Co-op Interviews: Nikki Valens

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

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

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

Co-Op Interviews: Bruno Cathala & Serge Laget

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

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

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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Co-Op Interviews: Reiner Knizia — Lord of the Rings

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.
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Co-Op Interviews: Richard Launius — Arkham Horror

Arkham HorrorLast month I started a discussion of co-op games with an article I called “Gaming Evolution: Co-Op Games, Part One: Honored Ancestors”. It talks about some of the primordial co-op games which helped to create the genre in the 1980s and 1990s. Before I move on to more recent games, I’m going to be publishing a couple of interviews with some of the designers of those co-op originators, to further document the games that the modern co-op boom ultimately looks back to as its foundation.

This month I’m talking to Richard Launius. He’s best known for his design of Arkham Horror. He was thus perhaps the first entrant in the “American co-op” subgenre of games which is best represented in the modern day by Fantasy Flight Games … who not by chance counts Arkham Horror among its stable of American co-op games.
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