In previous articles in this column I discussed the primordial co-operative play board games, from 1987 to 2000 — starting with Arkham Horror and ending with Lord of the Rings — and I talked with Richard Launius, who helped to kick-off the co-operative game explosion for the late 1980s.
This week I’m talking with Dr. Reiner Knizia, one of the top designers of Eurogames, and possibly the best known board game designer in the world. Just like Richard Launius, he’s a foundational co-op designer, because he’s the guy that got co-ops going again over the last decade, after they’d gone moribund for almost as long.
By chance, Knizia’s Lord of the Rings has just been rereleased by publisher Fantasy Flight in a new Silver Line Edition, which means it’s smaller and cheaper.
With that said, let me offer special thanks to Dr. Knizia for chatting with me about co-op games, as he rarely grants print interviews of this sort.
An Interview with Dr. Reiner Knizia About Lord of the Rings
Shannon Appelcline: Though there were some co-op games in the 1980s and 1990s, they were mostly gone by 2000. What made you decide to design Lord of the Rings as a cooperative game?
Dr. Reiner Knizia: When Sophisticated Games approached me in 1998 about the design and development of a Lord of the Rings board game, the great opportunity to work with Tolkein’s ground breaking masterpiece started. The project was soon agreed, and then I faced the pleasant but enormous challenge to transform this epic work into a board game that would be playable in not much more than one hour.
When working with any licences, I believe that it is vital to remain true to the spirit of the licence. This was particularly important for the Lord of the Rings, as there are many millions of fans all over the world who have a – maybe only subconscious – but clear expectation that the board game should allow them to relive their adventures when they read the book.
Henry Kissinger said, ‘Foreign politics is mainly about leading the inevitable’. To remain true to the spirit of the book, I had to match the point of view from the book: we are the Fellowship! Of course, the Fellowship does not work against each other; they cooperate against the evil Sauron. I did not decide to design a cooperative game – it was inevitable! And suddenly, hair grows on your legs….
SA: Did any older games influence the cooperative design of Lord of the Rings?
RK: When I design games, I feel a great sense of urgency. I believe there are many great games in the universe for me to still discover and invent. I am not paranoid, but I know that there are many people out there who are trying to ‘steal’ my ideas even before I have had them….
As a consequence, most of my life is organized around exploring and developing new games. Playtesting is the life blood of game design; therefore we are playing every day. Funnily enough, with all this playtesting, there is literally no time left to ‘play games’. As a consequence, I really do not know many other games.
You can have anything in life, but not everything….
And now I will tell you a secret! Not knowing many other games is a big competitive advantage for me. Other game designers obviously cannot contain themselves and play many other games, claiming that this is important for market research. Of course it is mainly for entertainment! By doing so, they spoil themselves with other people’s ideas. I believe that the evolution of the human brain is not entirely geared towards game design: the design process requires a lot of decisions, small ones as well and big ones, how to handle and how to solve many of the tricky game situations. Now, the human brain has evolved to learn from experience. In game design this means that if you already know the solution another designer has applied to a similar feature, the brain irresistibly meanders towards this solution. As I do not know these solutions, my brain is free to develop my own innovative ideas…
So after this long introduction, returning to your question, the answer is simple and short: No!
SA: Were there any particular challenges in making a co-op game that you don’t see in more standard competitive games?
RK: When we say that we are playing together, we usually mean that we are playing against each other on the common platform of a game that we all enjoy. The competition amongst each other actually makes the game!
I remember very well when the Lord of the Rings board game was advertised as a cooperative game. Many journalists were doubtful about the play experience and the replay value. How can a game be exciting if we are all in the same boat and there is nothing to do? Well, the answer is that a game does not become cooperative simply by declaring it to be so.
In the Lord of the Rings, the players are given a common task that they must achieve, and they realize very quickly that they are doomed. The players realize that the task if essentially insurmountable, so competition and selfishness is replaced by a true spirit of togetherness against the common evil. The evil is me, or at least all the nasty obstacles I build into the game system to work against the players!
In a cooperative game like the Lord of the Rings board game I, as the designer, become much more a part of the game play. Now you may think that experience with the gameplay will make things easier. On the contrary, you will feel even more doomed! When you play the Lord of the Rings board game as a novice, you play turn by turn, being surprised by one obstacle after another that comes along. With more experience, you can much better foresee the consequences of your actions and all the future obstacles that you are kicking loose.
So how can you ever win? Firstly, the game allows the players to play on various difficulty levels. For cooperative games, this is always a good idea, as players of very different general play experience will take part in the game. Secondly, whilst developing a true sense of doom, the players also learn about more and more actions and reactions the game offers them to overcome the obstacles and to deal with the ‘evil’ game system. This will lead the players eventually to a true mastery of the game.
Most importantly, the Lord of the Rings board game is not won against other players. The winner does not triumph over the loser, but the game creates a unique team experience for the players that bring them together as human beings beyond the individual game. I find this aspect of the cooperative gameplay most fascinating and rewarding!
The big challenge when designing and developing cooperative games is, of course, to fine tune the balance between the feeling of doom and the abilities to overcome these obstacles for victory to create a highly exciting game with a great climax. If the game is too easy or too hard, this game experience will be lost.
That the game balance works in the Lord of the Rings board game is above all proven by one most remarkable experience I have made many times: the individual players are so engaged in the overall objective of destroying the Ring, that they are willing to make the ultimate game sacrifice. They are willing to be eliminated from the game and the future gameplay so that the rest of the Fellowship can achieve the common goal.
SA: When you released Sauron for Lord of the Rings, you introduced an active & intelligent evil that the players had to fight against. How did this change the basic formula for cooperative play in Lord of the Rings?
RK: The cooperative gameplay against the ‘evil’ game system naturally motivates a lot of discussion amongst the players. Again and again the players assess the current situation and discuss the most promising options to move ahead.
The main purpose of introducing Sauron as a human counterplayer in the second game expansion was to increase the feeling of doom even further. Now your enemy personifies around the table, sitting amongst you and listening into all your discussions whilst already planning his next counter strikes. How can you cooperate, which is so vital for the game’s success, if your overwhelming adversary is watching all your steps and listening to your every word? I believe this really captures the spirit of Tolkein’s masterpiece.
Conclusion
The element of this interview that I find the most interesting is Dr. Knizia’s description of his design process, most specifically that he doesn’t play other games. It certainly explains how co-op games could disappear for a decade, then reappear. If Dr. Knizia did play other games, we might well have never seen the field reemerge in the last decade!
If there are any other early designers that you’d really like to hear from, let me know, but my current plan is to move forward to the next stage of co-op designs in the near future, when we got a flurry of new designs in the wake of Lord of the Rings, at least one of which introduced a whole new subgenre.
