Matt 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.

SA: So how does the new game differ from your previous co-op releases?

ML: First and foremost, it’s set in 2065, in the world of International Rescue. The players take on the roles of this secret organization dedicated to saving people when all other means have failed. Fans of the show will be able to fly around the world in the vehicles they loved and recall their favorite episodes with each mission they attempt.

Mechanically it’s different from the games I’ve designed to date. Players assemble teams of characters and equipment in locations around the globe to complete missions which are resolved by the roll of two dice. Each turn they must weigh their odds of accomplishing these missions (short-term threats) against the overall long-term threat of their arch nemesis, The Hood, accomplishing his evil scheme. Players can invest time and energy assembling a crack team to increase their odds of success — but doing so takes time. In order to win, players will need to have a good sense of when they can go for the longer odds and when they can’t afford to.

The above said, the game shares some similarities to my other titles. It uses a familiar action-point allowance system (each turn the players have 3 actions to spend). And I’ve worked very hard to make the game as accessible as possible. While there’s a simple menu of actions to select from each turn, the choices the players have to make each turn can be quite involved and deep.

SA: The randomness of rolling dice to complete missions is a big change from the set results you find in your other games for removing disease, shoring up land, or digging up sand. Why did you decide to go this route in the new design? Was it just to introduce the calculation of odds that you mentioned?

ML: The dice help capture the excitement and unpredictability that the show featured and they form one of the central mechanisms of the game. You can add all manner of bonuses and re-rolls to the game (to mitigate risk) but doing so costs actions that might be spent elsewhere to complete other missions to avert other disasters.

The dice also move the overall game clock. One side of each die pictures The Hood and rolling it moves him along on his scheme. Players can take certain actions and save up Intelligence chips to re-roll those sides when they come up. But if you roll at longer odds and miss (and have to re-roll multiple times at longer odds in order to complete a mission) the odds go up that The Hood will advance on his scheme.

SA: It sounds like the Hood and his scheme form the central challenge of the game, taking the roll of impending doom that’s central to so many co-op games. Is just that clock that the players race against, or something more?

ML: The players actually spend the majority of their time dealing with individual missions, but the foiling The Hood’s scheme is how they ultimately win the game. As The Hood advances along his track, he triggers events (bad things) as well as disasters. The players need to avert each of the disasters before they’re triggered or they’ll lose, and if they can avert all three, they win the game.

SA: In Thunderbirds, it seems like you were working with a very rich thematic tapestry, compared to the somewhat universal ideas of your previous games. You already talked some about how that influenced your inclusion of a dice mechanic. Did it change your design process in any other way?

ML: I learned to stay flexible. The theme is very rich and provided many obvious hooks for the game, but it also provided constraints that (counterintuitively) got me thinking in new directions. For example, if I had designed the game from scratch, I might not have considered including a vehicle that didn’t move (Thunderbird 5 stays put in Geo-stationary Orbit). So, if anything, the theme required me to get a bit more creative than I otherwise might have been.

SA: Now that you’ve designed several different co-op games, do you feel like you’ve learned any core rules or requirements for their design? Or, alternatively, have your ideas about designing co-ops shifted over those several releases?

ML: Yes, I’ve become more conscious about elements that can make cooperative games better. When I designed Pandemic, I was doing this all instinctively. Now, I actively work different play patterns and mechanism into my designs upfront. For example, I try to create alternating upbeats and downbeats in my cooperative games, finding ways to introduce intervals of hope and fear in the players in order to amp up their emotional involvement in the game. Cooperative games need this since they don’t have a human opponent to generate this kind of tension. I also work to ensure that each player has a sense of autonomy so they feel that they are in control and that their individual actions have merit apart from the group as a whole.

All the above said, I want to make sure my design process doesn’t become to formulaic; I’d like each of my designs to stand on its own and contribute something unique.

Thunderbirds is available on Kickstarter until March 29, including lots of expansions and other cool materials.

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