Co-Op Interviews: Corey Konieczka

Corey Konieczka is the VP of R&D at Fantasy Flight Games. He may also be the most prolific professional designer of cooperative games, with a half-dozen games to his credit. He’s best-known for the traitor game Battlestar Galactica, but he’s also designed two true co-ops — Gears of War: The Board Game and Space Hulk: Death Angel – The Card Game — and two overlord-led co-ops — Middle-Earth Quest and Mansions of Madness. Finally, he was involved with developing the second edition of Descent: Journeys in the Dark.

This interview was conducted by email in May, June, and July of 2013.


Shannon Appelcline: Thanks for talking with me, Corey. Let’s get started with the basics: what got you involved with the cooperative genre in the first place?

Corey Konieczka: Co-op games are very exciting to me because they can provide unique social experiences. The emotion of playing a co-op game can be drastically different than the emotion of playing competitive game. Knowing that you need to rely on teamwork to win leads to dramatic events that you won’t find in too many other games. You can have those moments where everyone is cheering and high-fiveing around the table; you don’t get that often in competitive games.

I consider Battlestar Galactica my first co-op design. Although this game has a hidden traitor element, all of the other mechanics are purely co-op. Making a co-op/hidden traitor game for this license made a lot of sense thematically, and it really kindled my interest in working on more co-op games.

Battlestar GalacticaSA: I’d definitely consider Battlestar Galactica a co-op design — and a pretty notable one in the field. How much was it influenced by Shadows Over Camelot, the previous traitor game on the market?

CK: That’s an excellent question that I haven’t been asked in years. I had not played Shadows Over Camelot at the time, and intentionally stayed away from it. I heard it was a great game but wanted Battlestar Galactica to be original, and not subconsciously influenced by their game design.

SA: I’m impressed to hear that, as Battlestar Galactica feels very much like a second-generation take on the concept of traitors, with better integrated mechanisms.

I personally think that much of Battlestar Galactica’s success as a traitor game comes down to its skill-check crisis system. What led to its design?

CK: Well one challenge with co-op games is what I call the “Optimal Move Problem”. Since you are not playing against an intelligent and unpredictable opponent, the game can become a logic puzzle that has one Optimal Move. Often times the player with the loudest voice talks everybody into doing what he perceives is the Optimal Move. This takes away the other players’ abilities to make decisions for themselves, and turns them into observers instead of participants.

The skill check system in Battlestar Galactica really serves two purposes. Although players can generally discuss what they should do before performing the test, they are forced to make some individual decisions. Each player needs to judge if other players have played enough cards, and whether they want to contribute or selfishly keep their cards. The second purpose of the skill check is to mask which player is playing which cards. This secrecy is very important in any game that has a traitor.

SA: The result seems to work quite well. What other systems did you introduce to Battlestar Galactica to specifically help or hinder cooperation?

CK: Some Crisis cards force players to make individual decisions. These cards say “Admiral Chooses” or “President Chooses”, and give one player a choice between two different outcomes. This means that players who hold the Admiral or President title have more control, and these positions are often fought over among players.

I took this choice mechanic to another level in the Space Hulk: Death Angel card game. In this game, some event cards have the “Instinct” keyword on them, meaning that the player who drew the card must make a choice without consulting the other players. Even though all players are on the same team, “Instinct” cards force players to either choose what is best for the team, or what is best for themselves. If there was instead an open discussion, a bossy player could dominate the decision and the result would be less dramatic.

SA: I’ve long thought that the bossy player was the biggest design issue faced by co-op games, so it’s interesting to see how different games solve it. I do want to talk with you more about Space Hulk: Death Angel, but I had one more question on Battlestar Galactica first. You’ve done two major expansions for the game, with a third due out this summer. Do you feel that any of these made major advancements or changes to the game’s cooperative gaming?

CK: The most fun part of Battlestar Galactica is the paranoia. With each expansion we tried to capture a specific season of the show as well as increase the level of mistrust. Whether it was Cylon leaders that replaced the “Sympathizer” mechanic, Trauma tokens, or Mutiny cards, we’re always looking for ways to increase the paranoia.

Experienced BSG players have a strong feeling about which choice is the “Optimal Move”, and will often threaten to Brig anyone who doesn’t choose this “best option”. We try to make the waters a little murkier with each expansion. We do our best to mimic the show by avoiding black and white choices and keeping decisions in a morally grey area.

Middle-Earth QuestSA: Thanks for the insights into Battlestar! I wanted to briefly touch upon one of your next games, Middle-Earth Quest, which you co-designed with Christian Petersen. With the max number of players, you have three hero players cooperating to work against the Sauron. Do you consider it a cooperative game, and what cooperative elements of the game did you find of particular interest?

CK: Middle-Earth Quest is a tricky one, because it is more of a team game than a pure co-op game. Even Battlestar Galactica is technically a team game. The main difference being that in BSG, the teams are hidden and everyone is playing by the same rules.

Since the Sauron player in Middle-Earth Quest is a known threat, this game tends to generate a different emotion. Instead of paranoia, there is a sense of camaraderie that you find in most co-op games. The fellowship players need to deal with many crises, any of which could end the game. In the case of Middle-Earth Quest, these crises are Sauron’s plots. The unique thing about this game is that these threats are placed strategically by a living, thinking opponent instead of a random deck of cards.

Space Hulk: Death AngelSA: So let’s return to Space Hulk: Death Angel — The Card Game, which is inarguably a co-op game. Clearly, when you guys picked up the Games Workshop license, you had lots of different opportunities to make games based on them. What made you decide to design Death Angel as a co-op?

CK: We decided that a co-op game would set our game apart from the original Space Hulk (which is a team game). This way, our game provides a different experience and doesn’t try to replace the original. By creating a different window into the same universe, we can compliment the original game instead of competing with it. I honestly wouldn’t dream of trying to replace a beloved game like Space Hulk.

SA: When you built the cooperative gameplay of Death Angel, what did you feel was particularly important? Was anything particularly challenging?

CK: The biggest challenge was making the game fairly simple but with interesting choices. For example, I wanted each Space Marine feel unique without making the game feel complex.

We started out with some basic abilities on the Space Marines cards, but these were difficult to reference since they were sitting at the center of the table. At the time, we had a common deck of Action cards that players drew from (similar to Gears of War).

I wasn’t 100% happy with this, and was experimenting with different ideas. The solution came from Harold Bilz, from Heidelberger Spieleverlag. We were playtesting and he suggested that each team of Space Marines have three unique action cards. This allowed us to give the space marines more personality and removed the randomness of drawing action cards. After playing with this new system, I knew that we had discovered our solution.

SA: Do you find unique characters to be a particularly important element in cooperative games?

CK: Not all games need unique characters, but it feels particularly helpful in co-op games. I think that having unique characters really helps players feel like individuals. If we all have the same strengths and capabilities, then it is difficult for me to identify with anything on a personal level. I also find that players can create emotional attachments to their characters, and make decisions that are more thematic than mechanical.

For example, in Death Angel all players win the game as long as at least one player survives. However, players instinctively make decisions that will help their own space marines survive, which adds an additional layer of tension and drama.

Mansions of MadnessSA: I wanted to talk about one more of your co-op games, Mansions of Madness. How did that come about?

CK: Though not a pure Co-op game, in Mansions of Madness, investigator players must work together against an intelligent opponent.

Years of watching horror and mystery movies had inspired me to try something different. In my experience, these movies always have a point where the audience is speculating about how the movie will end. My hope was to create a dynamic system where multiple different background stories could dynamically change the story, making any of the speculative endings a possibility.

Independently, Christian Petersen had come up with an idea for Mansions of Madness — a game about investigating Mythos locations as Arkham Horror characters. The two ideas came together to create a dungeon crawl style game that focused on story and theme.

SA: I thought that the plot system was something particularly fresh that Mansions of Madness offered to the co-op genre. Did you feel like it had any particular effect on how players cooperated in the game (or how the intelligent overlord worked against them)?

CK: My favorite element of the plot system is that the Keeper player knows what his objective is, but the investigators do not. They must watch the keeper’s actions to try and determine what he is up to and how to stop him. For example, in one early playtest the keeper was not attacking investigators and instead moving all of his cultists toward the chapel. As more and more cultists entered the chapel, the investigators started fearing that something awful was about to happen. An experienced Keeper can use this to his advantage and provide false leads and red herrings. It really captures the feeling of the Keeper being an evil mastermind that is trying to manipulate the investigators to fulfill his dark purpose.

SA: All told you’ve designed an impressive number of cooperative game — including true co-ops, games with a human opponent, and games with teams. There are some that we haven’t even touched upon, such as you revisionary work on Descent Second Edition. What keeps drawing you back to the cooperative genre?

CK: I really enjoy the atmosphere that co-op games create. For example, in Gears of War: The Board Game, there is a tangible sense of camaraderie. Players are discussing strategy and making sacrifices for their buddies. Even when the map is filled with enemies and the odds are stacked against players, they work to pick each other up and take that one in a million shot at winning. Nothing unites players better than a common adversary.

Even comparing this to a semi co-operative game like Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition, the emotion is subtly different. Unlike a pure co-op game, we can’t stack the odds against the players. There needs to be a sense of balance for both sides that you actually want to avoid in a pure co-op. I find that players prefer challenging co-op games over balanced co-op games.

SA: Are there any general lessons that you feel you’ve learned for designing co-op games?

CK: My experiences have taught me that co-op games need a healthily level of uncertainty and hidden information. Co-op games at their heart are puzzles for players to solve, and if there is no randomness then there is always a “best” solution. The more uncertainty there is, the more players are forced to make gut decisions based upon their own knowledge. Hidden information on the other hand is what helps players play as individuals and not be bullied into making group decisions.


Thanks again to Corey for taking the time to participate in this interview!

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1 thought on “Co-Op Interviews: Corey Konieczka

  1. Good point about the “optimal move” and “loudest voice” issues. I was excited for Spirit Island by GTG, until I played at gencon and the demoers were trying to tell me these were features, not defects of play. Literally watched two people stare at the board for about 3 minutes working out best moves for everyone…

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