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

New to Me: Winter 2018 — Another Season of Co-ops

For the last few years, I’ve been working on a book about the design of cooperative tabletop games with my co-author, Christopher Allen. We’ve recently finalized a contract with a publisher, and we hope to be offering the book to the public before the end of the year. That means that it’s our last chance to consider new co-ops before we lock the text down on July 1. So, this quarter, I played a lot of co-op games, and they’re all discussed here. (This isn’t the first time I’ve had a co-op heavy quarter, and it’s all been because of this book.)

As usual these ratings are my own feelings about the game, as a medium-weight gamer; they don’t necessarily represent the overall quality of the game. In fact this time, I’m well aware that I low-rated a few different games that are well-loved, and might be good designs for the right audience. And, as usual, these games are new to me, though a few are slightly older.

The Great

Robinson Crusoe (2012). Co-op #1. This is already a classic co-op — and a well-received one. After a play, I can see why. The heart of the game is serious resource-management play. If I wrote an elevator pitch for this game, it’d be, “what if Agricola were a co-op?” So you have to feed everyone, and that’s tough enough because it requires dangerous hunting and slightly dangerous gathering. But you’re simultaneously choosing a lot of other actions, such as exploring your island, building inventions, improving your shelter, and doing whatever’s required to finish the game successfully.

Robinson Crusoe is one of those games where you simultaneously feel like you need to do everything, and where you don’t ever have enough actions to do so — which is a tension that’s at the heart of many very successful designs. This feeds very well into the co-op system, creating a nail-biting game where things seem to be getting constantly worse, as your team becomes increasingly wounded and demoralized, but where you’re simultaneously advancing toward victory. Continue reading

Brawl of Cthulhu — A Lovecraftian Gamopedia

Some time ago, I wrote an article discussing many of the Cthulhu games on the market. Six years later, I’ve decided to return to the topic by looking at some of the major Cthulhu games that have appeared since. However, rather than just creating a partial list of new games, I’ve also reprinted (and revised) all my previous mini-reviews, to make this a comprehensive look at Cthulhoid games.

The one limitation is that these are just the games I’m familiar with. Most I’ve played, but for the one where I just read the rules, I’ve noted that. There are still a few notables missing, such as The Hills Rise Wild, and Munchkin Cthulhu. I may add them to this article with a quiet edit some time in the future. (And, if you’ve got a Cthulhu game that you’d like me to play and add to this list, drop me a line in the comments.)

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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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New To Me: Winter & Spring 2013

As with its predecessors, this article is intended to talk about the games that I played recently which I’d never played before. Most of them are games that were published in the last year or so within the United States, but on occasion I play a “new to me” game that is quite older; they’re all listed here.

I usually write this article on a quarterly basis, since that tends to offer up a good selection of new games. However, my new game selection in Winter was quite poor due to a combination of sickness and vacation (fortunately, not at the same time!). So I didn’t write the article in April, as I usually would have … then got deluged by new games in Spring. So, I’ve got a lot to talk about this time …

Keep in mind these are not my assessments of whether the games are good or bad, but instead my assessments of whether they appeal to me. Generally, I like light but strategic games that are euro designs but that don’t feel like work to me. They’re in roughly descending order of interest. Continue reading