For the Love of Board Games

By Erin Dean

A book that explores how modern, popular games were created by interviewing the board designers behind the games.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543954258

Book preview

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Acknowledgments

For the Love of Board Games has truly been a labor of love, and I want to thank everyone who helped make this book possible.

First of all, thanks to my parents, Bill and Lynn Dean, who were my cheerleaders along the way. Thank you for always believing in me.

Thanks, too to my Kickstarter Manager, Vaughn Reynolds, who played a crucial part in the Kickstarter campaign. His marketing and graphic design experience helped tremendously, and I could not have completed this project without him.

I’d also like to thank my amazing book editor, Rachel Collins, who helped sculpt For the Love of Board Games into a much better read.

I’m also grateful to Robert Schilling and Manny Trembley, who applied their incredible artistic talent to create the two beautiful cover designs for the book. Your artwork helps the book reach a whole new level.

Thanks, too, to Rodney Smith of Watch It Played, for providing the Foreword to this volume.

Huge thanks are due to the board game designers who agreed to be interviewed for this book. I’m grateful to all of you for sharing your time and insights with me, and for contributing to this book. Without your creativity and passion, the board game industry would not be what it is today. Special thanks go to Richard Garfield and Matt Leacock, for participating in designer Q&A’s as part of the Kickstarter campaign.

Lastly, a huge thank you goes out to all my Kickstarter backers. Without your support, For the Love of Board Games would not have been possible!

Foreword

They say every gamer has at least one idea for a new board game in them. I’m not sure that’s true for me. I’m probably better off just playing and making videos about games. For the people in this book however, it’s an undeniable fact. And they haven’t just had one idea for a game, they’ve had hundreds.

However, these people have done something even more impressive. This book could be an unending multi-part series if it just focused on the people who had ideas for games. Ideas are easy.

Instead, what you’ll find here is a book of doers. People who had ideas that simply had to be realized. And thank goodness for their persistence and dedication, because these are the people shaping the state of our beloved hobby today.

This is a book about innovators. People who saw that board games could offer more than just what was available in mass market retail stores. Games that could challenge and entertain us beyond being passive distractions. Games that would engage a generation of new hobbyists who would jump at the chance to send love letters to a princess, rustle cattle in the nineteenth century, or even make salmon happy. (Seriously, there’s no shortage of game themes.) And yes, a fair share helped us delve another dungeon and explore another galaxy, too!

So, get ready, because what you’ll find here is a deep dive into the work habits, design methods, and inspirations of today’s tabletop game creators. For those of you with that hot idea for the next game, you might find just what you need to turn it into a reality.

For the rest of us, prepare to enjoy an engaging read about the people behind the games we love and enjoy. And who knows? We might find we have a game idea of our own, after all.

—Rodney Smith

Watch It Played

Jeffrey Allers

Can you tell us a little about your history with board gaming? Did you play board games as a kid or discover the hobby as an adult?

I always loved playing and discovering new games. My family played card and board games together, and when we visited friends of my parents, I would learn new games from their kids. Later, my friends hosted games of Risk in their basement, and I had a short-lived Dungeons & Dragons phase in junior high. At one point, I remember discovering a complex war game about the Battle of Midway, buried in my uncle’s closet. It inspired me to design my first game, which was a war game with lots of unit counters and complex dice attack tables. It would be more than twenty years before I would design another game, and during that time, I rarely sought out games to buy, although I never refused a game with friends.

When I moved to Germany in 1994, I noticed the wider variety of board games on store shelves, but I was still learning German and assumed the rules would be too complex for me.

After I got married in 2000, my wife and I were visiting friends when, after dinner, they asked if we wanted to play a game. They brought out Carcassonne, and I was fascinated by how simple the rules were, yet how different the game was compared to anything I had seen before. We then found a biweekly gaming meet-up at a local shop, and I started to buy games there. I also started buying used board games at the Berlin flea markets my wife frequented.

How did you get involved with designing board games? What inspired you to start designing games?

In 2004, I joined a weekly gaming group that included several game designers who used the group to test out their prototypes. I started making my own prototypes and brought them to the group, and they encouraged me to pitch them to publishers.

As an architect, I enjoy art and mathematics, as well as designing spaces for interaction between people. In that respect, game design is much like architecture. Another similarity is that both architecture and game design give me the opportunity to learn about many different fields. As an architect, for example, I’ll want to learn more about education in order to design a school, or about the history of a particular site. Game design also gives me the opportunity to learn more about how mechanics encourage interaction, or about particular historical places and events which can serve as the basis for a game.

Can you walk us through how you design a game? How do you start? What is your process?

I have lots of notebooks and computer files full of ideas for games, include themes, mechanics, or even materials. These ideas are usually developed during my daily in-between times: in the shower, in the subway, walking the dog, etc. Inspiration for game themes and mechanics comes from everyday life, art, films, or travel. Or I could be playing or reading about other games and decide that I want to take their ideas in a different direction.

Do you follow the design philosophy of starting with a theme and building mechanics around it, or vice versa?

When I started out, I was mostly inspired by theme, but now I often start with mechanics as well. Even when starting with mechanics, I try to find a theme as soon as possible, as this helps me develop new mechanics to fit thematic elements. Game design, for me, is a constant dance between theme and mechanics.

What is your ratio of games you’ve started designing to finished games that have hit the retail market? Can you tell us about one game you started designing that just didn’t make it?

I have a file full of game ideas, and another full of games I have prototyped. Looking at that file, I have prototyped over sixty games, while eleven have been published (with three more planned for this year). Sometimes, a game doesn’t get published simply because it hasn’t yet found the right publisher. Other times, it’s too costly to manufacture, or the timing is wrong. I had a 3D mountain climbing prototype, for example, that I was pitching at the game fair in Essen, when I noticed that Hasbro had just released their own 3D mountain climbing game. It was very different than mine, but some publishers didn’t even want to look at mine, just because it seemed too similar.

What was the inspiration behind New York Slice? What was the design process like? Were there any challenges?

In terms of inspiration, it wasn’t a celestial object that struck me… it was Alan Moon. Fifteen years ago, I had officially entered the board gaming hobby here in Germany, and I was playing catch-up with a steady diet of Knizia, Kramer, Teuber, and (especially) Moon. When I began to design my own games, this prolific quartet of the German school of streamlined themed abstracts were my inspiration.

I enjoyed playing most of Moon’s games, including San Marco, co-designed with Aaron Weissblum. I thought it was a brilliant marriage of the I split, you choose mechanic coupled with an area control game, but the game was only playable by three or four players, with only two or three players involved in the pie-division at a single time. I almost preferred their two-player variant of the system—the tiny card game Canal Grande—to its beautiful board game parent San Marco, because—with even three players—downtime was an issue.

I wondered whether it was possible to make a pie-division game that was accessible by more than just two or three players. I needed a game that gave players interesting options without overwhelming them with too many. I thought about this off and on for a long time. Years passed, and I continued churning ideas through my head in those in-between times when I was on my bike, in the shower, on the subway, or drifting off to sleep at night. (Some people count sheep; I count game mechanisms.)

One of the issues that held me back was finding an appropriate theme. Then, quite suddenly, I had one of those revelations where things suddenly seem obvious, like an apple falling on my head to remind me of the power of gravity. Why not make a pie-division game about… pies?

Suddenly, everything fell into place. It would be a set-collection game, with different types of pies worth varying amounts of points if you had the most at the end of the game. The more valuable pies would also appear with greater frequency, making it more difficult to collect a majority. The theme provided me with a limitation: the pie pieces were placed in a circle and had to remain in that order as the pie was divided, which would help reduce downtime.

I also wanted another choice, another option to score points, and a dilemma to add more tension to the game. Instead of collecting a slice, players had the option of eating them, which they do by flipping the slice over. The player would receive guaranteed points from these slices, but they would not be counted toward the end of game majorities. That was it. Five pies and fifty-five slices later, I tested the game to immediate success. It was the first and last time my battle-hardened playtesters were satisfied on the first run-though.

I showed my prototype (dubbed American Pie, after the song)—to Winning Moves Germany. They loved the game and renamed it after a famous German song called aber bitte mit Sahne (but please with whipped cream). They changed the pies to German cakes and changed the eating points to dollops of whipped cream, to fit the theme. After testing the game, it didn’t take long to secure a contract for what would become the best-selling game of my modest career: aber bitte mit Sahne, or Piece o’ Cake

The pies looked great on a table in a café and always attracted a crowd. Gamers found it to be an appropriate filler, and, best of all, many of my non-gamer friends enjoyed it as well.

For better or worse, the industry has changed dramatically since I entered the hobby. Gamers have always been excited about new games, and a sharp increase in game publishers has met the demand. Admittedly, this has probably helped me find publishers for my game designs by giving me more options, but it has also meant that very few games remain in a publisher’s catalogue for more than a couple of years. Thus, it was inevitable that sales for Piece o’ Cake would eventually decline, and the game would disappear from the original publisher’s catalogue.

The upside to the current state of the industry, however, is that a good game can be published again, sometimes with a new theme and even new variants. With this in mind, I began shopping the game around again, after it had been off the market for a few years.

Shortly after releasing the original game, the publisher asked me to brainstorm ideas for an expansion to include in Spielbox magazine. Because the original game was so streamlined, it was quite easy to come up with multiple ways of adding new twists and variety to the game. The Joker Slice was chosen for the magazine: a slice that could be immediately added to any other flavor or eaten for two points.

The other expansions included combination slices that would count as a half slice for two different flavors and slices with special actions or end-game bonuses on them, such as You receive 1 bonus point for every different flavor you collect or You choose first on a future round. Since all of these ideas worked well and the publisher had no plans for a larger expansion, I posted them on BoardGameGeek for fans of the game to print and play.

When I began pitching the game to publishers for a second time, I went back and revised the expansions and included them in the pitch. The main change was that the special action slices were now tiles that could be placed with any group of slices.

In 2016, I was chatting with Ted Alspach of Bézier Games about doing a project together, when he suddenly remembered Piece o’ Cake and asked if it was available. Soon after, he was testing and developing the game together with my expansions and was excited about the possibilities. His suggestion to change the theme to pizza was perfect and led to some brilliant production decisions: the expansion adding bonus actions and rewards would become the daily specials, the rules would be printed as a fold-out menu, and a score pad would be included in the form of a restaurant check. And, of course, the game box art would look like a pizza box!

Although the theme is based on the thin, New York-style pizza, the game is deeper due to its new mechanisms. It also offers more variety to each game. It’s rewarding for me to see it in print again—with all the extra toppings—and even more so to see the attention to detail that Ted has given the game.

Can you tell us a little-known fun fact about New York Slice?

I have a visually impaired friend who likes to play games, and we made a Braille version of the game to play with her, using a Lazy Susan. That was one of the most enjoyable times I have had teaching one of my games.

When you’re not creating board games, what do you do for a living?

I moved to Berlin as an architect, but several years ago, I changed careers and now work as a youth and children’s pastor with a German-American church partnership.

Do you have any interesting hobbies (aside from designing and playing board games) that we should know about?

I enjoy sports, the arts, writing, and travel.

What is one theme you’d love to work into a game design, but haven’t yet been able to use?

I really don’t have trouble designing a game around any theme. I once told a friend I would design a game for her if she gave me a theme, and she said, George Clooney. I later re-themed the game as Wampum, which placed second in a design contest and was published!

What’s one game you love that you wish you designed?

There are too many great games to list, but I still have a soft spot for Carcassonne. I love how different it is from any game that came before or after.

Aside from your own games, what’s your favorite board game of all time?

I don’t really have a favorite. When I host game nights, I often feel like a DJ trying to find the right game for the group and the mood. Consequently, I have a large collection that includes games for just about everyone. I also design a wide variety of games.

If you could set up your ultimate gaming session and play a tabletop game with anyone from any time in history, living or dead, what game would you choose and with whom would you play it?

Chess players are known to play Chess exclusively, but I found it interesting that Bobby Fischer actually tried to improve the game with his Chess960 variant. It would be fascinating to play one of my games with him and get his feedback.

If and when you retire from game designing, what do you want your legacy to be?

I will probably be designing games as long as I have friends who like to design and playtest them. It would, of course, be great if people were still playing some of my games long after I’m gone.

Do you have any advice for designers that would love to follow in your footsteps?

Almost everyone has an idea for a game, but it takes hard work to develop it, prototype it, and test it over and over again. It’s a great exercise in perseverance, which is why I enjoy leading game design workshops for children, university students, and adults. It’s also important to be able to listen to criticism and to learn to filter it, so that you can improve the game while staying true to what you’re trying to do.

Ted Alspach

Can you tell us a little about your history with board gaming? Did you play board games as a kid or discover the hobby as an adult?

I’ve been playing games all my life, from childhood—with my family and friends—until now. I played everything—all the Parker Brothers games, every card game imaginable, and even some Avalon Hill games.

How did you get involved with designing board games? What inspired you to start designing games?

I’ve been designing games since I was little as well. I always wanted to make games that I wanted to play, or to improve on existing games.

Can you tell us about a specific design you did as a child? What was the name and nature of the game?

A lot of things I made when I was younger tended to be economic in nature, like games about opening a store and setting prices low enough so that other people would buy things, but high enough to make the most money.

Can you walk us through how you design a game? How do you start, what is your process?

I usually have a pretty clear, broad concept. For example, for Werewords, it was what if word games like Password had a traitor… someone who was giving wrong clues, and not only would you have to figure out the word, you’d have to figure out who that traitor was?

Do you follow the design philosophy of starting with a theme and building mechanics around it, or vice versa?

I’ve done both, but I tend to skew more towards a functional theme, like building a mansion, which turned into Castles of Mad King Ludwig.

What is your ratio of games you’ve started designing to finished games that have hit the retail market?

About 100:1 or higher, for games that have been started vs. games actually published. The ratio has gotten better the more experienced I become, but even in the last few years it’s probably been 25:1, or higher.

Can you tell us about one game you started designing that just didn’t make it?

There’s a perfectly acceptable game that’s been sitting around for years called The Temple of Feng Shui, which is an area control game. It’s very Euro, super easy to learn, and has unique mechanics and strategies. Sounds like a winner, right? But it’s short of something… some key ingredient that will make people want to play it again and again, which is what I always strive for. Hopefully one day I’ll see the solution to it, but for now it sits with scores of other unpublished games, hoping against hope that it will be published.

What was your inspiration for designing Suburbia?

I wanted to make a board game that felt like Sim City without people getting bogged down in the crazy deep economics and minutiae that are in the computer game.

What’s a fun fact about Suburbia that not a lot of people know?

We’ve named our house, which we moved into recently, Burg von Alspach, like the tile in the game.

What was your inspiration for Castles of Mad King Ludwig? Can you tell us about the design process and some interesting facts?

Castles was inspired by drawing dungeons for D&D while in class in high school (instead of paying attention). I liked the idea of creating these unique, fun environments that had a special element. The game started out as Mansions and was about creating your dream house.

The initial version had a lot of bathrooms, because, you know, you need a lot of bathrooms in a big house. That isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds, so I think the only bathroom that made it through was the Powder Room. And the Hole, which has a lot of other practical uses as well. The Ludwig theming came later, and it ended up influencing the design in a lot of ways, such as the shapes of the rooms and how they interacted with each other. About half the rooms in the game are based on actual rooms that Ludwig built for his castles, while the other half are totally made up, like my personal favorite, the Baconry.

What was your inspiration for designing One Night Ultimate Werewolf?

It was based on a similar Japanese game, but that version was—as most Japanese games are—very minimalistic, and it didn’t have enough replay value. My brain is always thinking about social deduction and ways to make it more interesting, and over six months of development, the game became enormously better than the original incarnation.

What are some fun facts about One Night Ultimate Werewolf that not a lot of people know?

The Troublemaker was originally modeled on Kimberly Shaw, Marcia Cross’s character from Melrose Place.

When you’re not creating board games, what do you do for a living?

That’s what I do for a living. Well, the publishing part, anyway.

What is one theme you’d love to work into a game design, but haven’t yet been able to use?

The Wire.

What’s one game you love that you wish you designed?

Recently, I’ve played a lot of Cabo. Very addictive and clean design.

Aside from your own games, what’s your favorite board game of all time?

Tichu.

If you could set up your ultimate gaming session and play a tabletop game with anyone from any time in history, living or dead, what game would you choose and with whom would you play it?

I’d like to play Acquire with Sid Sackson.

Is there a certain board game theme or mechanic that you feel is really overdone and should perhaps go on hiatus for a while?

I’m not a fan of co-op games, so the more of those there are, the less there are of other game types that I like. That’s me being super selfish, of course. (Just one more reason for me not to like co-op games!)

If and when you retire from game designing what do you want your legacy to be?

I hope that people look at the games I’ve made and feel that they’ve been a way for them to connect with friends and family and a way to bring people into gaming who might not have played otherwise

Do you have any advice for designers that would love to follow in your footsteps?

Design and playtest all the time, while at the same time playing as much as you possibly can. And playtest. In your spare time, find people to playtest with.

Kristian Amundsen Østby

Can you tell us a little about your history with board gaming? Did you play board games as a kid or discover the hobby as an adult?

I have been playing games all my life. I grew up in the eighties, and as a child, played whatever was available in the local toy stores. Whenever I went on vacation with my family, I loved searching the shelves of foreign toy stores for new, exotic games. I later discovered imported games in local hobby stores, and then we started playing a lot of Diplomacy, Junta, and the standard eighties’ array of American hobby games. I also designed a few games at that time, mostly inspired by the tradition of these American games. In the late nineties, my interest gradually shifted towards the shorter, more mechanism-focused games that were to become known as Eurogames. I’ve been in that camp since.

How did you get involved with designing board games? What inspired you to start designing games?

I have designed games for as long as I remember. I don’t think it’s uncommon for children who play games to experiment with tweaking the rules, come up with rules of their own, or even make their own games from scratch. I just never stopped doing that. In 1996, I got my first game published by a small, Norwegian toy store that was making its own line of games. It was a small deduction game. Then it was another couple of years before I submitted my next game to a publisher. It wasn’t until my final years of university that I started designing more regularly.

Can you walk us through how you design a game? How do you start? What is your process?

It’s not a clearly defined process. I think about games quite a lot, and sometimes a new idea can be inspired by a theme, or at other times by a new mechanic. Inspiration can come from anywhere: a political event, films, other games, art, or something more abstract, like philosophical ideas or mathematical concepts. For there to be a game, there needs to be a system with non-obvious dilemmas. When I develop an idea, I begin with an alpha-prototype that can be as simple as scribbles on pieces of paper. At this stage, the goal is to test the core system to see if the dilemmas are interesting. This should also establish the basic mechanisms. At some point, the game is ready to advance to the next stage, and I put together an early beta-prototype that I can test with others. I will make changes to the game rules several times during a single test round, so I’m completely dependent on playtesters that are comfortable with frequent changes. Further development, balancing, and fine-tuning can take months or years, depending on the game.

Do you follow the design philosophy of starting with a theme and building mechanics around it, or vice versa?

It varies whether the mechanism or the theme comes first, but the result is usually better when I have a good mechanism to build around. I often begin with a core mechanism, find a fitting theme, then let the theme inspire the development of further mechanisms. A fitting theme is not only important for player immersion, but also helps in teaching the game, as it is much easier to learn a game when the theme and mechanisms match.

What is your ratio of games you’ve started designing to finished games that have hit the retail market? Can you tell us about one game you started designing that just didn’t make it?

I believe I’ve designed about twenty games that have been published. I have about two hundred folders on my computer with game concepts in various stages of design. That would make my ratio about 1:10. But then there are all those ideas that don’t even make it into a folder. By adding that into the equation, the ratio jumps to about 1:100. Sometimes a design process can come to a halt for a good reason, and it can be better to put the project away than to continue pushing in a direction that doesn’t really work. Sometimes I can return to a game years later, as it might be easier to see what works and what doesn’t work, once I’ve gotten some distance. I have shelved two game projects because a similar game was released on the market. It happened with Pandemic and with Camel Up. The game mechanisms weren’t very similar, but something in the concepts would have invited comparisons. I still have the folders for both these games, so I might resuscitate them at some point.

What was your inspiration for designing Escape: The Curse of the Temple and Santa Maria?

Escape was strongly inspired by the computer game Left 4 Dead. In that game, the players are a team of survivors trying to get through a zombie-infested city. The goal when designing Escape was to recreate the claustrophobic stress and the players’ complete dependency on one another. So, the initial idea for Escape didn’t really come from a specific theme or mechanism, but from the emotions that I wanted to evoke in the players.

For Santa Maria, the inspiration came from the mechanisms. Or rather, from the idea of making a dice-drafting engine-building game. Co-designer Eilif Svensson and I tried out variations on this idea, and we tested it for about a year with several different themes. Changing to a theme of colony-building opened up new design possibilities, including expanding the player board to a two-dimensional grid.

What were the biggest challenges in designing Escape and Santa Maria?

With a real-time game like Escape, a major design challenge is to keep every rule and mechanism so simple, streamlined, and intuitive that you minimize the risk of someone making a mistake mid-game. This is important, since there is no time to clarify rules. For this reason, we decided to not include any quest chambers in the base game. This is something I kind of regret, because the quest chambers are what really provide longevity and replayability.

With Santa Maria, we struggled with the engine-building concepts for a while. In the beginning, you built up the production of each of the six dice values. It was a problem, because once you had built up the production of a certain dice value, it was hard to see why you should ever want to pick a dice of another number. When we introduced the theme of colony-building, it became natural that the dice should also activate actions, and this helped with this problem. The problem was finally fixed when we introduced cornered triomino tiles that put a building in two different rows and columns.

What are some fun facts about Escape and Santa Maria that not a lot of people know?

Escape was originally meant to be a slightly darker game than it turned out. The soundtrack I used with the prototype was scarier, and an original rule was that players didn’t necessarily win or lose together. It was possible to leave someone behind in the temple to save yourself.

Some reviewers have talked about how Santa Maria seems to be inspired by our previous design Doodle City, because it uses a grid with dice on the x- and y-axis. In reality, Doodle City was never on our minds. For quite a long time, there was no grid. Instead, players increased their production for each of the six dice values separately. At that point, the game was much more inspired by a previous game of mine, Kampen om Fredriksten, which has only been released in Norwegian.

When you’re not creating board games, what do you do for a living?

When I’m not creating board games, I either work as a general practitioner at a local doctor’s office or as a researcher in the fields of social medicine and mental health.

Do you have any interesting hobbies (aside from designing and playing board games) that we should know about?

I love film, and I try to stay up-to-date with releases from my favorite directors. Also, like probably everyone else in this hobby, I’m fascinated by puzzles, escape rooms, pop-up books, and curious mechanical devices.

What is one theme you’d love to work into a game design, but haven’t yet been able to use?

A proper civilization game is on my to-do-list.

What’s one game you love that you wish you designed?

That must be either Puerto Rico or Chess. I think Puerto Rico is one of the best games ever designed. And Chess, because it would be cool to walk up to someone playing chess in the park and say, I designed that. And they would say, But this is a 1400-year-old game! And I would just nod and watch their heads explode.

Aside from your own games, what’s your favorite board game of all time?

My favorite game depends on the mood and the player group. I generally prefer games with little direct player conflict. Some of my most highly rated games are Puerto Rico, Taj Mahal, Ra, Go, and the lesser-known Homesteaders, by Alex Rockwell. For the past year, the game I have played the most is The Quest for El Dorado by Reiner Knizia.

If you could set up your ultimate gaming session and play a tabletop game with anyone from any time in history, living or dead, what game would you choose and with whom would you play it?

I’m not that into two-player games, so I would have to invite more than one historic person. It would be great fun to gather Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Marx, Jesus, and Douglas Hofstadter to join me for a round of The Resistance.

If and when you retire from game designing, what do you want your legacy to be?

I’m not concerned with legacy, and I think it’s rare that games nowadays become evergreen classics. Most games are on the market for less than a year. So, the goal is not so much to create a legacy, but to create games that can entertain and let people explore and discover new mental universes.

Do you have any advice for designers that would love to follow in your footsteps?

The first piece of advice is to play a lot of games. Play games of all types and genres. Bad games and good games. And when you begin designing games, start small. Smaller games are quicker to design, easier to test, and easier for a publisher to sell. I would not recommend self-publishing your first few games. A professional publisher knows the market and can help you polish your idea. Lastly, only design games if you love the process. Don’t expect to make any money.

What’s next for you? Where do you see yourself in the future?

The short-term plan is to focus more on Aporta Games. I co-founded the company in 2014, and up until now, my co-founder and I have both had full-time jobs on the side, meaning we’ve only published one or two games per year. We’re now in a position where we want to devote more time to the company, and thereby hope to increase our publishing capacity.

Antoine Bauza

Can you tell us a little about your history with board gaming? Did you play board games as a kid or discover the hobby as an adult?

As a boy, I played the classics, like Monopoly, but I was more into video games. As a teenager, I played pen-and-paper role-playing games in addition to video games. It was in early 2000, as a student, that I discovered modern board games. At this time, I was renouncing a career in the video game industry, due to the lack of creative liberties and compounded with receiving a junior position in the game design field. It was then that I started to play and design board games.

Tell us about one of the first board games you designed.

The first game I recall designing was a wrestling game, when I was eight years old. It was a team game with wrestlers and special powers. The name of the game was Catchmaniacs and it was horrible to play. I also spent a lot of time modifying classic games like Hotels, Formula D, and Full Metal Planète, which I played when I was younger.

Can you walk us through how you design a game? How do you start? What is your process?

I like all kinds of stories. I like to read, hear, and watch them. Before becoming a game designer, I wanted to write stories. I have kept this love for stories in my career as a game designer.

I believe that board games can be a tool to tell stories, and most of the time, when I start designing a new game, I start with the story I want to tell. For example, in Takenoko, I wanted to tell the story of a panda and a gardener sharing the same bamboo forest, but with different objectives. In Tokaido, I wanted to tell the story of travelers taking a journey across Japan.

Once I’ve decided what story or stories I want to tell, I look for the tools (mechanics) that will allow me to do so. Characters, objectives, and environments are the elements that become the components, like the board, pawns, cards, and tiles.