I’ve covered several of my favorite designers in previous Who’s whos, but today I want to talk about one of my favorite designing duos. While the hobby is filled with prolific one man shows, some designers seem to prefer pairing up to create a board game. That’s not to say either of these designers is not capable of designing a game on their own, and in fact some of their most well-known games are solo designs. But something magical happens when they design together, a certain best of both worlds combination arises. The two designers I’d like to cover are the two Brunos of board gaming: Bruno Cathala and Bruno Faidutti.

Bruno Faidutti is most well known for his game Citadels, which was a revelation when it came out in 2000 and pioneered the role selection style game. Each round players choose from a selection of role cards that represent medieval trades such as Merchant, Thief, Assassin, Warlord, Wizard etc… These roles then interact with each other in fun and chaotic ways. The Assassin kills another character, the Thief steals all of another character’s money, and the Warlord destroys another player’s building. The result is a cacophony of

interacting effects that makes for a great time. It has a lot of the double guessing, and trying to outthink your opponents like a game of poker. A player who is ahead for example is very worried about getting killed by the Assassin or having all of his/her money taken away by the Thief, but since these actions are carried out upon another character, vs the player themselves it becomes critical to choose a character the other players would not expect. The doublethink then comes back around as the other players try to outguess each other’s outguessing  such that when the roles are finally revealed and executed in numerical order it can feel like a complex poker flop.

Bruno Cathala’s most recent solo hit is the wonderful Five Tribes. This game takes the classic

mechanism from Mancala, picking up a group of objects and then distributing them out one at a time, and adds a whole other dimension of gameplay. Players pick up groups of different colored “meeples” (wooden people tokens) from a tile, and drop one off on each tile, with the caveat that the last meeple must match the color of a meeple at the destination tile. The color of this final pair then determines what action the player carries out, with one action assigned to each of the five meeple colors. Red meeples assassinate other meeples on the tile, white meeples help you buy special powered

Djinn cards, green meeples help you buy goods from the market etc… There’s something oddly compelling about that age old mancala gameplay, and when it’s combined with a more complex combination of rewards and actions for HOW you carry out the action, the result is fantastic.

So while each designer is successful when flying solo, when they come together it is like a peanut butter cup of board game design. Bruno Faidutti’s more chaotic fun combines with Bruno Cathala’s complex gameplay from simple systems. In a way they balance each other out to make a better whole. The best example of this is Mission Red Planet. This game combines the fun chaos of Citadels with the more balanced and clean approach of a game like Five Tribes. So both Brunos’ strong side comes through in the resulting design. In the game players are trying to colonize Mars and each turn they attempt to board one of several rocket ships headed to different locations on the planet. This is driven through a familiar mechanism from Citadels; role selection, except in this case each

player has their own deck of the same 9 roles to choose from. Here the roles are not so medieval, but are fun things like the saboteur who jumps in a rocket AND blows up another one waiting to launch, or the femme fatale who converts a colonist planet side their player’s side. The separate decks solve one of my chief complaints about Citadels, which is that in that game you often spent a lot of time watching other players make their decision from the single deck of roles. It is never a good time to watch other players think, and this can slow down a game, or cause folks to lose interest, so the separate decks and simultaneous selection of Mission Red Planet is much improved. There’s also a lot more going on based on this role selection than there was in Citadels., with the points of the game coming down to an area majority contest on the different part of Mars. Players who have the most colonists in a given sector get the resource reward for that sector, but each sector gives one of three different resources worth one to three points respectively. Claiming a sector with the crappy ice resource that’s only worth one point is much less appealing than the holding on to a majority in a section that has resources that are worth three points each. And so naturally the areas that are more lucrative become a bit of a bloodbath as players vie to hold onto control. The game really is a blast, and is a stellar accomplishment made possible by two designing minds coming together.

In fact, both Brunos seem to prefer designing in pairs. When they are not designing together they are working with other fantastic designers. Bruno Faiduitti has designed the wonderful push your luck game Incan Gold with Ticket to Ride’s designer Alan Moon, among some other well known designs with Serge Leget. Bruno Cathala has also designed with Serge Leget including the well known Cooperative game with a possible traitor Shadows over Camelot. He most commonly designs with Ludovic Maublanc with the Greek myth inspired Cyclades and the poker and dice mash up Dice Town. Across the hobby it is not uncommon to see two names on the box of a designer board game, and many games are certainly better for it. What are some of your favorite designer duos?

For years Germany’s Spiel Des Jahres (Game of the Year) has been the sign of quality in the modern board game market.  I have covered countless previous winners over the course of my blogging here, and that’s no accident. These games have an elegance and approachability that other games in the market lack. Publishers are eager to win the award, especially in it’s native country of Germany as a win promises really great sales for years to come, a surefire hit that the publisher can bank on and plan expansions for. Even just being nominated gives sales a little bump as that iconic ribbon on the front of the box is a telltale sign of quality.

Since 2011 there have been two levels of Spiel Des Jahres award. The traditional, and original Spiel Des Jahres is awarded to simpler and more family friendly games. These are still great games, but tend to be shorter and more approachable than the Kennerspiel Des Jahres, or complex game of the year. This latter category is where a lot of my game group’s favorite games reside, as they have a bit more depth and strategic meat on their bones. This years nominees are a bit more of a mystery to me, but that just means more great games I have yet to discover. But without further ado, the nominees!

Spiel Des Jahres

Kingdomino by the awesome and prolific designer Bruno Cathala wins my vote simply for having a punny title. This game is a tile laying title sharing some light similarities with the classic Dominoes. There’s something really enjoyable about playing with Dominoes and this game replicates a bit of that feel while replacing the traditional numbers with landscape types that players are trying to arrange in a 5 by 5 kingdom. Blue Orange Games has picked this one up for release in the United States and it fits right in with their line of other great family friendly games.

 

 

 

 

Magic Maze sounds less like a pleasurable game of Dominoes and more like a frantic heist. The game is a cooperative style title meaning all players work together to win against the game itself. Each player takes the role of a certain hero like a mage or warrior or elf, but these heroes can only perform certain actions. The goal of the game is to coordinate these actions across players to complete their goal. The game adds some nice silliness by having this traditional fantasy trope all take place in a shopping mall… not your average kingdom. The coordination aspect of the game is accentuated by the fact that everything has to be completed before the timer runs out.

 

 

 

 

Wettlauf nach El Dorado is by the mathematician of board games Reiner Knizia. His games are often defined by their unique scoring mechanisms. This one is not out in the United States yet, but with a nomination on this list it can’t be too far off. It combines one of my favorite mechanisms, deck building, with a traditional race game. Players are trying to find the fabled city of El Dorado and steal its treasures before the other players get their first.

 

 

 

 

 

Kennerspiel Des Jahres

Exit: The Game takes the excitement that is the escape room and boils it down into a board game. Escape room or puzzle room experiences are popping up everywhere, so it was only a matter of time before someone successfully captured these experiences in a board game. There is not much going on here componentwise since the game is little more than a deck of cards, but if you enjoy escape rooms this will definitely scratch that itch. The one downside of these types of games is that they are not really replayble. Once you solve the puzzle there’s not much else to do. But the series is rapidly expanding and affordable, so there’s always the next puzzle to solve.

 

 

 

 

Raiders of the North Sea is a viking game that just hit the German market. Since these awards are based on Germany sometimes there is a bit of a timewarp that happens. More often than not, the game is released in Germany first and then comes to the U.S. but in this case the game has been out for two years already in the United States but hit Germany within the window of the 2017 award. It is a worker placement style game, and each turn players can selection action spaces to prepare for the raid, or send a ship off to try to successfully complete a raid. It certainly sounds more exciting than the traditional farming theme, and maybe the award nomination will help get this game reprinted and more generally available. This is also a major accomplishment because Raiders of the North Sea is the first kickstarter game to ever be nominated for a Spiel Des Jahres award. Crowdfunding has reached the big leagues.

 

 

Terraforming Mars is the clear winner of this category, at least in my heart. No game has EVER completely captivated my board game group like this one. There are often two games of it being run simultaneously, and half the group has their own copy. It is a longer game as well, typically running two hours, so it is impressive with how often it hits the table. It is a tableau game where players spend resources to build cards representing various technologies or buildings used to terraform mars. The game has a ton of hard science in it, as players work to increase the oxygen content of the air, raise the temperature of the planet, and add water to the environment. It is an excellent game that will be played for years to come and I am thrilled to see it recognized in this award category.

I can’t wait to find out who wins in July, and will announce those winners here. In the meantime I’ve got some research to do on these game of the year contenders!

 

I received an interesting party game in the mail this week called Chaos Cards. I am not sure it’s the right fit for me, or if I will ever get it played in earnest. I gave them fair warning about this. They did know they were talking to a board game blogger, right?

That’s not to say I don’t go to parties, or host parties. It’s just that at half the parties I go to that have more than eight people, at least three of them are already spending hours roleplaying an angry armored dwarf or looking very seriously at a map of Central Europe. At the other half of parties I go to, people are shouting at stone of granite from behind a pane of glass. I am just not sure where this party game fits in.

But I did want to discuss party games generally, and this does present a great opportunity to do that. You see, party games have a very different demographic than a lot of the games I have written about. When people sit down to play a traditional board game, they know what they are signing up for. Whether it’s a half hour or seven, everyone is in it to win it, and folks learn the rules as best they can to be effective at the game.

With a party games, the goal is very rarely to win. Heck, with the game I just received there aren’t even points to keep track of. Everyone is in a party game to have fun, and the fundamental goal of such a game is to be fun enough to get people on board.

But I suppose all of these kinds of games require a different level of investment, and, quite possibly, a different level of tipsiness in order to succeed. At the bottom of this investment gradient is the classic party game Cards Against Humanity. This game is essentially madlibs with the most offensive fill in the blank cards possible. It is low investment because players can join or leave the game at will, and just about any card in the right situation will be hilarious. Players don’t have to ham it up, act any differently or think on their feet. It is the “just add water” of party games, and that is the secret to its success.

On the other end of the spectrum are games that require acting, improvisation and quick witted thinking at every turn. These games require a different level of participation, and if the drinks aren’t flowing or the guests don’t know each other as well, they may fall flat or dissolve rather quickly. Classics such as charades or Pictionary have a lot more risk. Risk in this case being that you have to put yourself out there and put your possibly terrible drawing or acting skills on public display.

So where does Chaos Cards fit on this spectrum? Somewhere towards the more risky end I would say. The game consists of fifty cards, each with a “mission” printed on it, the player’s goal to accomplish during that party. Some of these are quite benign, like using the word “Noble” excessively in your sentences all evening, or constantly steering the conversation towards talk of parallel dimensions. Some seem a bit more risky like finding a party goer you don’t know as well and somehow referring to them as “vulture” once every half hour, or finding a fellow party goer to exchange clothes with.

The name of the game seems accurate enough as there is no doubt that the game would introduce chaos to your party… but I have to wonder, if you handed the cards out to guests as they arrive, how many missions would be completed? It would really depend on the crowd at the party, and perhaps just how much alcohol was circulating. But if it did take hold it also seems like the party itself would become a Chaos Cards party.  That is to say, it would become the focus of the evening. Still I am curious to try it out someday, if the opportunity does present itself.

One more note on party games generally though. While Cards Against Humanity has the distinct advantage of making the hilarity for you, I find that the games that require more investment have a bit of a longer shelf life. A game where the players create the fun, through acting, thinking on their feet etc is a lot more like a blank page, and what fills that page will be very different from group to group. With Cards Against Humanity it seems as though an injection of new cards is required whenever the old cards have been seen enough times, much like a trivia game might need new cards when folks already know the answers. Still, the way Cards Against Humanity makes the humor seem effortless is hard to argue with, and is the source of its extreme popularity.

What are some of your favorite party games?

Full Disclosure: I was provided a copy of Chaos Cards in exchange for my honest thoughts on the game.

Full Discolsure Part 2: If you host parties where Chaos Cards would be a good fit feel free to contact me. I can play a decent dwarf paladin.

While expansions can be great, like extra gravy on top of mashed potatoes, it’s not all good news. Expansions do have some downsides. There are, for example, bad expansions. I have thankfully been mostly out of the blast radius of these, so I have minimal direct experience. But I remember a few expansions that absolutely killed all excitement for a game in my local game group. Expansions  that were so bad that they actually hurt the experience of the original game, and left people with a sour taste in their mouth.

One of my favorite games is Suburbia, a game that captures all of the fun of the classic PC game Sim City. Suburbia’s first expansion, Suburbia Inc, did what any great expansion should. It added a few small new elements, and gave players more of what they already loved. However, it’s second expansion Suburbia 5 Star was so bad it ended up making people shelve the game for a few months. 5 Start added a few things, just like Suburbia Inc… but these additions poisoned the well.

The first thing it did was to add a fifth player. Suburbia had always been a four player game, and what could be better than making a favorite game accomodate more players? This is another case of being careful what you wish for. Suburbia Five Star was one of those cases where adding another player broke the delicate balance of downtime vs. decision time in the game. It might not seem like much, but just a little bit more downtime from a fifth player can make the wait between turns seem too long. Multiply this small wait for a whole game’s worth of turns, and something shifts in the perception of the game itself. The best games are like time travel. You look up at the end of the game and wonder just how time flew by so fast. If the opposite happens and you check your watch midgame only to despair that the evening is almost over… that’s a bad sign.

The other misstep was the new star system that the expansion added. This new system affected every aspect of the game, from player order each turn to being a tiebreaker for the goals that players chase to score points. Unlike many expansions that add a small new aspect to the game, this was game changing stuff that affected the core of the experience. It did not go over too well with the game’s most passionate fans, and so instead of injecting new life and energy like an expansion should, this change left the game sitting on the shelf gathering dust.

Another game that fundamentally changes with an expansion is Machi Koro.  Machi Koro is a nice family style game where players roll a die every turn, and that roll determines what happens based on the building cards in their and other players’ city tableau. When Machi Koro’s Harbor expansion came out, everyone in my local group was excited about new cards for a game that they already loved. But just like Suburbia Five Star, this expansion flipped the script in a negative way. The original game had an easy straight forward setup, where all cards were available from the start, so players had equal opportunity to build their city. In the expansion, the marketplace of what cards are available is determined from a random card draw, and continues to be random from there based on a central deck of all the different cards available. So now the game had two layers of randomness, both the result of dice rolls every turn AND the randomness of the card draw. This proved to be a bridge too far for my group, and so the game was shelved.

Ok, so there are bad expansions. But what is the ugly? Well, there is a an unfortunate truth that not all games really need or have room for an expansion. I guess that metaphor here is that your favorite game is a perfectly tuned sports car. If it’s great as it is, do you really need to hook a camper trailer worth of new stuff to the back of it? While many modern games are designed with expansions in mind, there are also games that just don’t need any more than what is included in the box.

There is also the conundrum of too much of a good thing. For example, I own all of the Dominion expansions, as it was one of my favorite games. The allure of more cards for a game I love is always compelling, like a siren song… but how many of those cards have I really explored in any depth? The truth is; not many. I have a hard and fast rule that I won’t buy an expansion to a game unless I have played the original game at least ten times, but even with this rule I sometimes feel like my group hasn’t fully plumbed the depths of a particular game before we are bolting on new shiny bits to it with the latest expansion. This might be a group specific thing of course. If your group has played a particular game almost exclusively, it is much more likely to be ready to dive into some new content.

Another potentially group specific thing is when to introduce an expansion. If not everyone at the table has played the base game, is it really fair to throw them into the deep end with an expansion right from the start? Do you specifically exclude people who haven’t played the base game? If you are playing with the same group each week this is less of a problem as most people in the group will have played the same things, but in a more transient or public gaming group, all bets are off.

Still, at the end of the day, expansions are a pretty great. It’s hard to argue with more of a game that you love, and these missteps I’ve discussed are few and far between. What are some of your favorite expansions?

After hearing news about his successful (and still going) kickstarter for Bios Genesis 2nd edition, I had a chance to catch up with legendary designer Phil Eklund who’s science based games I have written about previously. Sitting down with Phil was a huge honor, and I think from the interview you can tell that we both very much love to nerd out about the subjects of science and board games. I have added editor’s notes and comments where I could to provide as much context as possible. Also, I have never had to link to wikipedia so much in one article! In the most exciting news, the kickstarter now includes both Bios Genesis about the origins of life AND the next game in the series, Bios Megafauna 2, where players develop creatures to rule the food chain.

 

JO: Tell me a bit about how you got into board game design

PE: Well Jeremy, most people have this story where, somehow, there is this almost ineffable fascination with a particular medium or particular art form. As a child I played games for fun, but this was a way [of having fun] that not only brought me together with the other neighborhood kids, but also almost immediately I started changing things and adding things.[I was] always making it more driven by some weird impulse that’s common to most really dedicated gamers.

But I have to say that I have always been more fascinated with game design than actually playing games.

 

JO: Ok, so the design element is your favorite part versus the gameplay itself?

PE: Yes. I am at best a lackluster player, but I’m always fascinated to see that well, these elements when combined, should recreate the sort of motivations that people had at that time. Then I try it out on a bunch of people with different personalities and see how it plays out, and how they react to it. It’s never obvious which way it’s going to play out. Most of my games are kind of like a sandbox, so they can kind of go in any direction that the players wish to take it. It’s most interesting to see this play out. Whether or not I win or lose is not of high importance to me; it’s the experience.

JO: Yeah, I definitely agree, one of my favorite games of yours is High Frontier. When my friends and I get together to play that game, unlike most games that we play it’s really not about who wins or how many points someone has by the end.

Last time for example my friend was most excited to build a really powerful solar sail and soaring around the inner orbits of the solar system. Just the story of how cool that felt was what he came away with from that game.

PE: Yes, I can imagine. It’s gratifying to hear such tales of exploration, because of all the iterations it took to try to get to a point where photon sails could actually be in the same game, the same simulation system as rocketry.  They seemed to be so utterly different in their acceleration and fuel use and the like. Trying to get it so they could be in the same scale was kind of like an obsession. And the entire game was built around this accommodation of rocketry with non-rocketry.

JO: Right, I definitely read up on your early designs with Rocket Flight, and finally the eureka moment of mapping things out by energy.

PE: Yeah, that was a Eureka moment.

[Note: Rocket Flight was Phil’s 199 design that tried to factor in more of the “space” of space with large hex based maps that captured the gravity and distance between objects. High Frontier took this design and made it practical with an energy based map instead of distance.]

JO: So how long have you been designing games? I saw just out on board game geek, your earliest design was from 1988 is that right.

PE: Yes that was my earliest published design, but as I may have mentioned a little bit earlier, I had a biplane game that I made myself that I made with Xerox copies for my friends and the like, so this was even in the late ‘60’s that I had neighborhood games. There was a star trek game, and a smugglers game. I am still working on games that have these themes that interested me in the 8th or 9th grade.

[Note: Phil’s first published game Lords of the Sierra Madre covers some material later capture in Pax Porfiriana. Both games cover Mexico during a tumltuous time in history.]

JO: How do you decide a topic for your next game? You’ve obviously covered a wide variety of topics but is it just what’s grabbing your interest in terms of your reading and your research at a given time or is there a series of ideas that are knocking around and come to fruition.

PE: Well let me think about that. Sometimes I will read a book and a certain passage will just strike me and I’ll say ‘Well this is just screaming to be a game!’ For example, I read about the early Triassic period when there were proto-mammals and proto-dinosaurs both of them on equal footing then, and how they would battle for dominance. That was where Bios and American Megafauna came from.

I remember too, when I was doing Origins I was trying to get the map right so that the new world could be discovered from the west or the east. It would sort of depend on the ice extent during that turn, whether not it was possible or not. But I wanted it sort of equal from the west or the east, and from this experience I sort of got interested in Greenland.

Greenland had to be a spot on the map as a sort of a bridge, so if you wanted to come from Europe to discover America, Greenland was the place to be. I remember when I was doing it, I remember saying ‘Gosh this is a really interesting story. Somehow three cultures ended up on one desolate treeless island.  Who would have thought after more than 10,000 years of separation that the east and the west would finally meet again for the first time on desolate desert island out in the middle of nowhere, and then they’d be trapped on this island as the waters froze around them and they’d have to figure out how to survive. This is like the very stuff of literature, this plot that’s unfolding. So just when you’re doing some research other things become interesting, fascinating or significant.

[Note: Origins: How we became Human covers the development of the human brain in early human species and eventually covers common civilization topics like culture and society.]

 

JO: So why a second edition of Bios Origins, and why kickstarter? 

PE: Well Bios Genesis was kind of an experiment. It was based upon a grand vision to encompass the entire history of the earth into a trilogy of games. And I’ve been sort of struggling along these lines for a long time, and it’s been very difficult.

Bios Genesis was by far the longest and hardest stretch, and it also was the least likely to be popular or succeed, because the subject matter was so esoteric, dry and couched in quadra-syllabic words that were longer than even German words.

It didn’t seem like biochemistry would be a very popular thing, but it’s something I really wanted to do. So I worked on it for an awful long time, and eventually, somehow, I got a prototype that I liked, and I just went out for a couple of thousand games, the bare minimum. I was hoping that I’d be able to sell all the copies eventually, after a couple of years.

But it sold out very quickly, and this caught me by surprise! In fact the retailers were very upset at me over this. They said well it was supposed to debut here in Essen 2016 and it did, but it sold out before I even got here. So I told them all, well I am coming out with a new edition, so this one will be even better. A lot of these retailers were mollified by this, but the first edition had sold out so fast, it was only direct to customers. So the second edition, I wanted to fix some mistakes and make sure that it was part of the trilogy.

Right now I am doing Bios Megafauna 2, the second game in the trilogy, and I wanted to make sure these games played together. I wanted to make some changes and make it all flow right.

So I decided, yes, I’ll make a new edition, the first edition I came out with some, it was well illustrated, but there were still a lot of cards that weren’t illustrated, so I asked my artist to try to come up with more art, and then I wanted to see how many the market would bear for a new edition. I didn’t know how many of the previous owners would actually spring for a new edition, and I didn’t know how many new people I could drag into this. I thought maybe I have already dredged all the uber-nerds there are out there, who would even be able to pronounce biochemistry, I wasn’t sure. So I eventually decided to go with Alley Cat Games to launch a kickstarter campaign to see what the market was, see how many might sell, and what the interest level was. I wanted the game to be right, and for it to be right as part of the series. So this was the result.

 

JO: So what was most challenging about Bios Genesis and getting this particular topic right?

 

PE: The most challenging things about it were the player identity. This was especially complicated because of the idea of having parasites in the game, and endosymbionts.

[Note: In Bios Genesis, players each take on the role of a different aspect of life, from amino acids, to lipids, to pigments and nucleic acids it is a very unique approach vs games where all players start on the same footing]

Normally in a game you’re one particular side, and you have particular forces or units or identity or something, but here that wasn’t the case.

Here you had different specializations that had to get together, so there was an element of cooperation and competitiveness. And if you happen to entrain one of your opponent’s life stuff into your own organism, then you have a composite hybrid organism and this proved to be much more complicated than I had originally envisioned. It was much more involved to try to get the rules right for a committee action on say a mutation or gaining macro organisms or whatever, this was pretty convoluted.

The other big deal in Bios Genesis was that I needed to have the feeling somehow that the chances are VERY slim for life to get started, but nevertheless not let it snowball so that the first player to create life is going to run away with the game. Here again the idea  is that there are multiple aspects to life, four of them in the game, and “life” has to be some association of these four qualities. This was the tough part of it.

And then there’s the fact that it’s so scientifically contentious what life is, and how it might have come to be. There’s an awful lot of debate on the proper place of the simple cells, the procaryotes and eucaryotes, which came first, was there a predecessor to RNA, or was there ever an RNA world.

There was a lot of things that I wanted to have in the game and to try to get them all in, proved to be probably my longest set of rules (if you don’t count all the modules in High Frontier). So those were the biggest design challenges.

JO: Fantastic. It sounds like you accomplished it though, as much as it was a bear to do so, and honed it even further with this second edition.

PE: Yeah, the kickstarter is just a day or two days old for Bios Genesis second edition, and I am told it’s the second most successful kickstarter campaign for a science board game. It’s running not too far after Edison vs. Tesla.

[Note: As of this interview being published Bios Genesis has officially become the MOST successful science board game kickstarter.]

JO: Wow that’s fantastic, especially for a subject like that, to know that there is an appetite and an audience out there for these more sandbox style science games.

PE: Yes, this was not clear at all. I mean, I have games that I enjoy, and which I enjoyed designing, but it was not at all obvious that there was another person like me anywhere on the planet!

 

JO: What is your goal in designing this campaign of three different games?

PE: With American Megafauna and then Bios Megafauna first edition I had like I mentioned earlier the idea of dinosaurs vs mammals beginning after the Permian catastrophe. This had the advantage of having two big mega dynasties that both had a lot of emotional appeal with people.

[Note: American Megafauan and Bios Megafauan are two of Phil’s earlier designs that deal with the battle for dominance between proto-mammals and proto-dinosaurs]

I mean, all boys love dinosaurs, and lions,tigers, and bears, giraffes and the like. These also have great appeal. So this was quite successful, but the challenge now was that I wanted to encompass ALL of life. Not alluring, photogenic megafauna. I wanted the insects, and the plants, and some fungus and the things that make up the bulk of the biosphere. Thins that control the aspects of climate and habitability on the planet.

So in order to do this in a game called megafauna I had to have some sort of way to encompass the various animal types, and also have them all have a capacity to get big, to get mega. In the first game in the trilogy: Bios Genesis, you’re trying to get to one of the animal, plant or fungi phyla. There’s eight of them in that game, and that means there’s eight possible entries into the next game of the series Bios Megafauna, and these eight were of all sorts of classes great and small today, but I wanted to have them sort of on equal footing from the beginning, to see which one will take over the planet and gain dominance.

So instead of teeth which were a dividing motif in the original Bios Megafauna; dinosaurs had a certain type of teeth, and like sharks you had batteries of them that were ever replacing, and mammals one set for life that were precise for a certain job, this separated the vertebrates, now I needed to separate them at a more fundamental level. So I choose skeletons for Bios Megafauna second edition. There’s four skeletal types in the game endoskeletons like vertebrates, exoskeletons like bugs and crabs, hydroskeletons like echinoderms and velvet worms or water bears, other lesser known small creatures today, and the last one is cytoskeleton which is found in many types of plants, vegetation fungi and the like.

So the players represent different skeletal types and they all have a chance to try to get big by developing lungs and breathing oxygen, becoming apex carnivores. They all have their little quirks and happenstance with their particular skeleton.

To make it flow together I mapped the colors from Bios Genesis that represented that four aspects of life to the organs in Bios Megafauna second edition. Red is the sensory system: your eyes, nose, ears and nervous system as well, and the brain. Yellow is the circulatory system: good lungs, good muscles. Green is the digestive systems, and blue is the reproductive system. So these four colors still represent things which they had analogs for in the first game Bios Genesis, but now they are no longer players, they are organs or aspects of life that you have to get in order to get big or become the apex carnivore. So the same themes are following a somewhat a different plane of functionality than they did in Bios Genesis.

JO: What was your design goal with this second edition of Bios Megafauna? Obviously the campaign mode is a big part of it and you’ve shifted from teeth to skeletons in terms of a differentiating factor.

PE: The goal is to encompass all life, not just tetrapods or vertebrates. There’s plant life, and depending on the variant you can be any of the three trophic levels: Plant, Herbivore or Carnivore. It also includes scenarios set on Mars and Venus, with corresponding maps. There is a complete climate module for the advanced game where just like in the original you have both the imperative of competing with your opponents, and the imperative to survive in a roller coaster environment and trying to prepare for anything that can be thrown at you. These two requirements, in the advance game are very challenging. That’s what’ similar between Bios Megafauna 1 and 2.
What’s different about them is that there is more generality of mutations. The mutations, by the way, compared to the ones in Bios Megafauna 1 are promotable as they are in Bios Genesis. When you promote them you have a choice of two orientations [of the card]. You can take situations like, electro location, where even bacteria have some sense of an electric field nearby, and you can take this in two different directions in the game. You can promote it to into echo location, like whales or bats where you send out a signal and it bounces back and even at a relatively large size you can zero in on very small creatures like mosquitoes or krill in the ocean or something. Or you can perhaps use it as an infrared pit sensor like found in protolithic rattlesnakes so you can see in the dark. So this sort of dichotomy, applies to all the mutations in the game, and it comes with some pretty bizarre configurations. It’s also got a visual thing too where you can build up your creature. You can see what it looks like with a head, and a brain and a tail and the like. And the plants may just be docile, but they could turn into horror plants out of a Hollywood movie that quietly photosynthesize during the day but during the night they breathe oxygen and grab things. Maybe you’ve seen this movie.

 

JO: I’ve noticed in the trend of your production that you’ve mostly been making kind of a smaller box card games. Plenty of science and plenty of meat on these games, but since High Frontier and the original Bios Megafauna the trend has been towards that smaller box game. Is that a conscious decision in terms of selling them and ease of production or, can you take me through that choice in form factor?

PE: Yeah. Especially based here in Germany if you can keep the game under 500 grams, you can send it anywhere in the world for four euros. This was a big advantage, and the players seemed to like the fact that they could actually carry these games along with them wherever they went, and store them in a small area and the like. That being said however I am coming out with larger games this year. John Company is a full sized board game, and Bios Megafauna 2 is also a board game, and these both will be a bigger deal productions along with a Collector’s edition of Pax Porfiriana in a sort of cigar sized box.

JO: How do you playtest a game like this? I mean you’re obviously trying to create a simulation and be true to the science, but also have a game that is, if not necessarily balanced, at least playable, and consistent in avoiding snowball effects and breaking apart. Can you take me through a little of your playtests process?

PE: I could, but it’s still a learning experience. Playtesting is kind of an Achilles heel for me. It’s very hard. I drive a harsh pace. I burn through play testers like crazy. I just go through batteries and batteries of them, and they invest quite a bit into this playtesting process.  They have to learn a version of the game, that will probably be torn apart, and then try to unlearn it and learn something new. It’s very hard.

So I have to have teams many different teams. I have certain players who will play solitaire, and I always like to have a solitaire version so I try to this started first and try to get somebody on that. That’s obviously easier for playtesting. It is challenging for example to get four players together and try to play to a certain depth of the game. It is even harder when maybe you’re only interested in a particular and rather rare corner instance. Like what happens if all cratons crash together early and the oxygen dives to like 3% and plants are totally dominating because the cloud level is just ideal for it. Can the animals recover from such a thing? So I can’t answer your question very eloquently because it’s tough. You can’t playtest enough. And there are going to be holes if you are going to be delivering something really significant and unique that’s never been done before. There’s going to be problems. I’ve gotten better.

JO: Yeah, it’s a challenge. You’re obviously willing to have living rules and let the rules evolve once the game gets out into the wild so to speak, which is a challenge as a consumer product. I found that once you get used to it, and you accept the fact that the rules do evolve, it can be a benefit. When I downloaded the updated Bios Megafauna rules it was a much improved game by that point, and essentially the game you get in the box can get better and better if you’re willing to download and reinterpret the rules, and play around with things as the play testers of the mass market start to pick away at it.

PE: Yes. So this is a combination of change that players have to suffer through, and obviously it’s not for everyone. But as you say, it can really improve the gaming experience, in the same way that Wikipedia or something else like that does. Because one person can’t think of it all, and maybe where the rubber meets the road, and it actually gets played and if you’ve got a worldwide population of various experiences going at this, then yes a game will become robust and actually recreate something that’s relevant and significant.

JO: Yeah. The thing I love about your games most, personally as a fan is just that I am really learning about something as I go through the game, and not in an edutainment, dry sort of way. Instead I feel like I am playing with the toolset, and quite literally learning on the job about how these vastly complex topics work. Obviously it’s reduced from the actual science to be a playable game, but you’re still picking up a lot of the nuance of just what’s going on there. And that’s a very unique experience that you could only really have with an interactive game versus a book, or a movie or a documentary.

PE: Yes, a good simulation game will tell you something about how the universe works and make the world seem a bit more comprehensible. And the advantage of a game over some other formats is that it’s not a game unless all the players are playing by the same rules. It emphasizes a fundamental fact of science that we all live in the same universe, and we all ultimately operate by the same rules no matter what culture you’re from. If you understand this, it will be as applicable in Mongolia as it will on Alpha Centauri. This sort of mindset gives gamers an advantage over many educators or philosophers or the like. It gives them an advantage to see that the world really is an objective place, and we’re not all that different. Gamers when they come together, they are playing on the same field, the same set of rules, just like in real life.

JO: So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and doing this interview, it’s been a pleasure. What else is on the horizon?

PE: Alright. Well the kickstarter is for Bios Genesis and as I said, I did this with some trepidation, I didn’t have a lot of luck on the kickstarter campaign for High Frontier. But I am very happy and pleased with this new kickstarter effort. I hope it brings this particular experience to a wider range of audience than the normal nerds that I deal with all the time. That would be great if that’s even possible with a game of bio chemistry. The enthusiasm has been so great that I think, with close to two thousand backers already  and it’s only like the second day, so that I am encouraged to try kickstarting some of the other games that are out of print.

[Note: The High Frontier kickstarter was run by a separate company One Small Step Games/Ares Magazine and was criticized for being very later, and poorly communicated.]

I’m considering doing a kickstarter,  for a four player edition of Greenland for. When I did an experimental fourth player, the sea Sámi for the original Greenland that sold out very fast, and so I may come out with either a deluxe or small box version, I don’t know of a four player Greenland.

[A new version of] Neanderthal, Pax Pamir, a deluxe version the the Khyber Knives expansion, and a map that Cole Wehrle designed. Cole by the way is designing feverishly, putting the last touches on John Company another 19th century game concerning the British Empire that I want to publish this year. So the three games being published this year are Bios Genesis Second Edition, Bios Megafauna 2 and John Company, Cole Wehrle’s game. After that I still have to do the third game in the trilogy which would be Bios Origins, and I’ve been tinkering with that for a long time. This would be like the original Origins but it has to accommodate the differences between flier and burrowers and swimmers and all these different specializations and creatures that you can become in Bios Megafauna and perhaps have different civilizations in your different Biospherical areas, the air and under the ground and  in the ocean.

So those are the imperatives. I am also trying in conjunction with my son Matthew to do a science fiction PAX game based upon technology and a utopian look at the future. Matt says there’s far too many dystopian futures, we really need to have a utopian one.

I am also working on a game which has failed on playtests several times but I’m still trying to come out with a game on slavery, because I think it’s an important issue, and for some reason it’s kind of a neglected issue. The story of how slavery was ended, and who’s responsible and why. It’s really the greatest political accomplishment in history to abolish such an institution worldwide, and this story deserves to be told. Also I have a zepplin game that I’ve been struggling with for a long time. So there’s various projects that I’d like to attempt.

JO: That’s great! I am really excited about the success you found on kickstarter. I know that some of your kickstarter experiences in the past were frustrating and challenging, and it seems like this is a new leaf that will hopefully open up new opportunities to reprint games and reach a broader audience, so that’s fantastic news. I am looking forward to Bios Genesis 2 and Bios Megafauna 2. Those are all great games and I’m really just thrilled that there’s games out there… Board games have become an amazing hobby for lots of reasons, but it’s fantastic that there’s room out there for these sandbox educational but fascinating topics, sort of science games.

 

 

This Saturday marked 2017’s International Tabletop day. While it doesn’t take a special day to get me out gaming on the weekend, I was happy to sit down with friends old and new and try out some new games!

 

First Via Nebula, a delightful route building and pick up and deliver game by Martin Wallace. I have always had a soft spot for Wallace’s games, but they can be a bit dry in terms of theme. This was certainly the most colorful game I have played by him, and was nice and light versus his usual brain-burner fare.

Essentially players build routes from different resources to building sites in order to complete buildings for points. There is an element of cooperation as everyone is using the same network of paths to different buildings sites and resources, but at the end of the day the player who delivers and build most efficiently is the winner.

The next game was a light cooperative title called Samurai Spirit. The person who taught it to us put it best when he described it as Seven Samurai the board game. In the game you draw cards that represent bandits attacking the village. Each of these bandits has a number and players are trying to have those numbers add up to their exact threat limit. Think here of taking hits in a game of Blackjack and trying to get as close as possible to 21. However there’s other things going on with the cards, as some of them deal wounds that could add up to kill your character (an instant game over), and others burn the village or send in additional ninja raids. Lastly there are three icons that players must defend against each round, and if they don’t bad effects are triggered. This village is in some real trouble, and like most cooperative games the strategy boils down to risk management as players try to deal with the different threats that can come up each turn.  The best part however was transforming into the animal form of your respective samurai when you got two wounds. Because who doesn’t want to be a samurai bear?

 

I also got to play another classic game, Wiz-War. This one would qualify for the games that stand the test of time I wrote about last week. The original design is from 1983, and was a big inspiration for Richard Garfield’s juggernaut Magi: The Gathering. You can see of the roots here with counterspells and different schools of magic at play, but Wiz-War has a really fantastic sense of space that is missing in Magic: The Gathering. Players are wizards running around corridors trying to steal other wizard’s treasure, kill the other wizards, or just survive. Things escalate quickly and the game feels a lot like controlled chaos in a box. Certainly different than a very clean and balanced Euro-style game, but tons of fun if you’re in the mood to sling some spells.

The last game I got to try at tabletop day was the Kennerspiel des Jahres winner Broom Service. Or as I like to call it, Kiki’s Delivery Service the board game. Players run a potion delivery service and try to get potions out to the far corners of the map to score the most points. Each player has an identical set of action cards, three gathering cards for the different potion types, four witches corresponding to the different terrains, two druids who specialize in delivery and a cloud fairy, to clear those pesky cloud hazards. Each turn players play four of these cards. They can choose to play them “bravely” which gets a better version of the same action, but if any other player also plays this card bravely they lose the action completely. Or they can play them “cowardly” in order to guarantee they get to play the action. So it becomes a game of guessing what other players have played that turn, and trying to bluff or outguess them to get the most out of your actions. Tons of fun, and beautiful to look at as well.

All in all it was a very successful tabletop weekend! Let me know in the comments if you got out for some gaming this weekend!

While I have been writing a lot about how games have evolved, and whether older games stand the test of time, there are two games I want to call out as surviving the aging process better than most. One game that aged like a fine wine is Merchant of Venus, originally published in 1988. It is a pick up and deliver game, where players drive a ship between different planets trying to make the most money. Everyone starts with a crumby ship, and very little money and must scratch their way up to a space age fortune.

At first glance the game has a lot in common with other games I have criticized from that era. Roll and move is one of the central mechanics, so luck of the dice is definitely in play here. However, many of the aspects of the game are ahead of their time. There is a fantastic sense of exploration, as the 14 different cultures are randomly assigned face down to different board locations for each game. This provides not only variety, but creates an opening of the game where players must strike out and find the different cultures to make successful trade routes. In the mid game there is a risk reward factor, as to whether you want to keep exploring, or stick to the few planets you know to continue your trade routes.

There is also a great ship upgrade system. You can buy new, bigger or faster ships or install shields to protect your ship from grazing asteroids. Most critically, you can upgrade your ship’s drive, which helps offset that crumby dice luck that I mentioned earlier. You see, every space on the board is either red, blue, or yellow. If you install a red or yellow drive, you can skip those colored spaces, and all of a sudden your ship is 33% faster than before. Install a  red/yellow combo drive and you are just zipping around the galaxy, but these drives take space and require an investment that might put you behind the chase to be the richest space merchant… so there are tradeoffs to consider.

Merchant of Venus also has a fantastic sense of humor. The products that different cultures sell always make me chuckle. Apparently Earth’s main export in the space age is rock videos, while other cultures sell things like impossible furniture or living toys. Very strange stuff, but who am I to second guess a successful business venture?

The game was out of print for decades after its initial publication, but built up a fanbase that was reverent enough to start putting together their own custom copies, painstakingly printing out custom boards, chits, and other components to recreate the original. Finally in 2012 Fantasy Flight put out a new edition that contained both the original and an updated version with new rules and gameplay in the same box. Even twenty years later there is still an audience for this unique board game.

Another game that stands the test of time is a little bit younger, from 1995, but was born out of the same new Euro style game movement that gave us Catan. That game is El Grande by Wolfgang Kramer. El Grande is what’s called an area control game, and was one of the first to introduce this new gameplay mechanic.  In El Grande players take on the role of Lords in medieval Spain vying for power to become the next king.  The basic goal of the game is simple; have the most cubes (which represent knights called caballeros) in as many areas as possible when those areas score. The actual mechanics that drive this simple goal are what makes the game brilliant. While the theme, similar to Catan, is not going to light the world on fire, the gameplay runs like a clean, cutthroat machine.

One element that holds up even after 20 years are the two different card systems that drive putting additional knights out on the board. Each round of the game five different action cards are available that let you put out one to five knights respectively. The more powerful the ability of the card, the less knights a player can place out. In other words, the one knight cards have really awesome special actions, but players are giving up presence on the board to execute that power. Players bid for card selection using power cards numbered one to thirteen. But these, too, are a compromise. Higher cards make sure you are more likely to pick first, but lower cards let you recruit more knights to put out onto the board. It is common for players to voluntarily go last just got build up a pool of territory. to claim territory in the future.

Another great part of El Grande is a chaotic element called the castillo. Every time players put knights out on the board they can choose to place them in a cardboard tower announcing how many they have placed. Once the knights are in there however, they are hidden, and it’s easy to forget just how many knights you or other players dropped in the tower. During the scoring round it’s always a surprise to see who wins scores for the castillo area of the board. Then to add just a little bit more fun players simultaneously select another location on the board to place those castillo knights, which can shift the balance of power quite a bit! My friends and I call this dive-bombing, and it’s fun to picture stodgy Spanish gentleman parachuting in on horseback, a lovely Don Quixote-like moment.

There are countless other classics that stand the test of time. While there are fantastic new games coming out every week, and the hobby itself has seen tremendous growth, sometimes it’s nice to play a game with proven staying power. Other pick up and deliver and area control games have come out since Merchant of Venus and El Grande, but each of these games still has an original spin on the formula that holds up decades later. What are some of your favorite classics?