Category Archives: Designer Spotlight

Co-op Interviews: Nikki Valens

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Nikki Valens was a Senior Game Designer at Fantasy Flight Games from 2013-2018, during which time she worked on several cooperative board games, including two of FFG’s top releases: Mansions of Madness and Arkham Horror. This compressed period of game design has already made her one of the most prolific and knowledgeable co-op designers in the industry.

Nikki was kind enough to talk to me about her co-op designs while Christopher Allen & I were amidst the Meeples Together Kickstarter last month (now available for preorder).

Shannon Appelcline: You seemed to hit the ground running at Fantasy Flight with a heavy focus on cooperative games, starting with Eldritch Horror. Was there something that drew you to cooperative design?

Nikki Valens: To me, games are a social experience. I like to play games with my friends and family. But I have no desire to enter a competition against those I love. As a result, I tend to enjoy co-op games more than competitive games, especially if there’s narrative investment involved. Winning a game of Hearts is abstract enough that there’s not going to be any hard feelings, but getting invested in a story and characters only to lose feels quite a bit different for most players. When I design games, I’m usually working toward a specific experience that I want to give to players.

SA: Eldritch Horror revisits many of the ideas from Arkham Horror 2e. Were there elements of Arkham Horror’s play that you were specifically trying to redevelop?

NV: Eldritch Horror was certainly inspired by Arkham Horror, but it was never the intent that Eldritch would replace Arkham. Eldritch sought to take some of the core ideas of Arkham Horror and apply them to a globetrotting Indiana Jones like narrative.

For the handful of core systems that the two games share, it was important for Eldritch to not only find its own way, but also to be more accessible to new players. Major design choices, such as the round structure or other world encounters were created taking inspiration from Arkham, but in ways that would be easier to learn, teach, and play. Continue reading →

Co-Op Interviews: Eric B. Vogel & The Dresden Files Co-Op Card Game

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Dresden Files CoverEric B. Vogel is the designer of multiple games, including two deckbuilding designs, Zeppelin Attack! (2014) and Don’t Turn Your Back (2015), that he’s discussed in previous interviews. This time around, he’s created his first cooperative game, based on the popular Dresden Files series of novel — a game that’s now available on Kickstarter.

I talked with Eric about the mechanics of designing a cooperative game in an email interview conducted over the course of April 2016.

Shannon Appelcline: Thanks for agreeing to talk about your new game design, Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game — or DFCO to use the abbreviation favored by your publisher, Evil Hat. It’s your first cooperative game. What made you decide to go with a cooperative design?

Eric B. Vogel: It was the publisher, Evil Hat Productions, who made the stipulation that they wanted it to be a cooperative game. That was not initially something I was happy about. I had done some development work on a cooperative game previously, but I had never designed one up to that point. So I started the project without any clear ideas for cooperative design. It took a few months of blind fumbling before I finally came up  with the core mechanic of DFCO. Continue reading →

Co-Op Interviews: Matt Leacock — Thunderbirds

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ThunderbirdsMatt Leacock is well-known as the designer of Pandemic (2007), Forbidden Island (2010), Forbidden Desert (2013), and related games. I interviewed him about his designs a couple of years ago, following the release of Forbidden Desert. Now that Modiphius Entertainment is Kickstarting his newest co-op game, the Thunderbirds Co-operative Board Game, I was thrilled to talk to him again, to see how it fits into his evolving design philosophy.

Shannon Appelcline: Between the Pandemic series and the Forbidden series, you’ve become one of our industry’s definitive co-op game designers. What led you to create this new Thunderbirds game for Modiphius?

Matt Leacock: Chris Birch approached me at Spiel in 2013 and pitched the idea of a Thunderbirds game. Growing up in the States, I had never seen the show but agreed to check it out. Chris is good at making a pitch and there was such enthusiasm and excitement in his eyes — I could tell he was passionate about the project. I went home and watched some of the shows and immediately understood the appeal. I also thought Thunderbirds and the world of International Rescue was a natural fit for a cooperative game, so I signed on. Continue reading →

Deckbuilding Interviews: Eric B. Vogel & Don’t Turn Your Back

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Don't Turn Your BackLast year, I talked with my friend Eric B. Vogel about his first published deckbuilder design, Zeppelin Attack! Now that he’s got his second deckbuilding (and first worker placement!) design, Don’t Turn Your Back, on Kickstarter, I couldn’t resist talking to him again, to see how his ideas about deckbuilding have evolved in the last year.

Shannon Appelcline: Don’t Turn Your Back is your second deckbuilding game, following Zeppelin Attack! Why did you return to the genre?

Eric B. Vogel: For me it didn’t feel like a return to the genre so much. That’s because when you’re playing, the worker placement element feels most prominent. You really only shuffle every turn or two, buy one or two cards a turn, but you place 4-7 workers every turn. You also have the area control elements. I would say this game is 1/2 worker placement, 1/4 deckbuilding, and 1/4 area control. So to me, I felt more like I was creating my first worker placement game, instead of my second deck-building game.

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Deckbuilding Interviews: Eric B. Vogel & Zeppelin Attack!

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Zeppelin Attack!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.

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Co-Op Interviews: Bruno Cathala & Serge Laget

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Bruno Cathala and Serge Laget are the designers of Shadows over Camelot and the recent Shadows over Camelot card game. They were kind enough to talk to about their design in email discussions between August and October this year.

Picture by Toshiyuki Hashitani (moonblogger at BGG); used under CC license.

Picture by Toshiyuki Hashitani (moonblogger), used under Creative Commons

Shannon Appelcline: How did the Shadows over Camelot board game come about?

Serge Laget: I’m a teacher, and I use cooperative gaming in my work. In the years before Shadows over Camelot was published, there were no cooperative games for adults except The Lord of the Rings by Reizer Knizia.

At first, I began to work alone on a cooperative game. I met Bruno Cathala during this time, and I proposed that he work with me on the project. The game was born by the cooperation of our two minds!

Bruno Cathala: The story begins on Christma 2002. My sister’s gift to me was The Lord of the Rings, the cooperative game designed by Reiner Knizia. In my head, i said: “Wow … exactly what I didn’t want to have.”

At the time, I didn’t like cooperative games (because I’m a competitor), I thought that cooperative games were just for children, and I was not familiar with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings story. I had tried to read the book many times, but each time, I gave up after less than 100 pages, because the style was boring to me — as boring as the French author Honoré de Balzac! Continue reading →

Co-Op Interviews: Corey Konieczka

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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.

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Co-Op Interviews: Matt Leacock

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PandemicMatt Leacock is the author of Pandemic — one of the essential games in the cooperative field thanks to its attention to light, quick, well-polished gameplay. He’s also the author of Forbidden Island and the brand-new Forbidden Desert, which is to be released in several languages this quarter.

This interview was conducted in email over the course of April 2013.

Shannon Appelcline: What made you decide to design a cooperative game — and more specifically, what made you decide to design Pandemic?

Matt Leacock: I was introduced to the idea of a cooperative game being genuinely fun (as opposed to a “fun” educational experience) by Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings. I found the mechanisms in that game fascinating — how so much tension could be created by pieces of cardboard — and wondered what it would be like to create my own. At the time, pandemics where all over the news and it seemed to me that diseases would make an excellent opponent: they’re unfeeling, scary, can grow out of control, and I figured they could be modeled with fairly simple rules. Those latter two properties were the most attractive. I’m drawn to designing games with emergent systems (where a simple set of rules can result in highly complex and variable results) and the thought of a system spiraling wildly out of control was irresistible to me.

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Deckbuilding Interviews: Alf Seegert & Fantastiqa

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Alf Seegert, designer of the upcoming deckbuilder Fantastiqa was kind enough to give me this interview on the topic of deckbuilding games. He’s a six-time Hippodice game design competition finalist and the designer of the board games Bridge Troll, Trollhalla, The Road to Canterbury, and (now) Fantastiqa. You can find out more at alfseegert.com.

Fantastiqa itself is scheduled to be published by Gryphon Games in late 2012. It’s currently on Kickstarter.

With that intro out of the way, let me get to the actual interview …
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The Dice Games of Stefan Feld

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Last week, I got to play Die Burgen von Burgund (The Castles of Burgundy), alea Big Box #14. It’s yet another game by Stefan Feld and yet another Feld game that uses dice as part of its mechanical engine.

I wrote about game designer Stefan Feld just last year (part 1, part 2). At the time I found him to be one of the brightest rising stars in the eurogame field. A year later, I still hold by that assessment. In my personal gaming pantheon, he’s replaced Wolfgang Kramer as the designer who produces somewhat abstract medium-weight gamers’ games just for me. (Thanks Stefan!)

My discussions of dice games (part 1, part 2, part 3) date back a bit further to 2008, which was the last time we had a glut of dice games on the market. As I wrote at the time, there are quite a few interesting game mechanics that tie those dice games together … and also some ways that they differentiate themselves.
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