I’ve been writing about deckbuilding games here for a while, so I’m delighted that my friend, Eric Vogel, has a deckbuilding game of his own coming out from Evil Hat. It’s called Zeppelin Attack! and it’s a new Spirit of the Century-themed game. I played it while it was under development, and liked it quite a bit, so I asked Eric to talk to me about the new game and how it advances the deckbuilding form. —SA, 1/28/14

Shannon Appelcline: Thanks for talking about Zeppelin Attack! What led you to design a Deckbuilding game?

Eric B. Vogel: When Dominion first came out, my friends and I played it to death. We played it till we were sick of it. I thought it was incredibly clever, but it did not directly inspire me to make that kind of game. Later, when I played Thunderstone and then later Ascension, and it was clear that deckbuilding was going to be a genre and not just a game or two, I started to really have a desire to design one myself. Also, with the design of Armorica [a card management game —SA], I started to wrap my head around some of the technical issues involved in designing complex card games. A deckbuilding game seemed more like something within my grasp. So probably around 2010 I started really playing with ideas for a deckbuilding game.

There was a hot-second when it looked like Sandstorm (the company that made Cambria and Hibernia) might do a deckbuilding game for their Marvel comics license, and so for awhile I was playing with ideas to pitch them for that, though it came to nothing ultimately. I also wanted to try to design a deckbuilding game in the world of the Don’t Rest Your Head RPG, so that I could pitch it to Evil Hat. So for a year or two, I was playing with ideas as to how to make a deckbuilding game different from the existing ones. Lots of little ideas for mechanical variations.

Evil Hat Productions meanwhile had commissioned a card game, which was not a deckbuilder, from Jeff Tidball that was intended to be their first tabletop game. It was called Zeppelin Armada at that time. I had a chance to play the prototype with Jeff and Fred Hicks at a con. The game got designed, and Christian St Pierre generated a bunch of art for it, but then Evil Hat decided that the game wasn’t quite what they wanted it to be. They got me to playtest it and make some suggestions about what to do with it. They tried to get Jeff to work on it some more, but at the time he was too busy. So Evil Hat initially brought me on just to do development of that game, but I found that without being able to work with the original author I couldn’t really develop the game as it was. So Evil Hat eventually greenlighted me to do whatever I wanted with the game, and so I turned it into a deckbuilding game. It was a funny process, because I started designing the game around a fairly complex theme, most of the art, and a certain number of card names (as a result of a Zeppelin naming contest that had already occurred).

SA: Were Dominion, Thunderstone, or Ascension particular influences on Zeppelin Attack? How about anything else in the field? Or, as you say, was it all about making a game that was different?

EV: You’ve touched on an element of game design philosophy that I have been overthinking for years. When is a game “original enough?” I have some kind of internal standard of originality that I want my designs to meet, or I don’t pursue them. Hibernia [a euro-wargame focused on color-spot dice —SA] is an example of the easiest way to achieve originality: you generate a really novel central mechanic, and then if the mechanics around it are familiar it’s fine; the overall impression is of novelty.

However, by definition the central mechanic of a deckbuilding game is not highly original; it’s at best a variant of a now familiar mechanic. So Zeppelin Attack had to be influenced by Dominion just by virtue of being a deckbuilding game. The first time I caught sight of Donald X, he was playtesting one of his games at the table behind me while I was playtesting Zeppelin Attack. I did not introduce myself to him that day, because I wasn’t sure how he felt about the existence of the subsequent deckbuilders. I did meet him on a later occasion, and found out he does not altogether feel that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I do think that Dominion is the most sophisticated of all the deckbuilders, even though I don’t think it is the most fun.

At any rate, because I set out to use a (by now) fairly well-used central mechanic, I was determined to create originality with a lot of little mechanical innovations and variations from the existing deckbuilders. So the deckbuilders I was already familiar with influenced me, leading me to try to vary their formulae. There were some instances of “positive” influence though.

I hadn’t played many of the most novel deckbuilders at the time I designed Zeppelin Attack: Arctic Scavengers, Penny Arcade, and Copycat I encountered later. The main way in which Thunderstone influenced me was that I admired how much more thematic it was compared to the other deckbuilders. Dominion does not really feel like you are building up a kingdom, but Thunderstone does simulate a dungeon crawl pretty well; that’s what makes if fun in spite of the fact that it is often too long. I felt like Ascension really found the perfect sweet spot for making a deckbuilding game light and fun. A Few Acres of Snow and Eminent Domain proved how much strategy an increased element of hand management adds to a deckbuilder.

Pergamemnon was a funny sort of negative influence on Zeppelin Attack. Now, let me preface this by saying that Bernd Eisenstein has designed some of my very favorite games, especially Peloponnes. However, I really felt like Pergamemnon did not work; I wanted to love it, and I just didn’t. It was an attempt to do something I had to do in Zeppelin Attack, which was to make a deckbuilding game with just 112 cards. That is a lot fewer cards than the base set most deckbuilders. Pergamemnon tried to deal with that by scaling down in a variety of ways, such as by shrinking the hand size to 3. So Pergamemnon kind of steered me away from various ways to make the game fit in 112 cards.

SA: Creating a deckbuilder with such a small base set is a pretty big change from the deckbuilding norm. What allowed you to accomplish this?

EV: Oh, that’s one of the biggest differences between the Zeppelin Attack and most of the other deckbuilders out there. In Dominion and pretty much all of the pure deckbuilding games, buying new cards is the primary activity of the game. Players buy at least a card every turn and as the game accelerates they buy several cards per turn. This is what makes these games require such large decks. By contrast, in Zeppelin Attack the main activity of the game is shooting at each others’ zeppelins and acquiring resources. You have to save resources over a couple of turns in order to buy a new card. While you’re saving resources in your hands from turn turn in order to save up for a new card, you have fewer assets in your hand to attack and defend with. That is the element of increased hand management that I alluded to before.

SA: Does Zeppelin Attack vary from the typical deckbuilder in any other major ways?

EV: The economy of the game is distinctive, although I think that is an element that often varies between deckbuilders somewhat. Games like Ascension, Dominion, and Thunderstone all use “permanent” money. You acquire a gold card in Dominion and then you have that much to spend every time it comes back into your deck. Pretty much the same thing in Thunderstone and Ascension. It’s a system that causes income to snowball very quickly. In Zeppelin Attack when you spend money it leaves your deck and returns to the supply. This, in combination with the saving up and infrequent card purchasing, gives an interesting kind of rhythm to the game that I don’t think most deckbuilders have. I like games to have a lot of ebb and flow about your position, like Hibernia. Also, when you require money it is a semi-random draw — a bit like Outpost or Phoenicia. There are also text effects on some of the money. I say “money” for the sake of clarity but that resources actually called fate points in the game. Fred Hicks wanted the money to be called fate points as a way of enhancing the relationship to the Spirit of the Century RPG. And a lot of the distinctiveness of how the fate points work in Zepplin Attack is derived from my attempts to make what is essentially a resource operate like something that would be called fate.

Another fairly distinctive element is the fact that most of the attack and defense cards have two facts, one of which is conditional upon the combat outcome. I found in some early playtest that if the negative consequences of combat were too dire there was a certain segment of players who would get really discouraged about that and would just feel like they were behind the eight ball the whole game. I also found that if players didn’t get any benefit from their attack card when it would get blocked by defense, they would end up being very gun shy of making attacks. So I decided that the attack cards would have two benefits for the most part, one that the player got only if their attack succeeded, and another that they would get regardless of whether the attack succeeded. So players always had enough incentive to attack. I did more or less the same thing for defense cards: I gave them one effect that worked only if they played the defense, and another effect it worked if they were played any time. This help to prevent a players hand from getting choked up with defense cards. It also added a decision point to the game, since players could think about whether to save a defense card to use if attacked or to play it during their turn for an immediate benefit.

I think aside from that the game has a lot of little distinctions from other deck builders. The way the cards available for purchase are laid out is a little different from any of the other deck builders: randomized cards of a type. The game timer is a little different. It involves decks running out like Dominion, but both purchasing cards and combat cause cards to disappear from the purchase decks. Most of the deckbuilding games that followed Dominion dropped the action point system from it, even if they retained a lot of the other concepts like purchase limits and card draws. I wanted this game to have an action point system, but I wanted it to be notably different from Dominion’s. So I essentially made the zeppelins into action points. You need a zeppelin to play an action card.

SA: Now that you’ve designed a deckbuiler, how did you find it different from designing a non-deckbuilding game?

EV: I guess it’s like designing any other card came in which just about all the cards need to be different from one another. After a while, I find the job of getting sufficient variety into the deck a little challenging, especially if I’m trying to make card powers matchup against a pre-existing theme, the way I needed to in Zeppelin Attack. With a game like Armorica it’s fairly easy, because it’s really just a matter of exploring all the permutations of combinations of assets that the cards can have. I don’t want to do that in a game like Zepplin Attack, because it will make the cards feel formulaic. I think what really defined the Zeppelin Attack design process was all the constraints I was working with and from the outset: text size, pre-existing art, pre-existing theme. That’s what really made the design process different and longer from that of my other games, but I think it ended up making Zepplin Attack break the mold of my previous games in a good way.

I’ve designed one other game that involves deckbuilding since Zeppelin Attack, but that was a fairly different design process because it started with a central mechanical innovation. It’s built around a new way of integrating deck building and work placement which is pretty original I think (that is to say, nothing like the way Copycat does it). That design process unfolded very quickly as my games usually do. Evil Hat has optioned that game as well.

SA: I look forward to hearing about that one in the future too! Anything else you’d like to say about Zeppelin Attack?

EV: Well, I am certainly hopeful that this one is going to be a breakthrough game for me. Evil Hat has been great to work with, so I am hoping this one is successful enough to warrant their doing more projects with me in the future.

This is not about Zeppelin Attack so much, but about my games in general. To the extent I’m known as a game designer at all, I think I am known for doing very streamlined games — short, based on a few, simple core mechanics. Zeppelin Attack is a little bit of an exception to that, although I have certainly streamlined it as much as I can while still making the game I want to make.

However, I think what fans of my past games may not know is how much of an influence you have been on that tendency towards streamlining. Shannon is one of my most valuable playtester/consultants — and he is pretty much the one who is always encouraging me to streamline the mechanics, not use two mechanics when one will do, etc. I often don’t really feel done with a game until Shannon is fairly happy with it. So you actually have a lot to do with the formation of my style as a game designer. You probably realize that already, but I thought I would share it with your readers.

SA: Thanks, that’s kind to say. And good luck on this new game!

Zeppelin Attack is currently available for kickstarting. I’ve already made my $30 pledge.

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