kids, I was like, what would be funny reasons that you would have to like, have a timeout or.

Or.

So we came up with a course like equipment malfunction.

I thought about the time my.

My son was sparring and his cup came out this pant legs on the end of the ring.

I was like, all right, we've all seen that.

Yeah, so.

So equipment malfunction.

We came up with power outage, which was funny.

I was designing it and I heard that Texas had a power outage.

That's so cool.

Oh, we have one.

We have a tournament.

I don't know why this convention center has light switches that aren't covered by something, but every time we're there, the lights go out at some point during the tournament and it's like, ah, so that's.

I totally understand that card.

Yeah.

And then my son's contribution to the game was he's like, wouldn't it be crazy if a cat walked through the ring?

So there's a cat.

There's a cat in the ring skip card as well.

That will be my daughter's favorite card.

I guarantee it.

Guarantee it.

So, yeah, but those are the cards.

And then we've got.

We've got wild cards, too.

Wild cards are things that like judges call no see or out of the ring, which would negate any kind of attack that was put on you.

And it also then reverses the direction of play.

Oh, so there's some other little caveats to how that works.

Oh, this sounds super cool.

Well, okay, so now transferring from the game real quick of, like, how you play, what was the process for you to.

You came up with this idea, you're playing it, but then you're like, you know what?

We could do this.

Make this.

How did you go about, like, going, okay, let's decide to make this game and release it to the world.

The biggest was just the feedback that I got from that camp that, that, you know, everybody was like, you should publish this.

You should publish this.

This is so cool.

I want to.

And it was just basically the, the tremendous feedback that I got back from our students.

And then just looking into the manufacturing process and I just, I thought that other school owners would probably enjoy a tool like this.

That's.

That's.

It benefits your students, it'll add retail revenue.

And it's.

I think our students, a lot of times, they're not going to quit when they're in classes, they quit when they're away from classes.

And so if I can get them thinking about martial arts and doing martial arts when they're, they're not at our school, then I want to find ways to do that.

Yeah, well, it's super cool.

Like I have a, we have a camp, a rec camp next week and then we've got some other things coming up and I can totally see, you know, taking it and playing it a little bit, getting students the idea of what's going on or not next week, a couple weeks, whenever.

But what a cool, you know, what a cool way to enter, you know, connect taekwondo and especially like sparring.

Sparring is something that people don't necessarily think about it as much.

Like it's the action packed part.

You know, like form seems like something that might be a board game or something like that.

So now technically I don't know if you, have you ever played Chief Master Wegman Made the path the Mastership game?

I do, I have that.

Yes sir.

Yeah.

So now we have, there are two ATA card games that you can play, man.

We're just, There needs to be a, an empire of song on card games.

There you go.

So tell me, people can go and buy this game now where would do we go?

What's that process like to buy their own, their own version.

So head to combo mastercard game.com and we, we have retail open now and we're getting, we're gonna start shipping those out.

Well, by the time this goes live we'll be shipping already and then we are also setting up our wholesale accounts right now so they can go to the same website and there's just a little, little spot that you can check, check for wholesale and we will just verify that you're a school owner and then we'll set you up with that account.

And we're doing, we're doing some bulk pricing there so that way everybody can use it as a revenue generator in their school.

That's awesome.

I, I saw just the other day, how many states did you say have orders in them already?

We are in over half the states already.

So we've sold over probably about 150 units between our school and open it up to, to the public.

That's, that's super exciting.

I didn't see Alaska on there yet, right?

Not yet because there's that club in Alaska.

I'm going to reach out to them and be like, you guys got to get one.

So we've got out of the, you know, contiguous States we can get out there in some other states.

Oh, man, that is so cool.

It's funny, I posted that and I had three or four people like, hey, you don't have my state yet.

I'm buying one.

And so anyway, it's fun.

Excellent.

Well, what is your, what's your big hope for this, for this game?

As people go and start to buy and start to play, what are you hoping for?

This.

So, you know, I just want other people to be able to use this as a tool to help, you know, help them grow their, their student base and their schools and, and more than just martial arts students.

I just, you know, I want to, I want to put it out there to.

It's obviously open to the public, but just to have a fun way to build family time and connections.

We're also, in the spring, we're going to be introducing some holographic expansion packs.

I saw some pictures, those were super.

Cool looking and they really add a lot of different fun elements to the game.

And we're looking at doing those.

So they're numbered collector's cards.

And so we think that by putting it into the schools, the kids are going to want to basically trading cards, collecting cards.

Yeah, totally cool.

Yeah, I saw those pictures.

So you are looking at kind of expansions, things like that.

I know, like I said earlier, I'm a big fan of exploding kittens and they had a.

They've just got a bunch of different expansion packs.

You guys are playing with how to, to add in different kinds of cards and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, we've got, we've already got them in.

I've already got some right here and we've been play testing them.

We actually had our instructors instead of, you know, we got Christmas coming up, so it's kind of slower right now.

So Monday staff meeting.

We just played Combo Master for an hour and play tested.

It was fun.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I've got a, I've got a planning meeting with some staff coming up and maybe we'll, maybe we'll dive into the game a little bit there, so.

Well, that is, that's super cool.

Well, we want everybody to head over to.

You said combomastercardgame.com Correct.

Get your copy and then definitely post online pictures of you like playing the game with students, with family, whatnot.

We would love to see that online and just people, you know, sharing spark, you know, now you can be like, hey, my, I sparred my grandma.

You know, play the game with your grandma and be like, I kicked my grandma in the Head with this card game.

That'd be awesome.

And not get in trouble, right?

Exactly.

We were eating cookies and playing a card game.

That's what a cool thing.

Sir.

Thank you.

Well, one for this because this game is going to be, I think, just a lot of fun for our students and for everybody.

And we want to thank you for your time today.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

And again, we went premium with everything.

This is it.

It's a big box.

So it's not just like a little bitty deck and.

The graphics and stuff.

Did you.

Who did the graphics?

You had somebody do those.

Where did they come from?

So that's a combination of me and ChatGPT and yeah, they look great.

They're like.

It makes me think a little diary of a wimpy kid.

That's kind of the style I went with.

And then I put it in Photoshop and then tweaked things and made it.

Made it what it was.

I think it's a really cool esthetic.

Did you say you have.

Do you have one of those holographic cards handy?

Do you?

Show us one real quick.

These are our test ones.

So we're actually going a little more.

You know, that's the thing in this process is learning.

Learning how like.

Oh, that's not exactly like I thought it was going to be.

But here's.

Here's a timeout card.

It's got some Ninja Turtle looking characters.

Love that Pizza party.

Skips the entire group there.

Let's see.

Here we go.

We've got any Mortal Kombat fans?

We've got over here.

Oh, no, it's.

Yeah.

Scorpion.

Switch hands with another player.

So, yeah, so there's things like that.

There's a.

There's a Nunchuck Ninja.

You get to target specific people.

Those are great looking cards.

I really.

You can tell you've gone really nice.

You know, this isn't a game you're getting and it's.

It's like it was all kind of home, home done and whatnot.

It's really cool.

Yeah.

And here's the final one.

I'll show you.

It's the Awe Snap card.

And so when someone goes out and they think they won't, you can play this one.

And it rewinds time and it starts the game back up again.

Oh, that's super cool.

Yeah.

Oh, I love it.

Those will be the expansion packs coming in the spring.

Correct.

Okay, so everybody's got to get your packs.

Now head over to combo masters.

Combo mastercard game.com and get yours now and then you'll be ready when the expansion packs come.

Awesome.

Yes.

That's great.

Awesome.

Thank you for your time today, sir.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you, sir.

I appreciate you having me on.

Well, I think the game is super cool.

I got mine in the mail.

We've been playing at my house.

I've got some really neat holographic cards that I was sent that are super cool.

So make sure you check out the link in the show notes as well to get your copy.

Licensee school owners, you are able to get a a licensee account now and you can sell these at your school as well.

It's a fun game, really neat.

The artwork I just love.

It's super amazing.

So definitely check that out.

Head over and see that info in the show notes.

Hey, speaking of show notes, we're going to leave a link in there to a live broadcast that Chief Master Skiles did all about Spring Nationals.

I don't know if you guys know, but Spring Nationals is coming up.

Lots of great events.

You need to make sure that you get registered for the actual tournament.

If you're going to compete at the tournament, get registered for any training that you plan on doing.

Make sure you talk to your instructor about, you know, the training options that you could have there.

Last episode we talked all about the tryouts for Team Mexico and Team Philippines.

So you know, that's super cool.

And then don't forget to book your hotel rooms because those are going to be going quick and you want to make sure you've got those set.

All kinds of neat stuff coming up in ATA Nation.

Lots of cool things.

If you have someone that you would like to hear on the show, reach out, let us know.

And do me an awesome favor.

This day that you listen to this, share it online, maybe take a picture of yourself and be like, hey, check me out.

I'm watching the AT Nation podcast.

You should too, and put a link or, you know, post it to your friends, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, send it to them, send them a link, whatever.

We want to make sure that everybody's getting this information out.

We would love that.

You can also find full episodes on YouTube.

We've actually just started putting the full episode with the intro and outro and everything on there as well.

So check that out.

Also subscribe to the ATAs YouTube channel.

Cool things going on there.

So, ladies and gentlemen, what are you doing to go beyond the belt this week?

That's what I want you to think about as we head out this week to another awesome time.

We'll see you next time.

Get out there.

Go beyond the belt.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the ATA Nation podcast.

Be sure to subscribe and share with your ATA family.

So the secret part's not so Secret on the YouTube because you can see that there's still things.

But if you got to the secret part on YouTube, if you watched the whole thing on YouTube, would you comment?

Would you leave a comment?

You know, subscribe, comment.

You probably already subscribed.

If you haven't, you really should be.

But would you leave a comment on YouTube if.

If you're listening on Spotify, you're one of the Spotify people, would you leave a comment there?

Because there's this, this cool Spotify app I can use and I can see your comments and maybe respond to them there.

Hey, I would love to know who's listening on YouTube on Spotify, you know, Secret Park.

Check it out.

Hey, guys, take care.