Designer Notes 77: Cole Wehrle

I don't like designing asymmetric games. I think that in terms of design principles, they're extremely expensive. Like every game is about a complexity budget, and you go to an asymmetric game, you're like, I would like to have the house on the coast. I'm spending all my money on location. But what you can get out of it...

is a sense of a world. It's really what you're getting is immersion, and you're getting a sense that the world is a lot bigger. There are more systems at play than the ones that you have direct access to. Bye. Hi, everybody. This is Soren Johnson, and you're listening to Designer Notes, a podcast about why we make games. Today, we are talking to tabletop designer Cole Worley, best known for his work on Root, Oath, PAX Premier, and John Company.

This episode was recorded on March 22nd, 2023 and was engineered by Michael Hermes. All right, so I think a good place to start would be like when we're the first time When was the first time that you remember kind of a board game like mattering to you? I grew up in a family with a lot of kids. I've got four younger siblings, and my parents loved play. They were not obsessed with it, but they just...

You know, my dad would play Maple Leaf with all of us. He taught us how to play sports really young. Right. And if it was rainy, it meant we were playing board games. And so I think some of my first games that I remember playing with him were games of Stratego. Okay. And...

There, I think that there were some early games of Stratego that I remember thinking about the game after it was over. Right. And that was like, I mean, those are my first game memories where we're thinking about, you know, I'm like on the, like writing or walking to school. in first grade maybe, and I was just thinking about Stratego deployments. Just sort of like hanging in the back of my mind a little bit. Yeah, Stratego is kind of unusual because...

You can put so much pre-processing into the game, right? You can spend a lot of time thinking about exactly the right way to set everything up. It's always kind of cool to play a game that has that aspect. Yeah, it's a game that you can talk about when you're not playing. Right. But it isn't as hard to talk about as something like chess. Right. There's just a clearer, clear terms. Right.

Okay. So what other games do you remember that kind of stood out as you got older? Yeah, so we kept playing board games, and then when I was sometime in elementary school, I had an older uncle. was about 15 years older than my dad, and he had found this box of old war games. that he had played growing up right and these are avalon hill games from the 60s and 70s mostly and they were all woefully incomplete so he gave me a box that had chattanooga tactics 2 a few other games chancellorsville

Maybe it was Chancellorsville, not Chattanooga. Yeah, not Chattanooga. Chancellorsville. And I remember the pieces of... Chancellorsville, like, include some pieces from Napoleon at Waterloo. Like, they were all just helplessly mixed together. And I remember trying to play those games with some of my friends and having no idea how they worked.

I didn't know how a combat results table... where i hadn't learned ratios yet really in any meaningful way and so we'd sat there trying to code these combat results tables and saying like okay there's a one through six i guess maybe we have to roll a die or maybe if i have six units that's what that means right and i remember so like you

You had the manual, but you didn't have the basic math school skills to understand what was going on. And even the manuals were missing pages. These were games that... Should have probably been thrown away a long time ago. I remember one of my first misreads of the cover results table was we took the...

We took the leftmost column and we thought, oh, that's the number of units that you have. So if you have six units, you're in that top column. And then when the ratios, the ratios were often expressed as dashes. And so we're like, oh, like a 1-2, that's like 1-2. 1 versus 2. Yeah, 1 versus 2, or maybe it's a roll of 1 or 2 on a die. So we always have these different ways of sorting through it. And then...

We started puzzling it through in middle school, where I remember I had found a copy of Third Reich at a grand sale. And most of the games... Who were you playing? Were you playing with your brother? I was playing with my brother and with some neighborhood friends. And, you know, most of the games...

that I experienced, and this is true both of video games and of board games, they were mostly things that we found in the garbage or at garage sales and just sort of piecing together. We used to have a ritual where on...

The garbage day was Wednesday, and so on Tuesday night, I'd be roaming around the neighborhood with my friends, and we would just kind of rummage through. If we found, like, an old computer, like, laying on the side of the street, we'd take it back and boot it up. Where was this, by the way? I grew up mostly in Fort Wayne, Indiana, so northwestern Indiana, Rust Belt. Okay. And every once in a while you'd hit the jackpot. I remember we found an old 386 that had...

All six episodes of Wolfenstein on it. Wow. And it was like, this was like the mother loan. And I was putting it on every... It was just sitting on the street? It was just sitting on the street. I mean, the computer was in disrepair. I think we got to boot up three times. We might have had to swap power supply. How many computers did you sort through before you found one?

He had so many. One of my friends had an old dresser in his room that was just filled with old computer parts that we were finding. And board games were the same process we found. Old copies of HeroQuest. And then, you know, towards the end of elementary school, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons with my brother. And again, I didn't know what Dungeons & Dragons was supposed to be like. I just liked the idea that...

There was a dragon on the cover. It seemed exciting, right? And so we were really just playing these games completely incorrectly for the first, you know, I mean it was really I think until Probably Battle Cry Richard Borg's Battle Cry was probably the first game that I played by the rules that was a more modern design game. And then at that point we started really getting into board games.

some a little older than you but like I remember also growing up through that time period, I guess there might be, there's the internet I suppose at this point. I don't know if you had game stores around you, but for me, it was just whatever random game. I found a random copy of the Victory Games Civil War game, some SPI games like Asino and Kharkov, but it was just stuff that was like... in the back of some secondhand store.

There was no game store. I'd open these boxes and you'd see the SPI catalog and you'd flip through it and be like, oh, wow, look at all these games. But at that point, I think SPI was out of business anyway. No one was going to pick up the tip line.

It's like, you know, there was this whole like world of wargaming, but like, you know, I barely had anyone to play with me and anyway, to find these games. And it was just kind of like this, but it was this fast. It was just like, I could tell that like, oh, this. This is something that could be for me. There were two little game stores in...

the strip mall near my house. One of them was a computer store called Computer Corner. And at the computer store, they had all these old PC games, but the guy who ran the store would never discount anything. And so what happened was the older stock just stayed there. And we only had trash computers, basically. And I remember saving up my money for a $60 copy of Ultima 5 or Ultimate Domain, who at that point, that game would have been...

years old 10 years old um but i was just looking for things that had three and a half inch discs and i wasn't aware that i was buying something that's probably worth five dollars uh if ebay had been around then and then there was this little comic book store that called books comics and things that stocked board games. And I remember I bought one of the first war games I ever bought was a copy of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, which

I played to death. And it was just sitting, I mean, it was sitting next to Batman graphic novels, basically, you know, in the way that... Actually, even now, if you're looking for interesting game stores, I always tell people, go to hobby shops, places where you'd buy model planes, because a lot of them ordered board games in the late 90s and early 2000s, and they never sold, and they're often just still there.

And you can find really interesting things, especially in the 90s. It was such a strange period for board gaming because... A lot of the big wargaming publishers were sort of destroyed by the rise of computer games. You haven't gotten Catan yet in the German invasion. And so there were just these like little...

Basically, you were just looking for things that had been sold into distribution as Avalon Hill was collapsing. And so you'd find them all over the place, a dollar store, any number of places. Yep. So what appealed to you about these type of games? I think partly it was that they were doing... They were just telling kind of different kinds of stories, and there was a... I'm trying to think about Wooden Ships and Iron Men, because at that point...

I totally remember that game from the catalog. Yeah. Oh, and it's awesome. It's so cool. It has like a... like an order like a real-time order phase to it and then at the start of every round you can communicate to all of your other players who are playing and so everybody we would you know have a little pencil with a post-it on it we'd all like raise our flag with our two-word message about what we're trying

to do and then you'd go and resolve all the orders um but i remember looking at that game and thinking um that i wanted more detail out of something like battle cry battle cry seemed like it wasn't telling the whole story. And when I looked at these older war games, it seemed like they were doing something bigger. So there was a little bit of a... I don't know, a kind of... There was a little bit of a...

Mystique to them, but also just had to do with theming I mean the only games that I had access to at that time had pretty like well-trodden boring themes, but a lot of those late

War games were all over the place. They were covering everything from the siege of Jerusalem to any number of other things. And I didn't always love the ones I played. I remember I had a copy of Diplomacy, which... i had read about you know because you know everyone saw you'd find an old copy of of the general and there'd always be like an essay about diplomacy strategy or something in it and i remember i sat down and played diplomacy with some friends

And my friends got so upset at the idea that every region could only hold one military unit. And they're like, this is ridiculous. You should be able to have two fleets in the Black Sea. I could break, you know, I was thinking about the Russian player was like, I could break. the ottomans if i could just have two fleets in the black sea and uh and it was funny because at that moment i remember thinking like

Well, no, but there's like a reason why we're not allowed to do this. And it was like that edge of starting to understand that there's abstractions happening in these designs. You make decisions when you design. You're not just trying to represent things. You're trying to create a situation, a feeling. Yeah. Did you try to design some of your own games during this time? I mostly worked on variants to fix things that I wanted to design. So I used to play a lot of Risk. I played. too much risk.

When I was in high school, we had a little risk ladder, basically, where we'd record who won. We had a little point system. I played probably two or three games of risk a week. Would it be with the same group? Yep, same six people. We always played it with six.

knew it took an hour it was very fast yeah and then uh when i remember when i was in college i a friend invited me to play with him and it was horrible because it took four hours and everybody was bickering at each other yeah these people they don't understand risk they're like essential

Risk to me boils down to a game where you're trying to make yourself hard to kill. You're not necessarily trying to eliminate the other players. You're trying to make yourself difficult to eliminate because in the mid-game, it's all about the cascading card turn-ins. So if you are localized in one area...

area, someone can just stomp on you, get the cards, and then kind of combo into the end. But if you spread yourself out so that no one player can eliminate you, you'll make it to the endgame. But when we were playing Risk, I remember reading... I can't remember. It was some book on the Middle Ages. I was thinking about systems of vassalage. And I thought, oh, it's a bummer that in Risk, when you eliminate a player, they're out of the game. They should still be in the game.

But as like a vassal. And so I made these like vassalage rules for risk. And actually, I did something very similar to diplomacy. And this is skipping ahead a little bit. But when I was in college, I... I was at a party, and I mentioned that I really admired diplomacy, and it turns out that in the Midwest, diplomacy was very commonly taught in high school. Really? I don't know how this happened, but suddenly half the people at this party said, oh, yeah, I played diplomacy in my high school.

run up to World War II history class, or World War I history class. And so I said, okay, well, let's play diplomacy at my place. And so next week, people started showing up for giving diplomacy, and the word got out, and I had about 20 people show up. to play a game of diplomacy, which only plays seven. And so at the last... And really needs seven. And really needs precisely seven. And so at the last moment, I hatched this kind of absurd variant.

which i still use and it's still my favorite way of playing diplomacy which is um you give everybody a supply center so you know you have three we have if we have three people If we have 21 players, we'll divide them as evenly as possible in their powers. And then you get a supply center. So if you're a French diplomat, you might get Marseille or Paris or whatever. And then when your country, when your capital, so the person who's... associated with the capital, they have to turn in the orders.

you lower the negotiation phase for the number of players. So the more players, the shorter the negotiation phase is. So then it becomes a question of delegation. You have to say, look, you need to negotiate this. You're responsible for negotiating that. Come back here in two minutes to check in. Then we'll go back out for a second round. And then whenever your country gets eliminated, when the capital falls, specifically,

Whichever new power controls that supply center gets you as a diplomat. And then the negotiations get shorter. So at the end of the game, you have three nations with staffs of six or seven diplomats trying to sort through. And there's some people will.

will sell each other out because they want to end up on a certain team for the end game. And it also plays in about three hours because you're continually increasing the pace of negotiation. So I was really interested in the political and diplomatic. situations that were present in history, but didn't seem to be in games because games had this very romantic like person as nation, as like death match.

mentality that I was finding in pretty much any strategic level game. And so all the early variants I did were usually about introducing some kind of diplomatic system into a game. Right. We're... I'm trying to remember when like social deduction games started appearing. It's not quite the same thing, but it starts to overlap, right? Right. We played a lot of Mafia. I was the one who was like constantly introducing Mafia to my high school friends and staying up too late playing it. Right. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Diplomacy is a, you know, it's a great game. I remember I played it a lot by email during, I guess, probably the mid 90s. Sure. The best way to play it, really. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Don't have to worry about long-term ramifications. We were playing essentially with anonymous people. But I was surprised how often I ended up...

Finishing the game in a team victory with someone, you know, where I was like, okay, I guess I could stab them. But like, I don't know. I kind of feel like, you know, like you can set your own idea of like what success is in diplomacy. Like you kind of have to. Yeah. Like almost, I almost, I dislike.

like the game when played to the stated victory condition because it gets so turgid. It just takes so long to actually get to those 18 supply centers. And so usually we'd play it to 10 or 12 or something, which oftentimes meant that... The situation wasn't fully resolved, but it wasn't worth the last, the back half. Right. Did you mod Risk as well?

Yeah, so there were a lot of weird risk mods I made around vassalage, and you could have multiple pieces in the same area. What was the point of being a vassal? There wasn't one. It was like I didn't want that kid to go home. Right. And so I was just trying to keep people in the game. And then there were situations where you'd like want to be on the winning team and you could be swapping your vassals around and things like that. And they never, you know, the variants like never.

really worked in any real way. But I was tinkering. Okay. I mean, are there echoes of this in Oath? Yeah, for sure. Is this kind of where that came from? I can't escape it. I mean, it's something... I mean, when I was working on Premier and setting up the coalition system... I was thinking about wanting to find ways for players to work together in the space of a game. And then when I was in later middle school, kind of going into high school,

It shifted a little bit because I had a friend who had some relative who was really into like the cutting edge of board games. So whatever game... would win the spiel or had done well at Essen that year, he would send. And so we had, I mean, I started playing Catan really early. I think, you know, I... the red box, the really old Mayfair box. So I got Catan very early, had been playing a lot of it, and then also games like Puerto Rico, Princes of Florence, Taj Mahal.

Those are the games we were playing in high school. And this was 2001, 2002, 2003. So they were just coming out. I think those games changed. I mean, I sort of stopped playing war games. We would get together and play El Grande three times instead of playing one long game of squad leader or something like that.

And that was just what, I mean, that was sort of my identity as a game player at the time. So why do you think you preferred those games versus the games you played before? They required a lot less setup. And I don't just mean set up in terms of putting pieces on the board. I mean, they're easier to teach. I mean, I remember, you know, I had friends who were really into Warhammer. And when we started playing Battle Cry, we stopped playing Warhammer because you only needed one copy of Battle Cry.

And when we would play El Grande, I remember I had this old game called Napoleon in Europe, which I liked quite a bit. And when I got El Grande... I remember someone saying, I like that we can play three games of El Grande instead of playing Napoleon. And they were scratching a similar kind of itch. We wanted to compete, but the historicity started mattering less and the actual mechanical framework started mattering a lot more. You started seeing that games are interesting in themselves.

Yeah, it was kind of interesting. Thinking back, War Games is kind of like somewhere between a hobby and a game, right? You're committing to this experience. And at the time, I didn't realize how much... you know, friction we were adding, you know, to get to, you know, something interesting. And it feels like there's kind of this weird path now of like, okay.

people wanted to make games about history and battles and you know complicated things right which meant they like okay we're gonna make a really complicated game And then those got outcompeted by, I don't know, maybe it's the dinosaurs versus the mammals. I don't know. They got outcompeted by people who are like, no, let's just make a game where it's all about the player experience. And it seems like the next step for board games was like, okay, well now can we go back and get...

what we really cared about originally was like we wanted games that are actually about something. And the term that I had, and this was as I was kind of going into college, was starting to play the games of Martin Wallace. Okay. And so particularly we played Princes of the Renaissance, Liberté, which is this game about the French Revolution, and then Struggle of Empires and Age of Steam.

Those were the hybrid games that were doing the work of bridging my earlier interest in historical games with a really mechanically robust game. When I was in school, we... We had a Sunday group that we would just play whatever Martin Wallace game we had on hand. So I probably played Age of Steam 50 or 60 times. We were always playing Struggle of Empires. So which of those games, for example, would be the best example? Can you talk that through? Yeah, sure. So probably Struggle of Empires.

So Struggle of Empires is a game about the kind of long 18th century, and it does a bunch of really incredible things. It's a very tight economic euro, but... You have infinite money. It's just as you print more money, you have to take social unrest. At the end of the game, the player who has taken the most unrest can't win. Or it is something they can't win. They just take a big scoring penalty. Okay.

The other thing it does is I think the 18th century is a really hard period to game because you're dealing with limited wars which don't fit. They don't fit cleanly into a lot of game logics. So why did they fight only in this very specific way for these very specific stakes and they decided to just stop?

And then maybe five years later, they were friends. And Wallace does this by having Struggle of Empires is built into these three contests, these three periods. And in each, you start with this auction where you spend resources. to choose teams, basically. And so you'll say, all right, in the first war, we're going to have France and Austria versus Britain and the Netherlands. And in the second war, Britain is going to work with Prussia or Russia or something.

It creates these very weird alliances because what will happen is if you're a strong power, your biggest enemy, you want to be on your team with your biggest enemy because you can't hurt them.

So if there's someone who's threatening... Wait, wait, say that again. You want to be on the team with your biggest enemy because you can't hurt them? Because if you're on the same team, they can't hurt you and you can't hurt them. So what will happen is the alliances are always extremely asymmetric. You always have these... two or three huge powers, a little bit like the Seven Years' War, where you've got France and the greater powers, think Austria.

kind of working together, but they're completely dysfunctional because they're at the height of their rivalry. And then the smaller alliances with the smaller nations, they are in positions of weakness, but they are actively collaborating. And the result of that is it creates these lovely limited wars where you're fighting in very narrow spaces on the board for very particular stakes, knowing that in a few turns, the alliances are going to get sort of rejuggled.

And it just sort of creates the feeling of 18th century political history with almost no rules. It's very rule slight. Wow. Okay. Well, that sounds very cool. It's a great game. Underrated. It's an underrated Wallace. And I think a lot of Wallace's games are. I think they like had their moment and then he had trouble navigating the transition to the Kickstarter, you know.

He had trouble navigating the transition to essentially like the growth of the independent board game publisher. So even though he was in some respects the first modern independent board game publisher, he never made that move quite right.

It's not that they've gotten worse, they just don't have the position and the spotlight that they once did. Sure, right. Okay. Okay, so when we're... Maybe let's talk about... what you were doing with your life during this this period so you know you're playing a lot of board games presumably you're also playing video games um and uh but what what did you want to do

Like, you know, where did you go to school? What were you trying to pursue? Did you ever think about making games? Like, this type of thing. It's weird. You know, I played a lot of video games, but I had a weird feeling about games, which is that... I loved them, but they seemed fundamentally like something that grown-ups didn't do, which is weird. And I don't think this is not, this prejudice is no one's fault but my own.

But I remember when I went to college, my grandfather said, he'd buy me a laptop. And I said, oh, that's all right. That sounds great. But I don't want a good one because I didn't want a laptop that could play games. Okay. And so this was a way of me being like, I'm going to college. I'm going to be a journalism student. I want to be a reporter.

I'm going to put away childish things. Put away my childish things. So I have a weird, even though I play a lot of video games, I have this black period from 2005 to 2010 where I played nothing. I played Halo once. I just missed the whole Xbox store, all that stuff. Isn't something that I really encountered at all. And so when I went to school, I brought with me, I had a copy of El Grande and a few other games.

But mostly, I got very serious about my studies. I wanted to be a journalist. And I went to Indiana, which had a really good journalism school. And just sort of I learned kind of the basics of broadcast reporting. But it was a weird time to be a journalism student because Craigslist had kind of destroyed.

The newspaper yeah, and but Facebook hadn't yet created the entry-level social media manager job Okay, so there were no runs on the bottom of the ladder So I remember calling a bunch of local papers and be saying Look, I'll work for very little. I just want to kind of get a start. And they said, well, we literally have no jobs for you. And so, you know, I was doing all this. So I wasn't thinking about games, certainly as a career, although I did run into a weird...

Paper I had written in sixth grade like a career paper that I'd forgotten I had written where you know You had to like pick a job and then interview someone who did it and I had interviewed I'd said I wanted to be a game designer yep, and had interviewed some people at relic because i was obsessed with homeworld at the time oh wow

In what grade? In sixth grade. How did you even get a hold of them? I wrote just an email to whatever the support, and then it was one of those I didn't hear back for a month. And then the person who designed Impossible Creatures 2, who I should probably look up.

wrote me this very, very kind answers to these like, you know, these sixth graders questions. And so, I mean, it was probably in the back of my mind that it seemed like an interesting thing to do, but I wasn't, it just didn't seem like a job that people had because.

You know, I grew up in a little rust belt city. I didn't know anybody who worked in entertainment or let alone in games. And so, you know, I kind of went through school thinking about being a reporter. Why did you want to be a reporter? Because I was obsessed with politics. My father was involved in kind of the local political scene in northern Indiana, and I was always sort of running into people who had worked at papers, and I really, like, admired, I mean, we would watch.

I remember as a kid watching Bill Moyers with my dad. And it was just, I was like, oh, that's what I want to do. I want to like, I want to help work on the Bill Moyers show. Such a specific, strange thing. And then, you know, I got to school and what I found was I was a really bad student for most of mine. I didn't really apply myself. But when I got to college, I found I genuinely loved taking classes, and especially if they were taught by people that...

were scary smart, impressed me in some way. And so Indiana had a really good history program and a really good English program. And so I just started taking classes in those departments and ended up, you know, kind of bloating my degree, just trying to get... as many classes as I could. And then when I graduated, there were no jobs. And so I ended up working in disability services for a year or so, just helping manage a group home. And then on the side, I would...

work as a research assistant to some of the professors I had worked with. Okay. And I did this because, you know, it was 10 bucks an hour just to hang out at a library. That's great. And also they... I just, I genuinely liked the work. And then I remember one of the professors- What were you researching for them? So I had a professor who named Joss Marsh and her husband, David Francis, were-

They worked a lot in early cinema. And David Francis had one of the largest privately held collections of Magic Lantern, Ephemera, and Slides, which were kind of proto-projectors. And they actually had a little house in Bloomington that was just the archive of his private collection. He had worked at the BFI before that. So I spent a summer just, like, helping them clean it and sort it and kind of working there. And at some point, I think it was Joss who asked. She said, well...

you know, it's getting into the summer, like, have you started working in your graduate school applications? And I said, well, I don't really even know what graduate school, I barely understand what this is. She's like, oh, I assumed you were doing all this work for me so that you could be applying for graduate school. And I was like, oh, I hadn't really even considered that, but maybe I should go ahead and try to do that. So I just sort of stumbled my way.

to a graduate program. Mostly because it just seemed like an interesting place to spend some time. And it was around that time that I started playing games more. I was sort of free from college and I had a little bit more free time and I got. interested in games again. Why did you think it was okay to start playing games again? Well, I mean, partly when I moved to Austin, so I did my graduate work at UT, and when I moved to Austin there was a game store across the street.

Literally just from the apartment I randomly picked. So I walked across the street to Great Hall Games, sadly no longer in business. And there were all these people playing war games and historical games. And I thought, well, I don't have anything better to do today. I'm just going to sit down and play. And I played this game designed by Phil Eklund called Lords of the Spanish Main, this pirate game that

It was a pirate game that like wasn't interested in pirate tropes. Like it mostly had to do with like... the Dutch and Puritan migrations and Spanish treasure fleets. But it was very specific and grounded in the 17th century in a way that I've never seen in a pirate game. Because most pirate games feel like, you know, Monkey Island or Pirates of the Caribbean or something.

Right. And so I sat down and played it and I thought, well, I've never seen a game that engages with history this way. And then I played his game High Frontier, which had just come out. Right. And it blew me away. One of the first games of High Frontier I played. my little crew was moving through a radiation belt and their ship busted up. And I spent the second half of the game trying to rescue my crew. I lost completely.

But I had never seen a board game tell so vivid and specific of a story. Right. And that kind of led me to really get back into thematic games, which at that point I'd been playing mostly Euros and kind of efficiency games for. five, six years. But it was Phil's games and some of the other war games that were being played that kind of dialed me back into games that were really grounded in their storytelling. Right. Cool.

Okay. And what were you studying in Texas? So I was in the English department. I worked mostly on the 19th century, the 18th and 19th century English novel. Right. So, and again, that came, and it wasn't because, I mean, I love Victorian novels, but I don't like them that much. I wanted, well, somebody had given me what was a pretty good piece of advice, which was that, especially the university, if you're going to...

be in research. You want to find something that you love, but it isn't like your truest passion because you need a little bit of distance. Okay. And so I, you know, I adored. a Thackeray novel or a Dickens novel. But most of the stuff I really loved reading was all 20th century. I love 20th century poetry and postmodern novels. But I couldn't be a good scholar of them because I was too much of a fanboy.

And so I had like enough distance from the 19th century that I could work on it. And then the longer I stayed in graduate school, the more my studies kind of shifted over towards the history side and the history of empire. I mean, 19th century literature. I mean, I don't know, it almost feels like it's history, basically. Yeah. Right, research is more than, yeah, I mean, it's as much as literature, right? So that's why I always find it kind of interesting. Okay, cool. And so...

So you finished your degree. Yeah. And what did you do then? Well, I, you know, over the course of my degree, graduate school is funny because it's hard. At least it was a difficult program, and it wasn't a walk in the park. But you also have these weird pools of free time where you submit an article and you're waiting.

And so you wait like months and you might be teaching a class or two and you've got some things that you're helping plan, but mostly you're just waiting. And I had an appointment for a few years at this place called the Digital Writing and Research Lab. the DWRL, and they gave you Adobe keys. So if you were in the DWRL, you could use any Adobe software. And so I just started teaching myself.

graphic design. Mostly as I was bored, I was sitting in a little proctoring lab watching other people teach and I would, you know, fix the projector when it broke. And so I just started teaching myself in design and then While that was going on, I've been playing these games by Phil and some other designers, and I just started emailing them and saying, well, I'd be happy to...

I want to playtest for this game. And then that turned into someone would say, well, I need this laid out. Can someone lay out this rules aid? And so I said, oh, I can lay that out. And so I was just picking up a little bit work and just trying to make myself helpful because I was interested in games. I wanted to make them better.

I wasn't really thinking about a career. Was reaching out to Phil the first time you'd reached out to someone in the industry? Yeah, it was the first time I reached out to a designer. And he wrote back the next day. He was so open. Pretty soon, I was on these email threads with about six or seven other people.

who, in retrospect, were like, that was the little design brain trust, where he's like, yeah, here's my idea, and people would react and talk about it. And a lot of this was just happening in email threads.

It wasn't very sophisticated stuff. Were these people mostly local to him? Because how would he... Back then it seems like it would be a lot harder to... if you're trying to design a game get feedback on it if people were all over so there were a couple centers you know it was him and his son and a couple people local to tucson

And then there were a few other places. Like there was a group in Germany and a group in Sweden who he had some relationship with. And then they would start, you know, tossing out their ideas. And I helped play test. A game of his called Greenland, which is the first game I ever really worked on where I can look at that game and point at conversations and things. That you had. Yeah, we changed that.

And Greenland was a really interesting game. It's a survival game about the Norse and Greenland. And it's sort of a reverse colonization game because the Norse get to Greenland and then the Inuit come later. And then the small ice age happens.

The Norse can't have cattle anymore. They have to leave or die, I guess. Yes, some combination. And I really enjoyed working on it. And then it was over that process that he said, well, would you be interested in working on a game? Like, do you actually want to design one? I said, well, I'll...

I'll think about it. And that led to a kind of string of history games that I did that were done. You know, I think Phil liked working with me because I didn't bother him that much. So I would say, okay, I'll go work on this game.

when you need the files and then I would just give him the files and he would kind of look over everything and say, yeah, this looks pretty good. Let's send it to the factory. I need it. You know, he's going to come out at Essen. Right. And so it was a very. That sounds very straightforward. I don't know that he ever really played the first edition of John Company. Really? Okay. Because at that point, from my perspective, it was great because Phil had a built-in audience.

Right, sure. And so I think one of the hardest things, this is always a hard piece of advice to give to people who are breaking into the industry, where they'll want to build their audience from scratch. And I always tell them, like, I kind of don't even know how to do that. Because what I did was I found a group of people who liked the same kind of games I liked.

And I sort of commandeered that audience. I mean, commandeering is too aggressive a word. I just, I already had a prebuilt audience. And then when I kept catering to it, eventually when I went off to do my own thing, many of those people came too.

I see. And that's very different from saying, like, here's my idea, like, like it on Steam, and we're just going to build it from there. Yeah, I don't know how to do it either. You know, for my career, like, I piggybacked off of Civilization, right? And... you know in here at gdc that's where we're talking you know there's gonna be a lot of people telling people like oh this is how you know it's really important to build your community and you got to make sure blah blah but like

I don't know if someone really does that from scratch. It seems like a miracle every time it happens. Well, the first edition of Premier sold 3,000 copies, which was never in doubt because Phil would say, look. I'm going to print 3,000 copies. They'll sell over about a year or two. And then I'm going to go on to the next game. And his whole business model, I mean, I loved his business model because it was built around things like German postage rate discount.

So you had to build, the games had to be a certain size. They'd be under a kilogram because he knew he could ship them fast enough. And later when he moved... To Germany, you know, he would tell me, like, well, this is how many games I can, like, fit on my bike rack, and I'm going to bike down the hill to the little post office and ship them off. So it's very, you know, kind of artisanal. Wow, yeah. But Premier sold...

Premier sold faster than expected. Would he sell everything direct? Almost everything was sold direct. Unless you were a store that wanted to buy. But he never put things into distribution. And back in those days, his whole schedule was built around Essen. And because he would have a little booth at us and sell there.

Would stores buy the stuff direct? Yes, some would. And actually, the store that was across the street from my apartment in Austin was one of the few stores that did. Because I'd never seen his stuff in stores. And here was basically his entire catalog. And I think it was just a matter of one person at that store.

liked his stuff and would just call him up or send him an email and order it that way. So I had done those things and I had also been writing about games and I had written a few essays about them and I just started... Because I was doing a lot of writing in my day-to-day job and thought, okay, well, maybe I should do reviews. I like games. Maybe I should be writing games in my spare time and things like that.

And, but it had been just a little side note. And then when I was defending my, getting ready to defend my dissertation, I was, you know, it's a classic graduate school problem. You're running out of funding. And you're like, can I, I mean, it's a little bit like. launching a game. You're like, can I finish this game before we run out of money? And I delayed my dissertation defense because I was finishing John Company. And there was...

I had too much to do. And so I remember I went to my advisor and I was very careful to never tell anyone I worked with at the university that I was working on games in my spare time. Because there was a perception. at the university that if they had any kind of side hustle, they weren't serious about their academic work. And that's because it was a very, very competitive program. And so if you... That's really sad because it kind of seems like...

It's very important for an academic to have like multiple interests and multiple like... Well, and a lot of people were working. I mean, I was working at this little cram school on the north side teaching SAT prep on the side. I would never tell anybody I had that side job because as soon as you told them, they'd be like, well...

you're just trying to go teach at a community college and kind of get the degree. You're not interested in actually like playing the R1 game and getting into the research world. But I went to my mentor. who was directing my dissertation, said, okay, look, I need to delay my dissertation. It's not ready because I have to finish this game at the East India Company. He's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, well, and I kind of like, you know.

Spooled out the past few years the fact that I've been kind of doing these games and he's like I can't believe you've never told me I love war games He like showed me a copy of wilderness war that he had and he you know, it was just a funny moment And he said, but like, are you sure you want to delay your dissertation? I said, well...

I know more people are going to read the rule book to this board game than are going to read my dissertation. Because at that point, there were just 1,000 people or a couple thousand people who were interested in that work, whereas in a university, there's like 10, 15.

And so it's funny, you know, the volumes of board game, board game volumes are so much smaller, orders of magnitude smaller than video games, but also orders of magnitude greater than academic publishing. Sure. And so I delayed my dissertation, finished John Company and got it shipped off.

And then I was up for this teaching job at this little school in Indiana that was sort of defunded over the course of my application process. And it was looking really good. It was looking good enough that I stopped applying for other jobs.

And that's a classic mistake. I just sort of said, like, okay, good. I'll teach at this little school in Indiana. It'll be great. And then that job evaporated, and I didn't know what to do, and I saw... a little job posting on Twitter of all places that just said, hey, we need a development.

A developer over at Leader Games. Wait, you know, hold on. Let's back up. Yeah, sure. You actually skipped over, essentially, your first games. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, like, and I, you know, I wrote them up and they got sent off and that was it. So that's a pretty big deal. Just. Period. Anytime someone makes their first game. So Phil said, hey, okay, you seem to have good ideas. How many people would he have done that with?

So apparently he had told me, he told me something interesting years later, which was that he had been trying to publish more games for a long time. I see. But what was happening is people would say, I have a great idea for a game. Yeah. And he'd say, cool, go make it. And they wouldn't make it. Okay, sure. Which is common.

But he was in a spot where he felt like he had built up this extra well of capital. He had a strong enough network that he could help people with factories and pre-press and all that stuff. But...

he didn't have titles to publish. And so as he was working, he said, well, like you should go work on a game about Central Asia because I know that's, you know, you're working on a chapter about Central Asia. So if you think there's a good game there, you should go do it. And I said, okay, well, that's...

That's something I'll think about. And I didn't really know how to do it. And part of the problem is, you know, I think working in the university can make you really, it has a chilling effect on creative output sometimes because... you're aware of how easy it is to do it wrong. Right.

And so I thought, okay, I want to be thinking about Central Asia, but I really don't want it to be like a piece of Orientalist garbage. Right. And so for that reason... I don't want this to be embarrassing. I don't want this to be embarrassing to me, to my advisors, to my family. And so... It took me a long time to figure out how to make this game about Afghanistan. And the core problem was I started designing it. So I thought, okay, I want to make a game about Central Asia. I think...

And you mentioned, because you were already doing research on this area. Yeah, so I've been doing... Was that what your dissertation was? So my dissertation was about... It was about perceptions of space and time in the 19th century. And what made it interesting was that I didn't talk too much about the railroad. It's about perceptions of space and time and them shifting.

before there was a technical apparatus to speed them up because what was happening is I noticed a lot of people would say, oh yeah, so you get the trains in the 1830s and 40s and everybody starts talking about how small the world is and how fast modern life is. But when I started reading about the...

The actual like letters that people were writing they were having those conversations like 30 or 40 years before the telegraph before the trades and I thought well What could have happened that would lead people do this and I'm like, oh, it's actually it's the global Empire And the Global Empire is this odd confidence game. And I always think about the example of India and the telegraph. They dropped a telegraph line in the 1850s that connected London with...

the company's holdings in India. It didn't work though. Fishermen were constantly pulling it up. It was getting sliced all the time. But everyone would always pretend like it was working. And so it was just a moment where you're like, look, London, I'm going to call dad if there's a problem. But they pick up the phone and they just had to pretend like they were actually talking to the police. And in fact, it was a deadline. And so I was really interested in that and just sort of how...

How people got around and existed in a world where their family members are living, you know, six months in the past or in the future, depending on which direction the letters are going. So one of those chapters I wrote about was... about this guy, Joseph Wolf, who is this missionary. And he read a report in the newspaper that said, these two men are hostage in the city of Bukhara. And he said, oh, I'm gonna rescue them.

And he goes on this insane journey to rescue these people. He gets there and they have been dead for a long time. And then he goes home. And the journey is so peculiar because... It relies on him assuming that the world is more connected than it actually is. This is valid information I have right now. Yeah, exactly. And then it's especially interesting because when he writes about this in this wild book, the travel memoir that he wrote about, he...

I think he figures it out pretty quickly that he's on a pretty dumb mission. But to maintain the tension of the narrative, he has to pretend otherwise. And so as he's getting closer, everyone's telling him, like, these people have been dead for a long time. What are you doing? But he's finding ways of, like, but there was a glimmer of hope over here.

I mean, a little bit like a bad cliffhanger in a daytime TV show or something. And so I've been working a lot on these travel narratives and just seeing people experience the bigness of the world. And then that had brought me into... learning about the history of Central Asia and thinking about, like, why, you know, why do we have these connates in the 19th century? What's going on there? And, you know, how is the...

How is the company trying, what is the British East India Company trying to accomplish in what was called then the Northwestern frontier? And learning a lot about the history of the Sikh kingdom and the... Russia's Western expansion. And so I've been thinking a lot about the politics period. I was really interested in it because Central Asia, it was just something I knew nothing about. And there's actually, there's a bit of my history with games that I left out, which is that I...

I loved designing games that I would never play. Like when I was in history classes in college, I would oftentimes, like I remember I was in a Byzantine history class and I was learning about the themes systems and how they did their levies. And I remember kind of like sketching out in the margins like, oh, that's like a...

cool idea for a game. And it wasn't a game I'd ever make. It was like I was just trying to understand something by putting it into a model. And so I thought, okay, I don't really understand a lot about Central Asia. What if I made a game about it? That would help me learn how that...

how that thing worked. And so I had this in my mind and I was reading these books, but the books were always like spy novels. And I tried figuring out like, how do you make a game about Central Asia with all these spies? But the spies were. They're so inconsequential. I mean, it's like the opposite of like, you know, an Ian Fleming or a John le Carré novel because the spies don't do anything. They're important, but they're not.

they're not the people who are actually steering the events. And so I noodled on this idea for about six months, and then I gave up. And then I saw a talk when I was at UT, and the person mentioned this book. called State and Tribe by Christine Noel, which is this book about the emergence of modern Afghanistan. And I read the book. And suddenly, like every little fragment that I knew about the period locked in a single picture. And I was like, oh, this is about an empire that...

which itself was a weird relic of the Persian conquest of India and the rise of the Mughals. And then the Durrani Empire is in a state of collapse. You've got this massive power vacuum and you've got... Persian interests and different local interests and Russian interests and British interests trying, you know, competing for control of the space while at the same time the Afghans are trying to figure out a way that they can make.

what looks like a modern state. And this is not so different from what was happening in Europe in the 19th century, in the Balkans or in other places where, you know, people are asking like, is there a regional hegemon that can stitch together something like a nation state here? As soon as I had that in focus, I thought, okay, I'm going to try to rebuild this game. So I created a draft for Premiere. I sent the rules and some PDFs to Phil and said, okay, here's the game.

And about a month later, he wrote me and said, cool, I want to buy it. Here are the terms. And I remember I got... He didn't have any, like, feedback? No, he said, you know, it needs work. It's not done. But... He was like, I want to go ahead and just let's secure this. We'll put it on the schedule. Do you think you can finish it by, you know, in eight months or something? Then I remember I got that email at like four in the morning because he was in Europe at the time.

And I just couldn't sleep. I mean, I think he gave me, I think I made, I think I made $2,500 and like he paid me a $1,200 advance. Right. At that time as a graduate student, my income was like 15 grand a year because I had like a teaching stipend. And I was...

I don't know. It blew me away. I couldn't believe that it actually happened. And then, you know, within a few weeks, I had that money in my bank account. And then I was finding myself just working on it, you know. How much time had you spent working on it at that point? At that point, like maybe...

like, I don't know, on and off for four or five months. Right. Can we just talk about, like, what, because what usually interests me is, like, okay, you want to make a game about Central Asia during that period, and... you know there's probably a thousand different ways to do that right um and you chose a couple very specific ways to to make packs i mean i played the second edition i never played the first so i'm not sure how different it is but um

You know, how did you decide to, I mean, there's some things really unique about PAX, right? Like a lot of, you know, most games like, okay, you're, you are these. You're this nation or whatever, you're this group and these are your units and those are your units and in packs you can flip around. The forces are not the players.

Right. That's interesting. The whole card-based system is interesting as well. And anyway, so like I'd like to hear some of the stuff. How did the goals come about? And what were you trying to do? There were two things. So I've talked a lot about the realization of the history, but there was this other conversation in my mind about game design, which had sort of nothing to do with the history and everything to do with the history at the same time, because I was just thinking about...

games that I was playing that there were things that they were doing that I didn't like. And one of them was I found that we were playing a lot of Race for the Galaxy. Yep. And I noticed that in tableau builders like that, You care a lot about your opponents in the early phases of the game, like a lot. Like if you're going to explore, I'm not going to explore. And you're always trying to read each other. But as you build out your tableau and your capability...

you're caring less about them. And really that's what you're building. You're building the ability to not care about the other players in the table. That's true, yeah. And so the tableau builders were always ending where I was just like looking down, where at the start of the game I was always looking across. Right. And so I thought, I want...

could I invert that? Like, would it be possible to build a tableau builder with the start? It doesn't really matter what you're doing. And then about halfway through the game, you start really caring about what the other players do. And that by the end of the game, you are thoroughly entangled with them.

The coalition system kind of came out of that, and PAX Premier has a scoring structure that basically says you're going to be on teams and you're going to work together. And when you're on these teams, your resources count collectively. But the prize pool is only going to go to particular players within that team. So there's kind of always two races. Or one way to think about it is there are kind of two scoring axes in the game.

The game is about dominating one scoring axis or the other, and then the third element of the game is dominating the fight to determine which scoring axis is going to count. And so I've been thinking about that, I mean, really kind of as an abstract. problem. And the game that helped me think about this was Pax Porfiriana, which is the kind of first game in what we now think of as sort of the Pax series. And Pax Porfiriana is a game that Phil made about the Mexican Revolution.

And it has a brilliant conceit. It's an amazing design. And I shouldn't say that Phil made it because it was really made by... him and his son and this guy Jim got. And I think his son did a lot of the design. And the history of the design, the very short version of it is, there was this game called Lords of the Sierra Madre, which was this massive open world

sim that basically did the southwestern United States and northern Mexico from 1900 to 1920. And it is an incredible design. It is massive. It barely works as a game. But it is so... It is so crisp and exciting in its narrative possibilities that players don't mind. They don't really care about what they're actually competing over or anything like that. And Phil had designed that game while his...

son was growing up. So his son played a lot with his friends. And then in adulthood, his son and Phil and their friend had attempted to make a card version of it. What I love about Pax Porfiriana is that it collapses like the weight of a star into like a sugar cube. All of the history is still there.

It's just hidden in really interesting ways in the design. And they did it by saying, okay, here's a market of cards. You're going to be buying cards from the market. You're going to be playing them on building your little tableaus. You're playing Hacendados, so you're kind of influential figures in the Mexican government.

And the core idea is, here we have Porfirio Diaz. He's kind of the corrupt president of Mexico. And he's old. And he's going to go away soon. But when he goes away, who gets to be in charge of Mexico? And Phil and the design team, the way they sorted through this is they said, okay, let's imagine there are these four moods.

And they call them regimes in the design. And so if everyone is happy with Perferia Diaz, we call that the Pax Perferiana. And then at that point, the player who has the most loyalty. So when Diaz gets sick and goes away... whoever was the most loyal to him, they get to be new president of Mexico. But let's say there's a Marxist revolt. In that case, the person who has the most sort of like influence with the Marxists is going to win.

And let's say there's a military coup. Well, then it's going to be about controlling the military. Or let's say the U.S. intervenes. Well, how close are you to Teddy Roosevelt? And so as players are building, they're kind of building these different types of victory points.

But at the end of the game, you only check, okay, do you have the right kind of victory points? And then you're going to take it. And so I thought, okay, that's a great framework. And then I tried to build it out into a more explicit coalition framework because I felt like if you and I were... we're both trying to get close to Teddy Roosevelt, we should be working as if we were on a team rather than just two players collecting blue stars. And so Premiere's design was very much like a riff on.

on Porfiriana in the same way that the early games I'd worked on were, you know, essentially variants. But I ended up... And you felt like it was a good match for Central Asia because you felt like there were... historical echoes between kind of the two periods yeah and it was one of those you know you have a big list of uh i always i do this exercise when i'm designing where i write like here are the characters here like the scenes that i want to have happen

And then you ask, is the game strong enough to support these moments? So it's never about, does this particular thing happen, but could it happen within the space of the game? And it seemed like a good match for Central Asia because both areas are borderlands. And they're borderlands that get dominated by... like little political enclaves, right? And so you have, you know, you have Sonora and Chihuahua and you have these like small landowners who have a lot of power in there.

very limited jurisdiction, which is a lot like the little city states. They're not really city states, but little cities and local powers in Afghanistan. So it felt like a pretty clean match. I think a lot of the... When Phil started working on PAX Renaissance, I said, I don't know if it's a good fit for the system because you're not working on a borderland area, and so it doesn't map. But they were able to make it work in a different way.

And so, you know, I kind of built through that stuff, and that gave me a basic formula. And then as I was going through the game, I kind of started with a very pex. For Furiana game. It was almost like just a mod of it. And then the longer I worked on it, I kept just subbing out systems. And so one of the first things that happened is I got rid of money. Because...

There wasn't a lot of money circulating in 18th century Afghanistan, in 19th century Afghanistan. Part of this problem was just because most of the circulating currency was... stolen from northern India in raids in the late 18th century. And so once... that dried up. There just wasn't cash. There's a famous liquidity crisis that happens in Central Asia where there's just not the influx of capital coming through. And so I thought, okay, well, it's not...

it doesn't really make sense for someone to be wealthy and have all this money and be able to buy all these baubles, because that wasn't really how power worked. And so I decided to instead change the money system to something more abstract. And so the money, they're still called rupees, but they... represent political capital. And so the idea is you accrue political capital in a variety of ways. And then when you spend them, you put them into circulation. Right.

And so, you know, when you buy a card from the market, you place these coins on all the cards before. And if anybody buys those cards, they're going to get whatever political capital happens to be sitting on those pieces. And what that did was it created this world where I thought about the... the cash economy of the game like a water table. And so, you can hold it all.

But players can take moves to like shift the water table over and then all the political influence will start running in other areas. And pretty much every part of the design I went through and found like, okay, I want this to behave in this way. travel narratives changed how the spies worked because I realized I didn't want to put the spies on the map because I'm like, spies are always lost.

And they're mostly not moving from, you know, two GPS coordinates, you know, a GPS coordinate to another. They're moving from one specific thing to another specific thing, which is why the spies in the game move in the tableaus. They're like not on the board at all. Right. And that was a really important part of the game's kind of like temporal. Yeah. I mean, to me, that's to make player positioning matter and car positioning matter, which was, you know, I thought was interesting.

Okay. It's interesting. When you talk about this stuff, I'm kind of curious where the line is between how much were you trying to improve Pax Puriana versus how much were you trying to make a game about Central Asia? Because it seems like the two things are kind of melding, right? Right. Yeah, I always have these kind of like two tumblers, and one of them is...

you know, settings, stories that I want to tell. And then the other Tumblr is like a mechanical intervention. And I find it impossible to design without... disliking something like I always pick a design where I'm like I'm not happy with how this works even if it's a game I adore and then I try to work in the negative space and build something you know that that addresses those things so I was really I wasn't trying to make a better

I really wanted to just make a game. I mean, fundamentally, I wanted to make a game about Central Asia. And then I also wanted to make a design that did something different with that type of game. But it wasn't, I didn't, I never felt like I was trying to like... Improve upon right the game. Well, I guess you you're building, you know, you're building off of it and and you know like so it was What I mean is that like it was an important framework for what you were doing?

Right? Like you were in the, I don't know, that little sub-genre, I guess you could call it, or whatever. And so the decisions you were making were still based off of like, okay, I'd like to do... X instead of Y, but in that kind of space, right? Whereas, you know, you could have also made just completely different game, right, about Central Asia that probably also still hit the marks you wanted to make.

about the period. But some of this was probably some mercenary thinking on my part because I wanted to make a game that did well with Phil's audience. Sure. And that meant working with what already had been proven. Right. I wasn't going to, you know. like take the Doom engine and make like a JRPG in it. I was like, no, we're going to make like Doom 2. You know, we're going to do like another game that is building on the things that are working.

Because I did want, I mean, I think something I was very conscious of when I was working on the game was thinking about... I wanted the game to do well enough. I was enjoying the process enough that I thought, well, I want to do more of these. I don't want to just make this one game. And that means it needs to...

hit with the audience. And so I was thinking about that pretty early on in the project. Right. Well, I mean, that's really good consideration for sure. Well, there's a funny balance because I think it's easy to... I think that when we think about games, it's so funny walking around GDC because I see a lot of people who are like, they take the, and I mean this in the worst way possible, they take the disruptor mindset into the game space and they're like, ah, this is my like.

earth-shaking idea that's going to change everything. And that to me is like a profoundly unhelpful way of thinking about how to make good works. Because you want to be building on something that already works. Yeah. Cool. I have a couple questions about kind of like some specific things about how Premier works that I found kind of interesting. One is that the whole clear the board mechanic of like when...

You know, when you do the victory, the victory determination and one of the nations is ahead by a lot.

You know, that's all very interesting because that's why, you know, keeps people from, you know, they've considered switching alliances. I mean, I think a lot of interesting game design is... you know early on you have like kind of like the like the most brute force of like it's just risk we have a bunch of a bunch of everyone's got their armies we're smashing them into each other um and kind of like what makes

Well, I'm usually more interested in conflict games is games where like there's very strong limits about who you can attack when and Otherwise, it kind of does, to some extent, if you're going to do a game where you can do anything, you might as well just play Diplomacy. Yes. Right? And so I feel like that aspect of PAX is really...

of a premiere is really interesting because you're essentially forced into alliances often. But the whole clearing the map thing feels a little at odds with the idea that I'm It kind of breaks me out of the setting a lot because I don't understand what it would mean in terms of the period. Yeah. Well, mostly it's so... This is a part of the game...

That board clearing mechanism was one of the first things I wanted. And that's a difference between the first edition and the second edition. Oh, okay. Because the first edition didn't have victory points. So it was a little harder to score. Okay. But it was just winning the game.

So you would like arrange things up and you'd have the right influence. And then if you essentially had scored like the most points, that's just victory and the game's over. And I thought, well, the problem with this is... That isn't telling the full story because if you look, if you start, you know, let's say 1823 and we go to 1850, there's moments where one faction achieves dominance, but then...

10 years later, there's like a second contest and so I wanted to make sure that players had a sense of this is more than just a single moment where they achieved an instant of hegemony, and then it was all figured out. And so the idea is that there's a time skip happening, that when you clear the board, it says, okay, so as you put pieces on the board...

It's not like you're building anything. This is funny because Premiere has the build action in it, but most of what you do in Premiere, you're not constructing anything. I always tell people that I'm really interested in Civilization games.

that aren't sieve builders. You're not building anything. What you're doing is putting things that already, you're putting edifices that already exist in alignment with yourself or with your interests. And so as you put pieces on the board in Premiere, it's like ossifying. into a particular conflict. And then the moment it resolves, everybody goes home. And you kind of like clear the board out. And then players will, in the kind of second act,

kind of rearmed the board a second time. And maybe it looks like it did the first time, which sometimes happens, and maybe it doesn't. And what that does is it gives your cards this kind of half-life where if you play the Army of the Indus and you throw a bunch of British blocks on the board...

you know, if the Brits achieve dominance, the fact that you have the army of the Indus on your tableau is not going to help you anymore. They've already done their thing. Maybe you keep them for their... administrative capacity, but you need to be holding cards in your hand and thinking about the market so that, you know, 10 years later you can...

do the second deed. And this is something I've gotten really interested in design more generally, is just thinking about how we deal with different kinds of temporalities and breaks in play, because it is a place where I think games really struggle to handle negative space.

Right. Because we want to create smooth experiences for players so they can just kind of like fall into it and just keep pressing the next turn button. I mean, this is something I feel like you know probably more about than most people. But...

there are these like cool and hot periods where there'll be a lot of activity in like a five day period and like nothing happens for three months. And those are really important to telling some of these, some of these stories. I mean, one of the biggest issues with just like most.

vaguely historical games is they just have a concept that like, I mean, Civ has this problem 100%, right? Like this idea of like, oh, I created this warrior and he's just going to stick around forever. Whereas most conflicts are building up of forces. Something happens and then the forces go away, right? You know, like there's an up and down if you're pulling your levies or you're doing this or that and...

there isn't this sort of constant military presence. So I get that. I just kind of wonder if you explain it as a time skip, which makes sense, but I feel like the game doesn't necessarily explain that. I feel like there should be...

maybe a clearing of the market, or you have, like, some of your cards are going to disappear, some sort of, like, thing that, like, marks that, like, time has passed here. No, I completely agree. And it's a funny place where, like, I won't be doing a third edition anytime, probably. But it is like that, when we put it in, we had a lot of trouble getting it to feel right because when we had...

We actually had a whole section of court attrition that players would have to do, and we had versions where the market would clear. And what we were finding is it was too disruptive to play. And so we were finding this weird balance where how can we show... that something is changing, but we don't want to, like, break the players' strategic plans. And I think that, like, it's possible that we were over the line a little bit on one side of it, but it was a really narrow...

Ranged to work in because the players really didn't want I mean when you bill if you spend resources and save to build that like cool night They just like tech chivalry to or whatever. You don't want that guy to go away Right. And, you know, I've been playing a lot of this guy Vocalrunka's living campaign games. And one of the things I love about them is you will raise an army and then they go on the calendar and they're like, hey.

They're here for 80 days. Right. And then they're going home. Yep. And so you'll have like bad weather or something or like the river's swollen. You can't cross and you're like, oh, no. I won't be able to. I can't get there. The other thing that will happen to you is you'll like raise all of your levies at once.

And you have this giant fat army and you're like, okay, great, we're going to go like conquer Granada or something. And then you're like, oh, I can't feed all these people. And so your army is very slow and you're constantly having supply problems and you're building all these flipping mules to carry supplies through the mountain passes.

And what ends up happening when you actually get into the rhythm of the game is there's this lovely dance where it's almost like a hockey coach pulling and putting in players constantly where you're like, okay, I'm going to let these guys go home because in a year I might need them again. And that was something that, you know, I was trying to do in Premiere 2 and just give this sense of, like, these were longer conflicts than it took to sort out. It's funny because I...

played oath after kind of playing premier a lot. And I kind of feel like maybe it needs some of the stuff that I see an oath in that, like, um, you know, market clearing, I think could work in a, like a, like a, conceptual sense but i understand that like yeah it like throws everyone's strategy off and like you know i was going to do this and like it's a big the scoring is already a big break yeah but like just something where okay yeah sure the army's clear but something else gets left behind

which now changes things a little bit in the next game. It doesn't need to be a huge thing, but just something that means like, okay, the Afghans will always have something in this area. Maybe it's not an army, maybe it's not a this or that, but there is some story left behind.

from the first two periods of the game. Yeah, absolutely. Or whatever. Like, I think that could be really interesting. Well, in Oath, I mean, it's no surprise that you have that thought because, you know, Premiere was very, the second edition of Premiere was very much me having worked on Root. and a couple other games, and then revising Premier to, you know, I mean, I just had learned a lot. I mean, Premier's my very first game, and Premier is filled with...

overly cautious design. I think the biggest mistake that I made, I wonder if this is common, is I think early in my design, I was very conservative. Because I would build a little working system and then I desperately didn't want a card power to like break that system. Sure. So my default was always very conservative system design because I didn't want to break the things that were working. And then as I've designed more.

I get a lot more liberal with my special powers and with my system design. It's like, no, this can go off the rails. The players will be able to correct for it. And if it has... If it has thematic and narrative resonance, it's usually worth taking a risk with the core system. And Oath, so Premier was very much putting in all these lessons I had learned. And then Oath was the first game I made after I had finished the second edition of Premier.

and was very much a reaction to Premiere. It was thinking about the kinds of things that the PAX games struggled doing and trying to find a way to... I mean, I wanted to make a PAX game without using any of the PAX mechanisms and try to, like, how do you get to the same...

We'll call it a narrative place, but from a completely different starting point. Right, yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, that's interesting. The other thing I want to ask about with Premiere is player count, because it just seems like such a... fundamentally different game. Three versus four versus five. And that's maybe a positive, right? Like it's kind of cool that it plays out totally differently. But it's like, it seems like so, so different.

that, I don't know, like, I don't really have a question, just like, how do you think about, like, what was going on there? There are two schools of thought when it comes to player count. One of them is, how do you make the same experience work at all different player counts? Or the other way says, These player counts are fundamentally different.

Can you make the game system resonate at all those differences? Almost like they're different variants. I usually tell people I don't include variants in my games, but they do have different player counts, which act like different variants. With Premier... So one way of thinking about player count is, so, you know, in game theory, game theory is always oriented around two-player contests, right? You're player one, player two.

You make rock, paper, scissors. You make the little matrix. But when you start doing multilateral games, all of that thinking, like, completely... goes away. You just can't use it because you're working in four and five dimensions now and it's very hard to even visualize that place. Usually designs fall apart. I love StarCraft. It's probably the game I've played more than any other game.

the second one. And the free-for-all mode, I think StarCraft is about as brilliant as any competitive game can be. Right, sure. And the free-for-all mode is so comically bad. It's just bizarre that you can even do it. Yeah, exactly. Someone should not be letting me ruin this game as much. You should have to go to your any file and override something to unlock it. Whereas the team games are goofy, but they're goofy in a way that is so much closer to the core experience. And I was working on...

I was working on – what was it? I can't even remember the name of the game I was working on. But we were talking about player scaling. And I had this realization that when we're talking about – what was it? It was – I was playing some weird economic game, and we were realizing that at low player counts, players could get away with really wild strategies. But as the game had more players in it, those wild strategies got shut down. And so I started realizing that...

You can actually use game theory to talk about multilateral games, but it's not player one, player two. It's player one versus the herd, whereas the herd are just what all other players are doing, like the aggregate of all other players. And I use that framework when I think about scaling a lot because I imagine, I think Oath is a really good example of it. You have one player who's trying to do something.

And then how many other players are going to be there running interference on that strategy? And in a lower player count game, the herd is weaker. So there are more wild strategies that are permissible. There's more player control. Right. In John Company, John Company always has the same number of actions, no matter the player count, basically. There are reasons why that's not true. But, you know, the company is the same size.

Essentially, you're dividing it among the players. There are people who really like that. Even though it's a negotiation game, there are people who really like it at low player counts because it's like you're all controlling one giant robot.

And you get to control a lot more of the robot. And so you can set up like crazy combos. And it's very strategic. Whereas the game becomes much more about social engineering at the higher player counts. Sure. Because you only have such a narrow footing. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely like have the sense of like some games I'll never play a certain player counts or whatever. But I, you know, like I do sense like a certain player counts is like everything kind of becomes diplomacy. Yeah.

and yeah it's just interesting to know how much you kind of because like what do you like do you Do you have like your own canonical version of like what's the right way to play Premiere? Premiere, I like Premiere a lot, a lot of the counts. I think I prefer, I don't.

There are people who like it at five. I like it most from two to four, and I think I probably prefer it as a four-player game. But I really do play it a lot of the different counts. John Company got the most testing at three because it was so fast. Yeah.

And so, I mean, we'd play Game of John Company in two hours with three players. Four is interesting for a premiere because it feels like nothing quite fits. Yep. You get that awkward. Like, there's always one player. You know, there's always a weird – you feel like one player is always the remainder of this division. But that also – I love that because it means that the system is never finding an equilibrium. Like root...

Root's interesting because I, for a long time, preferred Root at three or four. I hated playing it at five and six. I thought it was way too chaotic. And then as we started releasing more content... I kind of changed my mind about it because people who played Root at six players, they were playing like... almost like an open-world strategy game, where it doesn't have the same competitive clarity, but the world feels a lot more like living and breathing. I really like Oath.

as a four-player game and a three-player game. I think that it is a, it's not a mess at five, it's just I would never do, Oath at the max player counts requires all players really understand the game. Right. And I think that is enough of a requirement that I usually just don't do it unless it's in a specific situation. Although I do like how the game behaves at that count.

But I don't mind playing games that kind of odd player counts because I think they just show different things about the system. Race for the Galaxy is an interesting example too because I know people who... hated it too, and think that the two-player version of the game is the worst version of the game. And it's because of the double actions. It's like too fast and permissive. Whereas three and four can be very tricky. And I know other groups who only played it too.

Yeah, I really like the two-player version. Yeah, I love it, too. Like, I think it's really interesting that sometimes you end up doing the same thing, you know, and it's like, oh, geez, what happened to that turn, you know? Yeah. Yeah, cool. Okay, so... So you released Premier with him apparently glancing at the rules. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll say what happened with Premier, I'll say a little bit more about how it got published. So Phil liked it. He said...

Keep working on it. And then there was a moment in, so he did a review of it halfway through. His son was visiting him and they did a review about halfway through the game and it wasn't working for like all the reasons the games aren't working halfway through the development. The hardest problem was the game didn't have a board at that time. It was only played on cards. Oh, okay. And it was extremely hard to...

understand what the actual game state was. Because you would look and you're like, I don't know what I'm looking at. I can't tell if any factions in the lead or anything like that. How were you supposed to tell? You just counted icons. Oh, okay. Because I had to make sure the game fit in a tiny little box that was four inches square, basically, two inches tall. But it wasn't working. I had this essential problem.

And I remember he sent me a note saying, hey, maybe we should delay this for a year because I'm having a hard time thinking about the game. And I said, okay, that's fine, but give me one week. And I remember I canceled the class I was teaching that week. And then it was... break so i actually took two weeks and i i i built i changed the card list to free up uh six cards so i could make the six regions and the first edition had a map made out of cards pieces and then

Once I did that, the game started working, and he said, okay, this is fine. Go ahead and finish it. We set it off. It got released. Two pretty positive reviews. A board game writer named Dan Thoreau wrote a really glowing review of it.

And it sold through and then he said okay, you know people want us to reprint it and I there were some things that I had left on the cutting room floor That I built into this expansion called Kyber knives, which we made for the first game That came out the next year and then that next year while I was working on Kyber knives There was a publisher starting up That wanted that I had done some writing for Amabel Holland

when she was editing a magazine and she asked me if I wanted to design a game for the studio. And I said, sure. And she said, we're going to start a small studio. It's based in Michigan. It's print on demand. And the rules are you get a map and you get a counter sheet. With 144, like 200 counters. And if you've ever wanted to make a game like that, your pieces can only be one size. You can use dice if you'd like.

And I thought, well, that sounds like an interesting challenge. And then I started working on this Opium Wars game, which I designed mostly, this is a crazy thing, but when my son was being born... We were at the hospital for a long time. And one of the weird things about... about birth especially the perspective of the guys that you can't do much mostly mostly you're just sitting there trying to be helpful but in this particular case it was extremely like long sort of like low

I don't know how to describe it without like, it was a boring labor for the first three days. We were just like in the hospital, like kind of waiting. Right. Low intensity. Yeah, it was very low intensity. That's the right way of putting it. So I just sat there with my laptop and was like typing.

what became the draft for Infamous Traffic. Okay. And then we released that game. It did really well. And then John Company came after that. I can go into more detail. But John Company, by the time I did John Company... This is the point I was trying to get to. I told Phil I was working on this game at the East India Company, said, great, you know, Premiere did well, Image Traffic's doing well. If you can get me the files by May, we'll publish it.

And he hadn't really played it. I mean, I don't know if he's ever played it or he played it once or twice. But so there was just an incredible amount of trust that was granted to me. And it was so nice going to that project because I had been doing graphic design.

He knew that I was going to be submitting the files to the factory, so I kind of helped handle a lot of the production management. So I got to learn a lot of the business outside of just the design. Just because it was a small operation, I was trying to make myself helpful.

And then John Company was worked on that year. Okay, cool. Yeah, let's talk some about both those games. What were you trained to do with Infamous Traffic? So Infamous Traffic was... I've been working on John Company for a long time. Yeah. And it started because there was this game in – there's this old Avalon Hill game called Republic of Rome, which is one of the most interesting designs ever made because it –

tells, it does institutional history. It says, here's the Republic of Rome. In the game Republic of Rome, all the players are senatorial factions. And you can, you know, you're essentially playing a co-op where you're managing the state.

But one player, so you can say, okay, well, we need to go deal with the Romans. So we're going to give Scipio a big army. Hey, why don't you go deal with the Carthaginians? So give Scipio a big army. Go deal with Carthage. And then Scipio, when he comes back, would say, you know, what if I topple the government instead?

Maybe that's how it should go. And it does a great job of telling that story. But at the time, I was really interested in it. This is like circa 2008, 2009. It was impossible to find. Okay. It was one of those, like, it's on eBay for $300.

So I just started thinking like, oh, I'd love to do a game about institutional history, but instead of doing political history, it'd be cool to do like business history. And then I started thinking, oh, well, we could do like one of the East India companies. And that project...

was actually where I started getting an interest in what would, in the Victorian period, and, you know, a lot of these weird spy characters, and so it was really, John Company was almost like a research project that was informing these other projects I was working on. And one of those projects was this game about the Opium Wars. And so I couldn't get John Company to work. But when Amabel asked me...

If I was interested in doing a game, I was like, well, I kind of want to do a game about the opium wars because I've never played a game about it. And it seemed like it might be an interesting subject for a design. And so I put together some notes, and I originally designed the Opium Wars game as a three-faction game. And I said, okay, one player is going to be the British merchants who are mostly interested in...

shipping opium from India to China to make a buck. And then another player are going to be the Chinese smugglers who were interested in sneaking past the Chinese government to get opium into the interior. And then the third player is... the Chinese government trying to shut it all down. And I couldn't get it to work. What was happening was that the players were being too...

They were almost being caricatures of themselves. It was a strange thing. I've never run into a problem like it. But what would happen is the British player sort of felt like they were cast as the villain, which they are. to a degree in this game. But they would play like a comic book villain.

It was too cartoonish. And the Chinese government would play the role of the hero, but the history is a little bit more complicated than that. And so I felt like everyone was playing this very cartoonish version of the past. It didn't really work or make sense. And so I decided to recast it. I said, what if I just have all the players be the villains? Let's make them all. Let me ask you a little bit. When you say it didn't work, I can imagine a game like that still being, I mean.

Fun to play sure. So you just felt like thematically just felt really weird. Yeah, it wasn't like it worked as a game It just didn't feel right. It felt like it was telling the wrong story. Sometimes I'll work on a design and I'll get a proof of concept working and I'll feel like, well, this proof of concept isn't.

It isn't generating the feeling that I thought it was going to generate. And so, you know, it goes back in the bin. And then, so I started thinking about it from the perspective of the British merchants. And there were kind of two questions that needed answered. One of them was, how do you tell the story of the opium wars if your vantage point is like people who never really went to China?

I mean, that was like, that's the core problem with this traffic is like, these people are just hanging out on boats. They might be in and around Hong Kong or something. And that led to a version of the game that is all about the sort of building of these... logistical chains and it's about thinking about a kind of business contract as a bunch of different jobs that need allocated. So the core mechanism of infamous traffic is you're building these trade chains and the trade chain

has a bunch of different steps. You need the opium, you need the smuggler, you need someone to bribe a bureaucrat, etc. And at each level, they're taking an amount of graft. And then the chain is only going to be financially feasible if its total is less.

commiserate with the demand of the region. And then as soon as that happens, the profit gets realized because we said, okay, we're able to put together a deal. And that was a fun thing to sort out because it allowed me to build a game that is very...

And it involves a lot of like weird little alliances where you say, okay, I'll ship your opium in this context, but you need to give me a good deal in that context. And it created these kind of interesting incentives and player entanglements. And then the second problem I had was...

What's the end state like like what are we actually trying to do? There's one thing I really dislike in in a lot of business games, which is they'll be about money in a way that treats money as the end right sure which you know you don't need to spend that long wandering on the halls of gdc to find like finance bros talking about what they're actually after which is never money but it's always something much stupider um

And so I was just like reading the letters and thinking about these different trading firms and they were just obsessed with respectability and with like having nice things. And I played a splatter game called Greed Inc.

which was a game that was made after, I think it was made around the same time as the financial collapse, but it has this great system. So you have all these corporations, you're trying to be profitable, you're trying to extract money, etc. But what you're doing is like there's a car auction at the end of the turn.

And you're just spending all this money because you're like, this might be the nicest car I'm going to be able to get. And so I thought, okay, there needs to be some cash out mechanism, which... put so much pressure as so much fear of missing out that it puts on the players that it then makes their actions in the kind of Chinese frontier

more irresponsible because I want them to behave like a little rashly and do things that closely correspond to what actually happened historically, which meant... They need to be trying to extract maximum profit as fast as possible, but in an uneven kind of chaotic way. And so the idea is you...

You bid this money at the end of your turn. You're basically bidding the profitability of your company to send your kids, your little scions back to England. But you don't know what you're going to get. And so then you reveal two or three prizes.

and you give the highest value prize to the player with the most second, et cetera. But sometimes the highest value prize is kind of a bad marriage that doesn't do anything. And sometimes it's like, nope, you had a hunting accident. Your kid has gambling debts now. And so now you go into the next turn, and you're like,

Well, my first two brats are in debtor's prison for their gambling debts. And so now I really need to land it with the third kid. And it was meant to be a little arch. And what I was doing was I was trying to find... the right kind of tone to talk about this particular period of imperialism. And I was kind of worried about it because when I finished the design, I sent it back to Amabel and said, I like this game.

But it's maybe too serious and too silly at the same time. We're like mechanically, it's like very tight and aggressive. But then the victory point system is like a party trick or something. It's like we're all wearing like silly little cone hats and blowing noise makers. And I don't know if it's going to do anything. I even told her, I said, look, if you and Mary, her wife, I'm like, if you guys want to redevelop it, do whatever you want.

I'm happy with how the game is, but also, you know, this is one of the first games that they were publishing. They were taking a big risk on me. I said, if you need to tune this or you need a different victory point system, I'm not going to get precious about it.

And they said, no, actually, we think it's great and just decided to publish it. And so it has a weird thing where it again got published too fast. I would have loved to have kept working on it for another six months or something. But they said no. What would you have liked to have changed?

economy of the game is too tight. It just doesn't. I mean, it's a bunch of small, narrow stuff. Little mechanical things. Yeah, it's a bunch of little mechanical things. I'll probably have a chance to address that if I do a second edition of the game. But it was one of those things that it came out, and even at the moment I was like, I don't think anyone's going to like this thing.

Were you afraid of the thematic dissonance? Well, at that point, I wasn't. The audience was so narrow that I knew that anybody who bought a game about the Opium Wars was comfortable with that thematic space. I was mostly worried that the people who had really come to like Premier for its like very careful political calculations were going to be alarmed at something that is a lot more random and capricious. Right.

To my surprise, there were all these... game podcasts that really liked it so like heavy cardboard like gave it a nomination and a big spotlight and it did really well and it did well enough for hollenspiel the little game company that they were able to go full-time and kind of you know in the early years that was a really important part

their sales catalog and I just kept whenever I got a royalty check for the game I felt like I don't understand what people are getting out of this out of this design because to me it always felt so dissonant um where I was I was just asking players to do two very different kinds of things. And after that- It's funny because it's kind of, I remember in your-

You know, you gave a talk a couple days ago, and you kind of mentioned Brenda Romero's train, right? Or I guess that was in the Q&A. You know, as an example of a game, like, okay, this is doing something interesting, but it's kind of like you only do it once, right? And infamous traffic isn't really there.

But it's kind of like a little bit because it's like, you know, at the end of the game, probably people are like, this is really, this is a really weird experience. So it seems like understandable if people like found it interesting, but don't necessarily, it doesn't.

like keep going so but yeah anyway if you have any well no it's it's the closest to like a message game that i've ever that i've ever made and it i think mechanically there's like enough clever stuff in terms of like how the dice work and the weird little parasitic chains that you're building. It models the Taiping uprising in an interesting way, which is that as the demand for opium increases, there's this sort of...

like stability track for the Chinese government. So the missionaries will be going in opening up regions and there's all sorts of messes happening. And if things tilt too far, the typing... Uprising happens and it all kind of you know, there's kind of a secondary scoring condition and I think mechanically that stuff is really really interesting it also It has opium wars and I think that this actually it's funny

to say that because it's quite possible to make a game about the Opium Wars that doesn't include the Opium Wars. Because the Opium Wars, when you say, when someone says, oh, I'm writing a book about the Opium Wars, or I'm gonna read a book about the Opium Wars.

It's mostly not going to be about the opium wars because the opium wars are not interesting as wars. They take like a month and then they give Hong Kong to the Brits. I mean, they're not really wars. And what people are really talking about is the opium trade. Yes.

And I think I'm realizing now in this conversation that there's a through line in my work, which is this engagement with different kinds of time. Because the Opium Wars, it's the same sort of thing as the dominance checks in Premier. Right. Because what happens in the Opium Wars is that... Under certain situations, you can pressure the British government to intervene in China. Right. And when that happens, you go to this war phase where players spend...

So basically, the player with the most British influence collects all the British influence, and then they spend it to just wreck stuff, to open up parts of China, to break things, and then... After they're done spending it the war is over and now like Hong Kong is a British protectorate and we're gonna go into the next step and it what it does is I think that Mechanically, players really like it because it's as if you're playing a game of Catan. It switches to a war game.

A bunch of stuff gets destroyed and rebuilt, and then you say, okay, now let's play the rest of the game of Catan on this slightly adjusted board. And I was thinking a lot, and this is a very graduate student answer, but there's this Deleuze and Guadari essay.

on nomadology and the war machine. And they have this amazing metaphor where they talk about how, you know, one thing that war does is it, it doesn't rearrange anything. It just changes the rules. So it's like you're... you know, playing a game of chess and then suddenly we stop and we say, all the chess pieces are go pieces and you play five turns of

of Go, and then they've become chess pieces again. And so war creates these very weird- Certain things are possible that weren't before. Right. And then when you revert back to the previous system or a new system of rules- The world starts to look really strange and like you're like I don't even understand How the game state got to where this is I think infamous traffic does that pretty well And even though the victory system of the game is like a little arch and maybe a little peachy

the mechanical system is robust enough that players found something in the design. Another thing that stuck out to me is that you started the game with the players in the roles where they're more of like the... the roles with a lot more agency, right? Like they're the actual governments, right? Or not necessarily like the merchants as much, right? And it's funny because to me that seems like...

That puts it more similar to PAX Premier in that and maybe some of your other work where, you know, you seem to be more interested in, you know, the people who are, you know, existing inside of this working system. Right. So it's interesting that you had to.

You started it from the other place where like maybe they had too much agency or whatever. It kind of didn't make sense. Well, what I found was like the smugglers, for instance, were often just responding to direct economic incentives. So it wasn't like they weren't.

shaping those incentives they were just responding to it and even that's even true of the chinese government to a degree which the you know chinese government at that time was extremely scattered and dysfunctional and In the moments where they were acting in ways that are intelligible, in the sense that, like, there is a policy that is being put into place, it was usually because there were specific actors like Lin Zexu.

who said like, okay, this is wrong. I'm going to like act with authority in this very limited way. And so the primary mechanism of infamous traffic is There are these, they're just called conspiracy circles, but there are these, like, action pools at the top. And it's a drafting game. There's a big bag of all the actions. And you toss them out in these circles, and then players say, like, okay, I'll take that one. And that one is going to be...

Chinese government, you place some Chinese government pieces, you place a smuggler piece, you put a missionary on the board. And then maybe another conspiracy pool is like three missionaries or something. And it... Because a lot of the actions that were being taken were by small actors with not a lot of agency acting in a pretty narrow space. The British merchants, it's a little bit like a...

It's a little like a conceit or something. It's kind of a cheat to say, like, well, let's just imagine that the British merchants are the ones doing it. But really, the rules of the game are doing it. And then the players are just sort of activating. certain parts of the rules. The system is already creating the behaviors. Right.

Okay, cool. Let's move to John Company. Sure, absolutely. That was the next game? That was the next game. John Company started, I mean, it was probably I've been working on for a long time, and I think when I wrote the little design... Whenever I publish a game, I always put like a little, this is the history of the design essay where I try in like a few paragraphs to give like the bird's eye.

view of how the game got made. And John Company's is funny because it says like, well, I tried in 2009 and it didn't work. And then in 2013, I tried again. In 2015, I tried again. And part of the problem was I needed... There were there were two difficulties. So one difficulty was scope Early versions of John company were about all of the India companies. Okay

And like, okay, so we have the French India Company, the Dutch India Company, the British India Company. What was your goal at the beginning? The goal was I wanted more games about history.

that were about institutions and about the history of trade. Because it felt like every game I played about history was just about war and politics. You wanted to get away from a state. I wanted to get away from a state. You wanted to get to a company. And obviously they're a super good example. Yeah, well, because they're companies that...

kind of behave like states. So like, okay, we'll start by going not like to GE. We'll go a little closer. Well, the ambiguity is what makes it such a bizarre period of history of like, what did they think they were doing? What were they really? And they were defining their role different times in different ways. And then I had a second draft said, okay, I can't do this on an internet. Like, I can't do this.

in a comparative way i don't want to compare like the dutch east india company the bruce east india company what if what if i just did all the different imperial charters so you could play like the virginia company and levant company the hudson bay company and the east india company

because there was competition in between those charters. And that also didn't work. I mean, it both didn't work mechanically, but even something not working mechanically is never the end of the world, because you can fix them. but it wasn't even clear what I was trying to say. And then I remember I wrote myself like a little design memo where I said, okay, what am I actually trying to do here?

And I was like, OK, so I wrote kind of what I told you. OK, I'm going to try to do institutional history. I want to do history of business, not the history of states. And then I was like, well, I actually have like this other question, which is, I don't know why the East India Company happened.

Like if you look at the founding documents of the East India Company, if you look at the old East – so the East India Company kind of got reincorporated in the early 18th century. If you look at like the old East India Company and then you look at 1857 and then you look at – you know, the 1940s and, like, the apogee of the British Empire, those things don't follow. It doesn't make any sense that they went from, like, we're just here to trade, like, Muslims to we now are, like...

drawing taxes and building schools and railways and committing atrocities across the subcontinent. These things are not necessarily connected. And what I found was when I started reading the history... is that everyone was unhappy with everyone else. It was one of the strangest things. I think about Clive being victorious at Plassey, coming back to England, and then getting shunned. And I thought...

Well, if the Brits are truly the arch villains of history, and there's a good argument for that, then surely they would have given him a trophy. They wouldn't have behaved like that, right? Yeah, they wouldn't have behaved. There's something kind of funny going on here. And what I realized was that there was...

I was trying to figure out why is this company behaving in such idiosyncratic ways? And I had done a lot of work on the trial of Warren Hastings, which is, I mean, basically there's a lot of resentment at home. for nabobs people coming back loaded and there was a sense that they were getting their their wealth unfairly and really this is an old money new money battle sure that's happening but hastings hastings is especially interesting because

There are things about his administration as governor general of India that are really positive. I mean, he's building a lot of infrastructure. He cares deeply about the people of the subcontinent. And also, he's stealing a lot and doing some bad stuff as well. And the people who really put him on trial, and here I'm thinking of like Edmund Burke, like they're making an argument that is like –

fundamentally kind of isolationist. And so there's a very weird thing happening where like the cosmopolitan actors... are like at war with more of the provincial, I mean, Burke's a founder of conservative thought. So they're saying like, we shouldn't be doing these things. Yeah, because like, yeah, you're going native or something to a degree. And especially, I mean, in the 18th century, there's an amazing book by William Darwin Paul called The White.

the white Moogles, which is just about like intermarriage and the degree to which company actors and the kind of luminary families of India were kind of one block. And so I thought, okay, well, this is... this story isn't making any sense, what's going on here. I started realizing that the company wasn't behaving in logical ways because it isn't a single unit. And that's what made me realize that I couldn't have a game.

that had a bunch of different companies because I couldn't have the correspondence be one-to-one from player to company because the company... Behaved in ways that are really idiosyncratic that only makes sense if you think about it as like a single It's like playing the that weird flash game co-op where everybody's only pressing one button and you're like try I used to do this with my with my students in a digital

class where I'm like, okay, we're going to play quat, but you each get like only one letter. And you're like trying to, you know, get players to talk to each other about, you know, moving the hamstring or something. And the East India Company behaves that way. And in fact... I saw this really interesting talk by an economist named Marty Asen. He's a brilliant Indian economist, and he said that one of the fundamental lies of economic theory is that

the atomic unit of an economy is a single actor, a single purchaser, the economic man, it gets called sometimes, when he's like, that's not true at all. Churches, families, you know, it's really informal and formal. organizations are the elemental unit of an economy. And it's important to make that distinction because they behave completely differently than individuals. They don't behave rationally. Sometimes they behave more rationally. And it's a little bit like there's an economy.

who used to teach at Indiana named Eleanor Ostrom, who did all this work on the tragedy of the commons. And her big realization was that the tragedy of the commons is a cute economic idea. and it rings true to us when you read it in the abstract. But if you look for examples of it in the world, you don't find it. And so she used the example of fishing villages in Norway where you're like, well, here they're managing like...

you know, a bay, you know, a fishery, and you would expect, because the fishery is not owned by anyone, that it would be depleted. But actually, what happens is all of these organizations spring up around it, and sometimes they are... and sometimes they're formal, but they're managing the commons really well, despite not having ownership over it. Right. And so I realized like, okay, if you're going to tell the story of the East Indy company, part of what you have to capture is the idiosyncrasy.

of the institution. And so I started approaching the problem saying, all right, imagine there are these families, which there were. And I read this book by Sutton called The Maritime Service of the Company, which was really just about... families that had two or three generations of work in the company. And I started realizing that these are usually, these were people who were in the upper middle class, but they had run into walls. Maybe they had had relatives that had lost a lot of money.

Maybe they were mostly country doctors, and they kind of dreamed of moving to the aristocracy. And they saw the East India Company as a way of doing that work. And you get a lot of Scots-Irish that moved to the US for similar reasons. And so they're going into the company saying, ultimately, we want to cash out. So we're here for a little bit. We want to put ourselves in a prosperous place, and then we're going to kind of come back. And then within the company...

you have these different factions that are basically, if you think about every niece and nephew you send off to India being part of a gambit where you're like, you're going to work in the army, you're going to work in the army, you're going to work in the army, and I'm going to really hope that the armies are going to go. Conquering and then or if you put all your nieces and nephews in a you know in a trade footing well then you want a different kind of trade

Situation happened. Yeah, and then what ends up happening is you have these like weird factions I think oftentimes the way I tend to understand the company if I have to simplify it is Fundamentally you had a military component and you had an economic component to the company, and they did not like each other, because they were constantly creating trouble, but also opportunities for the other party. Right. And so, you know, I mean, Clive...

when Clyde went to Plassie, he barely had permission for anything he was doing. And then it just so happened that one of the things that he secured after Plassie was taxing rights. And so suddenly... a single person is getting the taxing rights of what would have been handled by a state. before, and then the East Indy Company has to build suddenly a bureaucratic apparatus to hold the things that these kind of rogue agents are taking in. And so as soon as I started realizing that...

The whole cast of the game changed. And I looked at Republic of Rome again very closely to see how it worked. I was just thinking of the Romans when you're like, oh, I... So-and-so accidentally conquered this, and now they're... Now we have to deal with it, you know. There's all these taxes that they have. Well, I mean, it's the same. I mean, people were so... I mean, like, Caesar's such an interesting figure in all this, because the Senate was, like, barely... I mean...

It's funny to say, the Senate barely tolerated Caesar, indeed, to the point of stabbing him. But it's a similar kind of dynamic where there's an incentive structure in place that is creating... bad actors. And so you want to have that be captured. But I also had played this game Kremlin, which is not... good game but it is sort of funny where you have these officers who are kind of moving up through the political borough right and like moving up the Kremlin and

They get old and die. And so I thought, oh, well, that's interesting because that happens in Republic of Rome too. Your guys get old and die. And this did something where it put the game at a very human scale where it isn't just that you're in charge of this army. You're in charge of this army, but your guy isn't going to be around forever. And so that then gave me this like weird design idea, which said, what if you build a kind of negotiation euro, but most euros are built on this exchange.

inflection point where you go from generating infrastructure to generating victory points. Okay. Right, so you're like, I'm going to build, build, build, and at a certain point, instead of building, I'm going to spend my resources getting victory points. And I said, what if you built a game where that inflection point wasn't controlled by the players? So the game says...

hey, your guy wants to go home. He's done being in India. How much money do you have to retire? And if you don't have money, are the other players going to loan it to you? And so that... That like central part of the game is what turned it into a negotiation game. It's what gave gave the game. It's like very human focus. And then the whole design kind of sprang out of a desire to then take that understanding of the period and that kind of mechanical hook and graft it into like a strategy game.

John Company is tricky because it was built in almost in like little segments where I'm like, okay, I need a segment that handles like how budgeting worked, how trade worked, how the military stuff worked. I just kind of like slowly, you know, it was the most modular design I've ever worked on. We're just like bolted little systems onto it. Okay. I know someone who played it described it to me as somewhat of a satirical game design. I don't know.

I haven't played it yet, so I'm not quite sure what that meant, but like, does that make sense to you? Oh, it is. So it's so funny because John Company is, I think it's probably the game I'm proudest of any that I've worked on, and it is very serious, but it is also the game where like... people shout at each other and like laugh and like it is so weirdly joyous to play because the game um it it's very silly and it has i wanted um

What makes it so silly? Is it the stakes? It's the way that the game uses random – it's the way the game uses the dice. Okay. So John Company – It's a game about trade in the 18th century, so uncertainty has to be a really big part of that picture. And I designed the dice on purpose to be controllable. but also have some baseline noise. So you're going to roll the dice a lot, which means unlikely things are going to happen. Right. It's like one of the wonderful paradoxes of working with random.

And I was like, yes. And I think it's funny because you can design a game where you say, if you spend enough resources, you don't have any. liability. But John Company is built around this S-curve and its probabilities that says you can never fully eliminate the risk. So what will happen is you'll throw the dice a lot in the game to trade in India. And eventually people get a little sloppy and they're like...

well, we've been passing all of our checks. So, I mean, it's a little bit, it's a little different from a lot of other games that have ran this because you will roll the dice, let's say, 40 times in a game of John Company. You will pass. 37 of your checks right so at some point people are like yeah well just it's 80 chance we'll roll we'll roll and then you'll roll eight dice and on a chance of like one percent fail because it's going to happen and

suddenly everything gets thrown out the window because now there's a run on the bank. And it generates, because the core narrative currency of the game are people and families and marriages, when there's a run on a bank in India... It's like, oh, no, now we can't get our money out to retire my nephew. We're borrowing money here. We're going to debtor's prison. And it creates like these very 19th century novel moments where like, you know.

Magwitch goes off to New Zealand and makes a ton of money or something. And one of the people who played the game once told me that it felt like a Victorian novel generator, which is like the kindest thing anyone could ever tell me about that game. It's exactly what it's trying to do. Right, yeah.

I've been reading, you know, I've worked on this novel by William McPiece-Thackery called The Newcombs, which is entirely about like a run on an Indian bank and how it like ripples back and destroys a family in England. And that was a tension that I really wanted. I also felt like that... I think that the novelistic frame was important for two reasons. One, it... gave players a way of engaging with a pretty serious subject that allowed them to have a little bit of a distance from it.

And I was very careful in the art and the presentation of the game to make all the British characters look weird and ugly. By using Gil Ray and Rollins in the cartoons. And there are a couple exceptions to that, but that's... mostly how they look and then the other thing it does is people at the time thought about their lives in those terms in the same way that you know

Whenever we watch like a piece of prestige television, we recognize it as like, oh, you know, this is the world that we live in. And even if it's a heightened version of it, like, I don't know, Better Call Saul or something, like watching that as a lawyer and being like, oh, I see that this is cartoonish.

a little bit, but it's also a way that I'm imagining my own life and work a little bit. And people living at this time thought about their lives in novelistic terms, and so it made sense to have that be. the way the world was, you know, kind of presenting itself. Right. Cool. So you revisited it. Recently, right? What were you trying to change about it? What is it that you wanted to do differently? Well, John Company was a game that...

It could have always taken more time to do sure and it was it was a game that ran into so I mentioned earlier that Phil's games were always built around German postage rates very well Part of the reason why I was I think I was a good fit for Phil is I would never go

budget. It's like the old piece of advice in the game industry is like, don't lose money. The classic, don't lose money, finish things on time. It'll just make your whole life easier. And with John Company, it was the first time that we cut rules out of that game because we were so close to one kilogram that I was like, I gotta...

cut the rule book down and so i was like removing pages from the rules because i couldn't have it go over and there were all these things about the production like we knew that we could only have a certain number of cards in the design yeah and so there were all these things that i wanted to put in the game and in fact in john company's case i think we could only have one day

of cards they always print cards in these either 50 or 54 card decks if it's a poker size card or 60 card deck if it's bridge and i was working on the game and said okay i really want to do like an event in india phase but What do I have? And I'm like, well, I've got some dice. And then I have literally eight cards left in my card sheet that I haven't used. And so I built the first edition of John Company, the entire...

like algorithm that runs the events in India is on eight carts, which have these like funny tables and they sit on top of each other and kind of show different icons and you roll dice to resolve it. And it's a cute piece of design, but. There was a lot that couldn't be done because of how it was presented. And so when Drew and I started, when my brother and I started Whirligig to do the history games, we wanted to do John Company right away. That was really...

the main one that we wanted to do. But we were like, you know, let's go slow, really think about the design. And we also want to make sure that we know what we're doing before we do it. So we did Premiere first as a... like testing the water, making sure that this is financially feasible. And then with John Company, what I wanted to do was to find ways. So I had all that stuff about the satirical and the novelistic storytelling.

That's stuff that's very subdued in the first edition of John Company. And it's subdued because your family members in that edition are cubes. And in the second edition, we spent money to print little cameos on little wooden circles. And the first edition doesn't use very much art. In fact the first edition players will watch people playing it and not realize the game is about India at all because there's no like a map of India and said okay We got to put a map of India and in fact

If I look at every prototype board of the second issue John Company, one thing that happens is the map of India starts very small in the corner, and it just slowly gets larger, and it kind of scales up proportionally to the point where it takes up almost half the board. So that was one, like, group of things I wanted to do.

And then the second thing was, John Company has this insane twist in it, which it's a funny thing to spend so much time talking about John Company and now I've mentioned the twist of John Company, which is, in 1813, the British government revoked the British Sydney Company's trading charter. One goal of the design was that if you're playing John Company, you play the full campaign with all the bells and whistles. When the company deregulates, when it loses its trading charter,

players can start their own trading firms. And they're essentially building miniature John Companies within John Company. And so I thought, okay. well, this is a really cool thing that I really want to work in a game. And I got a version of it working in the first edition, but it never got the development it needed. It wasn't very well balanced because I was at that point finishing my dissertation. We were trying to move. We just had a kid, kid number two.

crazy busy, and we got it working well enough. But for the second edition, I thought, I really want to make sure the private firm game is working really, really well. We in the course of the development we kind of finished most of the second issue of John company and then spent about half of the development just focusing on the private firm game and making sure it was balanced and Creating really interesting tensions because I especially wanted to show

the weird parasitic relationship between these small private firms and the sort of like corpse of East India Company that they were harvesting. And there are instances where the private companies will essentially like you know, contract out security from the company or they'll build on different trade, you know, different trade patterns and or, you know, they'll build on.

They'll build different kinds of trade arrangements where they'll kind of alley-oop for each other. Or they can have a very hostile relationship and just be at odds. And it was important, if I was going to build this big sandbox game about the history of the Acidity Company, that...

The private firm game worked and so when you play the full campaign of John Company Deregulation is a tool that the players have that the prime minister player has in particular which is a position that players can compete for And if the company's in trouble, one thing you can do is you can opt to deregulate it. So if the company is going to collapse and the game ends when the company collapses, one thing you can do is you can say, okay, everybody, let's deregulate the company.

That's going to increase its standing. It's going to fix its financial picture. But now players can start competing with the company. And it does a lovely thing in the campaign mode because that could happen in 1740. as it almost did several times. The company was always on the verge of deregulating. You know, I mean, Oliver Cromwell almost did it. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's a funny thing. Cool. Yeah, so let's...

Let's jump into Root. I mean, you don't necessarily need as much of how it happened, but I'm just curious about, you know, what... It's got a super asymmetrical design. What what were you trying to do at the end of the project? Was that the was that the kind of a goal? I can only imagine. So it started with a concept document that Patrick had written

where he had done this game Vast, which was an adventure game that was asymmetric, where one player plays the monster, one player plays the hero, one player plays the setting itself. And he had written this little design brief that said, What if we could do this with a strategy game? And so there were actually a bunch of different variants of it. One of them was a 4X game where every player was like a different X.

Okay. Which was always kind of a busted idea. Just saying that, that's a crazy idea. But anyway, go ahead. I think it's a busted idea because the term 4X to me is like... a horrible term of design because it's so non-descriptive. So I always tell people like 4X is like a

The marketers can have 4X. Like, as a design principle, don't tell me, like, this is my 4X. It's not very useful. What's even worse is, like, they start using it for mobile games. There's this category of mobile 4X games, which is not at all even... So he had this other designer, and when I was originally hired, I was helping this other designer work on their 4X game, which we couldn't get to work. And then he said, well, if you had to make an asymmetric strategy game, how would you do it?

And he had a little prompt where he's like, I kind of want, and I'm like, what do you mean by asymmetric? He said, well, one player is like, they've got a big kingdom. They're trying to like build an empire. Another player is like a single actor in the empire, like a single hero. I said, okay, well, I'll think about that.

And the first thing that sprang to mind were the coin games, which is the series of games by GMT that basically look at these different... moments of counterinsurgency but they have this kind of similar template for how they they treat it which is to say there's a government player and their biggest responsibility is stability.

And then you have an insurrection that is the threat to the stability. And then in order to fight with the insurrection, they will oftentimes court paramilitaries, which behave like an insurrection, but against insurrection. And then you oftentimes have an opportunist who might be in the context of a game like Cuba Libre, be the casinos or the cartels in the context of Andy and Abyss. And so I thought about this and thought, oh, if we're making an asymmetric strategy game...

we should use that framework. And so I said, okay, instead of there just being an empire, this is like a player who is responsible for policing and they're mostly interested in development and commerce. And then I was like, okay, well we want like an insurrection. that is trying to like institute a new order and then for the single hero role we'll have like a roving opportunist who's mostly interested in their own bona fides and then we need some kind of i want an external threat

And so that led to the kind of initial four factions of Root. But I had played a lot of Vast at that point and had some problems with how the design worked. And the biggest problem was that it lacked a shared... a shared vocabulary that allow the players to be able to see what each other were doing. And this is a really important part of any kind of strategy game because you have to, the other side needs to be intelligible.

It's one of the things that is so frustrating about learning a MOBA game, is there's so many heroes when you start playing that you're like, I don't even know what this player can do, so we might as well be playing different games. In contrast, with something like a more traditional RTS,

So I was trying to think about how do you build a strategy game where there's a strong enough shared grammar that the players can imagine what each other's capabilities are and react to them. And so I looked at Vast and said, okay, the problem with Vast is that... everybody it's asymmetric so everybody's moving and fighting differently etc i said what if we just said like here are the rules of movement and here are the rules of fighting and and those are going to be the same for

Absolutely everyone so I tried to give like some shared verbs to the game and then had these like really simple inversions So, you know in the combat system in route you throw two dice and the attacker does the higher value and the defender does lower value, but we're playing the insurgent

the defender does the higher value. And it was just a very simple inversion that players could know like, okay, I know that you use these dice differently in ways that make it hard to attack you. And so we built the design. kind of around that premise. And then we went to Kickstarter to fund it, and the game did really, really well. And something about the presentation and the theme just resonated.

in a way that was outsized to our expectations. Yeah, what was the key to that success? Well, I originally designed it kind of as a generic fantasy game. It didn't really have a theme on purpose. And then Patrick had been working this other game with Kyle, and Kyle had always loved drawing these anthropomorphic cartoony animals, sort of in the line with Disney's Robin Hood. And Kyle said, well, we could use these.

And it created this really amazing, I hate to use the word synergy, but it's a synergy, a really amazing consequence, which is most... games, especially we talked earlier about sort of Euro games and the very robust mechanical puzzles that were made in the mid-2000s. A lot of those games, even if they were about war,

would have very abstract concepts. And so in order to convince people that the game was actually about war, they'd use really violent art. And my poster child here is Adrian Smith's drawings for Eric Lang's Blood Rage. Okay. Blood Rage. Everyone's ripping off each other's heads. They're all very brawny. But the actual game is not bland. It's a good drafting game, but it's just a drafting game. And so what the theme is doing in that instance is making...

the games seem more violent and more adult because the actual design is not doing that work. And what happened with Root was the original concept I made was so mean. that players would get very prickly when they were playing with each other because you could really damage another player's player position. But as soon as we put Kyle's art to it, it helped...

give players permission. It sort of turned the thing into like a Saturday morning cartoon, but people didn't mind the violence so much. So instead of the art pulling the game into its theme, the mechanics were pulling the game into its theme and the art was making it a little bit more... palatable it was trained on the temperature so yeah yeah exactly so you could still sort of like have that like high action moment

But it was more permissible because we were in a cooler environment. Yeah, and it was just something that we just kind of stood on together. And then we had all these conversations about the physical production that were related to it. One of them was about if we should use miniatures. And Kyle is a big advocate.

of what sometimes it's called like a deco rationalism which is to say when you're doing when you're doing design product design aesthetic design you should be trying to build something that has logic within the world of the game. So Root should look like a game that is played by people living in the world of Root. And so he opted for a wooden piece design. I said, I really want to use miniatures because miniatures always look like video games because they look like 3D renders.

um let's do wooden pieces and then i was like well i have this problem with meeples because oftentimes meeples are designed in very elaborate ways um and they don't look like anything because if you have a bunch of wooden pieces on the board and the shape of the wooden piece has a lot of vertices it's just going to look

like a blur. And so Kyle said, okay, well, I'm going to draw them to be very simple shapes. And so he kind of had this heightened abstract presentation for the root meeples. And as soon as he did the first draft, we were like, okay, that's the look of the game.

It all got locked in and then it really resonated with people. We raised all this money. And one thing that people demanded almost instantly was like, where are the other factions? And so that then... How much of the design was done at this point? It was barely done. You could play it, but only the first four factions were kind of fully sketched out. One of the factions did not really work at all.

It was solvable, but we'd only been working on the game when we talked the game to Kickstarter been we've been working on it for about two months, right? So we had it we had a look the the cat faction and the The Byrd faction were the most designed. The Woodland Alliance was a mess. It was very hard to make work. And then the Vagabond hadn't been worked on very much, but it was functional.

But people wanted us to do more work, but we hadn't designed the rules to actually be expanded. And so as we, after we raised the money and realized that we were, because one of the things that happens with crowdfunding is part of what you learn.

is how long you're able to work on the game sure right so if we would have only raised you know a quarter million dollars we've been like okay let's just get it done and move on to the next project but we raised enough money that we said like okay we can give this about a year and so part of what we did was expand the framework so that it could be meaningfully expanded right um we built some new factions we were able to add another map all that kind of stuff right

Yeah, I mean, you see bits in the rules all over. I was like, okay, this is what it means to rule. This is what it means to move. And it's like, okay, this seems like it's spelled out very particularly.

And then it only makes sense more when other expansions come along that do weird different things with those rules, you know. And even then, we only thought we'd ever do one expansion for Root. And then whenever an expansion comes out, Josh, the editor, and I will go in the rules and be like, okay, we have to rewrite the...

battle rules. So they're more knobby so that we can plug in other systems into them. Yeah, because a lot of the rules could be written a lot simpler if the game would have just been the four factions. Okay. Did you have like what were some of the major challenges in trying to get like these very different, you know, factions to work together? I mean, part of it was figuring out how to.

I mean, I had never made an asymmetric game, so I didn't really have any sense of what it meant to test an asymmetric design. And I think some asymmetric designs are actually kind of easy to test because you make one thing work, and then you say, okay, that's done, and you move on to the next.

puzzle but because I was very insistent that I wanted the interaction between the factions to be Truly multilateral so I wanted there to be really the the litmus test I gave myself was that players should always have a reason to be friends with another faction or to work against them and so that meant that we had to constantly revisit factions that we had already completed to make sure that it was harmonizing with all the parts.

We kind of had this big wheel where I'd go through and work on one faction. Once it was ready, I'd go to the next one. And then once we'd gotten through all the factions, we just started it back over. This was made possible because we had some really good testing groups. I mean, Root was mostly made...

And this is actually something that has really changed my own practice. Root was essentially designed by three groups. It was designed by the four of us in the office. It was designed by one group that we had that was based on the East Coast.

And then it was designed by one, essentially my brother and some friends who were living in Chicago. Okay. And those were the three groups that played Root by far the most. Right. And... we had to uh you know manage some there's some there's some version control stuff that had to be sorted out and we had to make sure that we weren't fatiguing our play testers too much but mostly we didn't have any

At this point, I had never managed any kind of project that I had to staff. All the projects I had worked on at this point were just me working by myself with some testers. And this was the first time where... I had to submit an art request list to the artists. I had to think about like, oh, this is our Friday version. We'll be testing it for three weeks. And then how are we going to get that information? So most of the development of the route was just brute forcing.

I mean, there's probably so much wasted effort in that first expansion because we were just brute forcing through whatever problem we had. So if we ever ran into a problem, we'd say, okay, let's just play the game five times and we'll try to solve it by the end of all those play tests. Right. And...

It worked, but it was probably extremely wasteful and certainly exhausted. What's the better alternative? Well, I think I could have spent some time modeling the game a little bit and specifically things like... the way combat worked. Root's combat system was designed almost entirely organically. I didn't have any key insight. I just sort of went like, okay, I need the attacker to be a little bit stronger than the defender.

I want kind of like this dynamic range and we tried a bunch of different dice systems and this one kind of felt the best so we just sort of went went through it whereas these days I feel like I spend a lot more time Doing design outside of the context of an iterative loop and because what will happen is you'll you'll see something and be like well I know that's not gonna work

And so you just, I'm not even going to bother putting it into an iteration. We can just scrap it. And with Root, we tested a lot of versions of Root where we'd play like half a turn and say, oh, it's busted. Just go back and kind of rebuild it. Okay. So that's interesting because you'll hear a lot from designers just how important an iterative loop is to making good games, right? So what you're saying is that there's some parts of the design where you really can't...

Or it shouldn't be done that way. I just like to hear more about what you mean by that. The one piece of advice I always give to new designers is that understand what the iterative loop is and do everything you can to make it as tight and short as possible. Because the longer and more complex your iterative loop is, the harder it is for you to play. One way to think about it, to put it in game terms, is the...

unit of time in game design is a cycle through the iterative loop. And you are going to, whenever that happens, guess what? You're exhausting your team, you're exhausting yourself. And so... You know you're gonna have to go through that cycle a lot and you can lower the exhaustion by being smart about What is composed in the inner iterative loop like what you're actually doing to iterate?

but also by realizing that certain times you don't need a play test to realize that something is busted. And that, I mean, I feel like that is the biggest difference between myself as a designer six years ago and now. is I will look at something and be like, I see that this is busted without a play test. Right. You're doing the iterative loop in your head. Yeah, essentially. So it's still happening. Is that just based off of your instincts and experience now? Yeah, mostly. And also...

It sometimes comes down to knowing the right tool for a problem and saying, OK, I understand the shape of this problem such that I'm going to go write a little Python model and run it and just sort of see what the outputs are. And then that's going to tell me as much as a bunch of playtests. And the other thing that has changed is I will play, I feel like I do a lot more playtesting that is looser, where I'll say, you know, I would work on this game Arx.

And one of the first things that we did is I said, okay, I've got this action system for this game I'm working on, and I want to test it. But I don't want to like answer the question of like what is a unit? How does battle work all that stuff? So what I did was I just set up a game of root and I said, okay, we're all the cat

Here are some pieces on the board. Combat is root combat, but here's a different action system. And we would just play some rounds just to sort of feel like, is this action system actually interesting? And that way I don't have to like... invent some goofy movement system to just do a proof of concept test or something like that. And roots testing happened because, you know, we're all sitting in the office, there are four of us, and we've got a printer, and we're just...

I'm printing out a new copy, we're putting it on a table, we're playing it over lunch, and then I fix it, and then we play it again. And at that point in the company's life, there wasn't a lot of stuff to worry about. I mean, Vast had already come out.

We weren't really worrying about it anymore. And everyone was able to just kind of like focus on the task at hand. I mean, one of the things I love about working in board games is when I listen to like a GDC talk, it's a retrospective of like what... PC games were like in the early 90s, it looks a lot like board games. Because it's like, here's a team of five people that made a game. And it took them a year. And I think our staffs have gotten bigger now.

but we're still closer to that world than the world of digital games. Yeah, yeah. When you're talking about some of the things that you... were iterating on and changing with the game. Can you think of some good examples of major changes you had to make? that maybe was preventing the game from working. Yeah. So the biggest one, and this happened right before we launched the Kickstarter, is the way the Eerie did its action programming. And it's collapsed. So the idea of the Eerie was that...

you would develop these positions, and then as you grew, you would also grow in instability, and then eventually you'd fall apart. And for a long time, I had the instability linked to the size of your armies and the size of your board position. Okay. And it created this very predictable system where you would just get a bunch of pieces on the board, and then you'd take them off the board, and then you'd get a bunch of pieces on the board.

And after you pulled all your pieces off the board, your action potential was so low that the last third of the game was nonsense. And then at some point, and I wish I had a better understanding of where this idea came from, I realized that... I shouldn't be linking the growth and collapse cycle to pieces on the board. I should instead be linking it to something else because what you wanted was a lot of pieces on the board, a lot of action potential.

but very few actions. Because that meant that you were having, you know, it felt like... the feeling of being in civil war where you're like there's a lot of capability out here but i'm only able to direct a very small portion so i went through all kinds of versions i had versions where like actually you have to fight these little civil wars that

there's not enough space in the game to tell that story. And then eventually you move to a system where I said, okay, the action programming is doing it. You know, you're going to be making these action programs. Those action programs are going to make you stronger.

but they're also going to make you a little bit more rigid in what you can do. And then when you suffer collapse, the action program is what you lose. You still have all your pieces on the board. And so when you start reprogramming... You still have a lot of strength, but it's strength that is limited and pointed. Right. And that was something that just took a lot of, you know, iteration. Taking stuff away from players is hard. Yeah.

It's especially hard because that's the story of everything. I think about the old Chaosome RPG, Call of Cthulhu, which... inverts the D&D power curve. Like in Call of Duty you start at your strongest and then your character gets weaker as the game goes. Which like that's how everything is. That's like every good story. And it's still so...

Tough. Yeah. One issue that I run into a lot in like 4X design is that you need to kind of, you're always trying to worry about kind of like snowball effects. And a lot of times... It becomes such a instinct of like, I got to prevent the snowball that you end up punishing the player too much for success.

And at some point you've got to step back and like, well, what's the whole point of this game? You don't want to ever put a player in a position where they're like, okay, I could do this thing, which means I've just succeeded, but now I'm going to fail because I succeeded. You want them to underperform I always think about the game power grid has this problem where the turn order mechanism

is so critical, which is the idea that the players who are losing give this little benefit. And it's so important that that's the game. The game is about using it. And I don't think it makes the game worse, but it does make the game's storytelling worse. Because you're like, ah, yes, I'm the... power company that is deciding not to grow so I can gain market advantage. There's no natural story there. That doesn't make sense.

Yeah, no, I found the eerie really interesting. I was like, I hadn't seen something quite like this. And yeah, I thought it was kind of... It was a... Very orthogonal to the rest of them, which I guess is the point. You said the Woodland Alliance really hard to get to work. So what was the version in there? We originally had a version that basically said they don't have actions. actions are just on the cards. And the idea was in the context of Root, the deck represents the...

culture of the map. Right. I mean, and maybe even every map was going to have its own deck and you would have these, like, if you're playing in this, you're dealing with these kinds of, these kinds of critters. And so the Woodland Alliance said, okay, well, what about instead of having actions?

all the actions are mapped onto the deck of cards. The deck of cards would say every card has a capability, which can be built. It has a suit, which is spent for lots of things. And then it also has a special Woodland Alliance box. It's like, if you use this...

For its insurgency value, you're going to smuggle some folks around. And we had this whole system of like hideouts and you're moving these pieces like on a little like sub map. And what ended up happening is we ran into the theory of mind problem, which is their actions were so up to. and were so contingent upon the cards that were in their hand that players couldn't even imagine what they could do. And so, you know, if you're trying to put, like, a terrorist cell in a game...

If the player who's the police person doesn't understand what kind of power the terrorist cell can do, then they can't be afraid of them, even if they are powerful. And that second part's really critical because it's going to feel arbitrary. If suddenly it's like, ah, I've done my big scoop and I'm going to destroy a bunch of your pieces. And they say, well, I didn't have a chance to react to that. And so...

I mean, I had no idea that that could even happen. Right, right. And so the Woodland Alliance was a very careful... Well, I wasn't careful at all. We went through many different versions that basically were trying to find where do we put the offensive potential of the Woodland Alliance in a way that it is properly telegraphed to the other players. And eventually we figured out how to do this by saying...

you know, actually the Woodland Alliance kind of only has these very basic actions. And we're going to imagine the faction is pivoting halfway through the game between... a system of revolts and sympathy and then a system where they're operating out of bases and kind of playing as a small military power. But the revolts were really important because we were like, okay, we want players to feel like everything that they have in a clearing could be lost.

very quickly if they're not careful, but they need to have had a chance where they could have stopped it from happening. And so they have to put sympathy there, and that sympathy has to wait for a whole turn.

and then they can trigger the revolt if they have the proper cards. And so the development of that faction was just about trying to figure out the proper amount of telegraphing. Right. I mean, this seems like this would be a huge issue with the game in general, is that... um i mean a lot of the games players learn the game not just by reading the rules but by watching what everyone else does during the game, and that's not helpful at all in Root. And it's very easy to...

Even if you've played another faction, you're now in the mindset of your faction, right? And you've forgotten like, oh, this little weird trick about how the cards work for this group or whatever. I mean, it's weird because that's the whole point. Right. To some extent. But there is a there has there has to be some complexity limit. Right. Like how did you kind of like try to figure out what the right the right target was? So it has to do with so.

There's a fundamental problem with asymmetric games, which is that when you're sitting down to play a game, you need to be able to share something. But if you want to tell an asymmetric game, the whole point is not sharing things. And so... Root got a weird get-out-of-jail-free card on this because people got so into the game, they started treating it like a MOBA. It was so funny. When we first launched the Kickstarter, I had a neighbor friend.

who was like, oh, I saw your Kickstarter. I'm so excited. He's like, I'm going to main that raccoon. And the way he used the word main, I'm like, oh, you're talking about this game like a MOBA. And I thought that was a little bit of a curiosity. And then...

As I've watched the competitive scene kind of grow for the game and the way a lot of people play it, that's exactly how they think about it. And we have a kind of development rule when we're working on asymmetric games, which is it's always a good sign when someone wants to play the same faction a second time.

Right. It's a bad sign when they say, okay, cool, I've got that faction. I want to move on to a different faction. What you want to see is people wanting to develop mastery. But if people play the game enough, they will internalize so many of those asymmetries. that the asymmetries become like weirdly less important. Or sometimes they become less important, they just kind of fade into the background. And then you have to ask yourself this question, like, well, why the heck do we spend all that?

that work on asymmetry. I think about asymmetry a lot. I don't like designing asymmetric games. I think that in terms of design principles, they're extremely expensive. Like every game is about a complexity budget and you go to an asymmetric game, you're like, I would like to have the house on the coast. I'm spending all my money on location.

And that, in many respects, is just like a bad way to spend the complexity of the game. But what you can get out of it... is a sense of a world it's really what you're getting is immersion and you're getting a sense that the world is a lot bigger and there are more

systems at play than the ones that you have direct access to. So we like to, you know, what one rule that we have for Root is that an existence of a faction in a game should change the game for all players at the table. So if the otters are in the game...

there's going to be this like weird economy like trade structure that kind of sits in and when the lizards are in the game like people have to pay a lot of attention to like what cards they're throwing away and when they're throwing them away and we want like every faction needs to sort of like torque

torque the whole ecosystem in a particular way. And so it gives you access to thinking about games as ecosystems with different species in them as opposed to just one. And that can be a really nice payoff, but it... I think it's useful to think about it almost in terms of pure liability when it comes to the design because it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like it makes a lot of things really hard. Obviously, it makes things hard. But, yeah.

You know, you hit how complex a faction can be, probably just so much faster than you would otherwise. Let's talk about the Vagabond. Like, why the Vagabond? I didn't want to put the Vagabond in because I thought it was goofy. It just seemed, I'm like, this is a weird, I mean, talk about the great men theory of history. Like this is a single figure who's like moving and shaking. But Patrick was very insistent about it. And I said, you know,

This is your company. You've sold a lot more games than I have. We'll make a single vagabond. And it is one of the weirdest roles in the game because really experienced root players hate it. They think that it doesn't have enough board liability. Board liability? It doesn't have enough of a footprint on the board that it can be really disrupted. It's too easy to float above the rest of the conflict. It doesn't leave a trail of liabilities. But...

It is probably like the most beloved role in the game. When I'm at a convention and I'm showing people Root, I'll give a little pitch where I'll say, okay, this person is trying to build their empire. These are the old invaders coming back. These people are running a... You know, an insurgency and the last player is playing an open-world adventure game inside the game. And it's at that moment they, like, grab the box from me and they want to read about it or they buy it. Right.

It's a bit of, it's audacious design. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it is like, and I think the things about it that I don't like is that it feels, sometimes it feels, if I'm being really critical of myself, I feel like it's clever for its own good. And I think the Vagabond, the other reason I don't like it is the Vagabond has...

easily twice as many rules as any other faction. And it's weird because players will often start with the Vagabond and will find it not complex when it comes to play. And it doesn't feel complex often because it leans on adventure game tropes. Right. Look, I'm going to move. Okay. Exhaust your boot. All right. That makes sense.

Whereas The Woodland Alliance is not that complicated, but it's so odd that it often feels pretty complex. The Vagabond, though, does something, the original conceit of it... was thinking about Yojimbo and trying to think about a role who wanted to play the other players off of each other. And so I had this little arc in my mind that was like, imagine...

You start the game helping someone out and then they get too strong. And then you go to their enemy and you help out their enemy. But critically, you need to feel like you're being hunted and you're like a little bit... vulnerable yeah a little bit vulnerable like you have to like the vagabond works best when the other players police you a little bit in the early game and you feel like kind of an outlaw right and it does a nice it's almost like a

a balancing figure where their interest in the best Vagabond games is making the game go as long as possible. and being able to get across the finish line. When the Vagabond is unchecked, their scoring trajectory is a little too fast, and so oftentimes it doesn't get to the more interesting parts of the Vagabond's play. I assume with like...

a veteran vagabond against a bunch of new players, like it's like... They're going to win. Yeah, almost certainly. And they're going to win in ways that are kind of a bummer. Yeah, I would imagine that would be the least satisfying route experience, right? Yeah, it feels like...

You're the most asymmetric role, so weirdly you're not playing the same game as everyone else. Someone just came out from outside the room and told you the game's over or something like that. Yeah, exactly. So Root came out. It kind of has a level of success that's unusual for a board game. How did that feel? Tell me about that experience. It kind of changed everything. So when I started, everybody at the company knew that the company was going to run out of money.

Which, I mean, every company has a financial horizon. That's not news. But we all had a sense that we needed something. And, you know, usually what we had expected was we would do a game that would do well enough that we would have to do another game. And Root did well enough that we suddenly got a lot of slack, which meant that we could spend time working on really weird, bigger projects. I'm a little more interested in how it felt for you. Oh, okay. Well, it felt...

Okay, well, I'll tell you how it felt. So I don't, this is a crazy thing to say, but it's true. I, especially at that time in my life, was not super interested in selling games. I liked making them. I loved that people liked them. But the idea of a game that would win the spiel or a game that would sell 100,000 copies or whatever, that was not something I was trying to do. I wasn't trying to make the next Dominion.

And there was a funny thing that happened when I was at Gen Con. So the year it came out at Gen Con, our booth was swamped. We were in this tiny little alley booth, just like a little 10 by 20 strip at the very back of the hall. And the line to get copies of Root went all the way down the hall and out the door. And we were completely swamped. We could not sell them fast enough. And then at night...

Gen Con at that time, there were no places for public play. There weren't tables. And so you would usually play games on the floor. And at night, I was walking through the halls over to the hotels, and there were all these people playing Root on the floor. And they were throwing dice and yelling at each other and screaming.

a good time. And I remember thinking like, you know, there's always a game that is like a breakout hit every year. This is just the way the market behaves. And it feels amazing that it's the type of game that I like. Because at that point, there just hadn't been a breakout game that was a conflict game in a long time. That's true. And so I had this weird disassociation with it where the fact that I made the game...

It took me a long time to have that sink in. I was more like, wow, it's crazy that all these people are playing a game I like. And that was my primary thought. Because right before we shipped Root, the last game we played in the studio was an extremely strange game. All the favor cards got played. The map was totally bombed out.

the scoundrel on the winter maps like the map had been kinked in a funny way and we got sometimes root gets into this weird post-apocalyptic late game where everyone has like 24 points and nobody can figure out how to get the last six points because they're all so devastated

And it was a great game. And at the end of it, I said, I don't know who's going to like this game. But I'm really happy that we made it. And we'll just see how it does. And what happened was just seeing that there were all of these other people who wanted games like this. That it really shocked me. It's something that I feel like I'm still adjusting to. I mean, I am the office pessimist. They don't invite me to the print run meetings anymore because I always...

picked like the lowest number. And when Root came out, we sold through the first print run pretty quickly. And then we went to a second print run. And I remember we wrote the dates on the board and had a little betting pool. And I was like, well, I think first print run sold out in two months. So let's say the next print run will sell out in like six. So it'll sell in April, I think it was.

It sold out before it got on the boat, or while it was on the boat. It didn't even make it to landfall. Nobody was right in the betting pool. And that was the second run, and then the third run sold out. And we're on, at this point, I think the tenth run of the game. And it has shown a consistency of sales and of audience engagement that is unlike almost anything else in the tabletop industry. Stores order it and they say like, look.

You know, the games that sell are like Catan and Root and Wingspan. And those are the ones that are just always coming off the shelves. And it's also, it's given me a weird relationship to my own work because I feel like... When we make a root expansion, I don't start by saying, here are my cool ideas for root expansion. I start by saying, what's the community doing?

Because I feel like in an important way, it's not my game. You're now counter-programming for the community. It's cool that we get to be the cure, the protectors of Root. And it's a huge, it's a wonderful responsibility. And our main goal is like, let's make sure they're happy and that the game is going in interesting ways. So it has to like, it has to, it has to harmonize with our own tastes still.

We're still in charge of how it's going to grow, but we have a responsibility to them as opposed to whatever we might want. It's almost more like what we call a live game. in video games. That's cool. I mean, I think in terms of like, okay, a game about conflict and those are out of fashion. I mean, I think it's just in the games industry.

Like there is always a kind of like a pendulum thing, you know, where like there's almost there was almost nothing that was at one point fun, which will never. come back at some point because it's just like, you know, people, people chase us. Like at one point in video games, like just the idea of consequence had been kind of sucked out.

before XCOM is probably a great example of one of the games that kind of brought that back. And it was kind of like this thing of like, oh yeah, maybe I should care. Maybe we have been coddling players too much and they've forgotten that bad things can happen to them. of course, eventually that goes too far as well. And I think about like the rise. It's funny you say that because I think about the big swing towards roguelikes that happened like a decade ago was...

like, the fourth swing back of that consequence, where, like, permadeath was like, no, I want it to matter if my run-ins, you know, in this silly way or that way, and I think about Spelunky, you know, being part of that. Yeah. Like, it's the weird affinity between, like, thinking about Spelunky and XCOM. and I'm picking on those for a purpose, as two expressions of the same pendulum swing towards a certain kind of design aesthetic. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. Cool. Well, let's jump to Oath. Because I know you said that Oath is a little bit of a reaction to Root. Yeah. So I'm always working kind of against myself. Oath was a funny game. I mean, there's so much to say about Oath. So we finished Root, and I helped Patrick finish Fast the Mysterious Manor. And then we did an expansion to Root that, I mean, Root changed. Root allowed the company to live, and then the Root expansion, which raised, I think, like $1.2 million or so, that...

Like that's when the company went from like five people to 10 people. And we realized that like, oh, we actually need like a marketing person. We can't just be doing this on our own. And what that did. I mean, in addition to the fact that it was like, okay, everybody, here's money for a down payment. Why don't we all settle down? And we were able to start thinking about the job that we were doing, not just as a weird...

I remember Patrick was like, yeah, you know, my company was no longer a midlife crisis as soon as we were actually having those consistent sales. When that happened... it started looking like uh we could do bigger projects and and that that's when you know working with patrick i kind of told him like what if we orient our studio so there are a few things one of them we said let's make

I read Ed Catmull's book on Pixar and some other books, and I thought, what if we could try to build a studio that initiates projects internally, like a video game studio or like a little film studio. We're going to initiate projects within the studio. We're going to take on big projects. We're not going to be afraid to cancel them because we've got slack from Root. So we can do big experiments that fail, and that's okay. And what if we try to work on games that are...

You know way too large for a small studio but way too risky for a big studio Like I want that to be like the founding identity of the game and then you know when it comes to the design aesthetic I'm like, what if our design aesthetic isn't asymmetric designs? What if it's just about emergent narratives and building games that try to do really big narrative work, but without a lot of writing?

Because I think that video games are so good at writing. It's a great format to give someone a paragraph to read. And board games are horrible at it because of the way that the flow break happens. And so... The initial idea I had was I said, all right, Patrick, one of the problems with Root, I noticed when people were playing Root, they would talk about the game as if it were sequential.

Like they would say like, oh, like I was winning for generations and then someone beat me as the vagabond and like my reign was at an end. I'm like, well, that's weird because that's like not what's happening in Root. But there was a desire to like arrange things chronologically. And I realized that, like, I was always very dissatisfied with the endgame of Root because...

Crossing the line like what happens is there is a moment. There's a pivotal moment where a player will win a game of root Sometimes it will happen on the last turn but most often it happens like two-thirds through the game, right? So it makes them people to realize it craft a boot cross the line and then the games I thought well I want a game that like actually ends when it should But then in order to do that there needs to be some kind of like steak there needs to be a

There needs to be a consequence to the game that was won a certain way. And I kept thinking about that last game of Root we played in the office that was this post-apocalyptic game where we were really behaving in very destructive ways. And I thought... Well, the fact that we did that should have a consequence. And I don't know if that consequence should mean that you deduct victory points off your score because you were a jerk.

or something else. And I realized that the only way you can really judge a player's performance is by forcing them to live in the world that they had just made. And so I pitched this idea for a game to Patrick where I said, well, what if... And this is actually, I said, what if every end state was also a beginning state? And you play a game, but the end state it creates is like intelligible as a start state.

Then you can kind of play this generational game and I'd actually been working on this idea for a really really long time But in a very I never thought it was even a game. So I had this idea for a game Actually, I stumbled into it at my parents' house. I made it in high school. And it was actually that same idea. And I had forgotten I had worked on it, but I had been thinking about proper scale for game design. I feel like game design, and I alluded to this a little bit earlier.

I'm always surprised that I am working in the game industry and then I'll go through like old folders of myself in elementary school and I'm like, this is as obvious as it could possibly be. I'll find design sketches where I'm like still obviously working on the exact same design problem. in a different context. And so I started working on this idea, and I told Patrick that I had no idea if it would actually work as a board game.

And I would only work on it if he was comfortable with me working for three or four months on something that I might throw away. And he said, go for it. Imagine you get six months to just come up with something. And I built two or three different games that just didn't work. And the reason they didn't work is because...

There were I mean there were so many problems there were problems relating to the physical nature of board games Like how you create a saved board state and then pack it up to hold the information. That's a big problem There were problems with How big can a game be? If a game changes every time it's played, what's the total possible worlds that it can exist in? How do you make that expressive space large enough? And then if you're going to say, all right, well...

Here's a big circle. These are all the possible versions of Oath that can be played. But then players only play a small part of that circle. They only engage with some systems. How do you make that game interesting if the game is only engaging with some small parts? And so gradually, over the six months, I started coming up with very basic rules or ideas. And one of them was...

How much should the world change? So this was an interesting question that I sort of started by thinking I had some core parameters. One of them was it should be possible. So I'm like, okay, you have a world, it's changing, but you probably don't want it to change more than 10%. Because if you do that, this gets a little bit into the question of like premiering the dominance check and clearing the board. You don't want the world to change too much. Because when you read...

And I actually, I really admire Old World for this question of scale because most Civ games go too fast. Old World says like, no, actually like a couple hundred years is like enough. Plenty of time. Yeah, it's plenty of time to tell a lot of these stories. And so I thought, okay, well... Imagine that, if you look at a little Byzantine village in...

700, it's going to be kind of the same as it is in 800. It'll be different too, but you need something like that. So I said, okay, there's a generational scope. About 10% of the world is going to change. And I said, okay, if we have a... we have a deck of 56 cards or 52 cards or something, five or six of them change every game. And so I was like, okay, well, that's a baseline. And then I said, I also want...

Things so you know in order for the game to work we have to have like a one in one out policy with the cards That's very important because otherwise the decks will become unintelligible and so it's like alright So we've got this 54 card deck and we're gonna sub out six cards every game

And then I said, all right, I also want there to be the possibility that things get forgotten permanently or quasi-permanently, and also things get forgotten in a lower step. So I said, okay, imagine you stumble into an interesting thing. and then it is not used for a couple games and you think it's gone forever.

But then it shows up in like three generations later. And I was thinking about fantasy novels. And I've been reading the Prudane books to my kids. And Kyle really admires Lloyd Alexander's Prudane books too. And so I was just thinking about the kinds of like legacies that are in those stories and thought, okay, so how do you do this? Well, one way to do it is to say you can only use, you only use half the deck. So we've got a world deck. It's 10% is changing every turn.

every game, and then we're only gonna use half the cards each game. And if we only use half the cards each game, then that means that it's a lossy, weird deck. You're not actually sure what's really being added and what's really going away. And so I said, okay, this is great. Now how many, like roughly how many cards would this create? And so I started saying like, okay, well, let's imagine we have these six different suits that are different elements of culture.

how many cards could be subbing out. And I started just doing some preliminary math. I'm like, okay, I think the card base for this is like about 300 cards. And then I went to the next very unfortunate realization. So I created this whole like rough idea. where I said, okay, there's this much of the game's changing, you know.

About this many cards are gonna be the card base. I have this idea of a suited deck and it was Kyle's idea to be like, okay, make it different elements of culture kind of use like a tarot mentality to think about culture because you want it like

in a kind of metaphorical register and then i i did all this work and i said okay i think that this might be a game this might be a game and then i got to the last step and said okay i have 52 cards in a deck let's say and i'm only using half of them in a game So I need to design a robust civilization political game that plays with 24 cards, which is, that's almost what a button shy game is.

And I had been thinking a little bit about a PAX game. I think PAX games use their cards really well. But PAX games are very... intensive when it comes to card velocity. I mean, you're going to go through 60, 70 cards in a game easily. If you're playing Perfuriano, you're going through even more because the market's moving pretty fast, cards are getting discarded.

Were you originally envisioning like a market model? Yeah, something like that. Because I kind of wanted to use a rough PAX framework potentially. And so I kind of came into this problem where it was like, okay, if we're introducing cars to the game. then how in the world do I make this game run on such a few, so few cards? And I said, okay, well, player tableaus have to be very small because I can't have them eating up all the cards.

And then we need a shared player tableau, which we'll think of as like the world of the game. And that's eating up a lot of cards. And so there's not very many cards left, but they can't be discarded out of the game. Because if they're discard out of the game, the game's going to dry up and it's going to stop working. And so that's what led the game to its zero-sum card flow system, where you go to the sites and you can like...

draw from the deck to advance the game, but you can also draw from the discard piles. Right. And that creates kind of like a rumor soft information economy. Which is like, that's the market of the game. It's just a drafting game. But the reason I'm spending so much time harping on these specifics is because I think Oath was an instance where there were some very high-level things that I wanted the game to do. And then the actual design process...

Was not me coming up with a novel solution. It was me being backed into a corner by this like that means I can only do this That means I have right so like almost every almost every rule and oath. I felt like I was back into a corner That was the only way that rule could look yeah

For better and worse. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, yeah, how do you feel about that now? There are certain things like the combat system is funny because as we were working on the game, I wanted... players to be able to use the combat system

to kind of compress time so that you could do a lot in one action, but it would entail a lot of risk potentially. But that led to a combat system that is like a step too complicated for its own good. I was about to use those words. It's just somehow each time you have to...

to go back okay we gotta do this and that and i think that is like that doesn't quite hang together well and actually i think the biggest mistake of both and this is something that hopefully we're going to address with the we're working on expansion right now for the game um is that i think

Well, there are two big problems with Oath. So one of them is, I think, too much is given to the winner of the game to determine the state of the game going forward. And I think that the resolution of the Chronicle steps... is it doesn't give players a lot of room to play. It's not really a game. In fact, when we used to play the game on Tabletop Simulator, we just wrote a script and had the script run. And actually, that was a place where...

with a little bit of work, we could have given the players a little bit more identity and a little bit more ownership of how the game state is changing. And so that's something I would really like to revise. And the other thing is Oath... Oath suffered from a very weird problem that has nothing to do with me or the studio or anything like that, and everything to do with the world, which is that we were working on Oath, and then the pandemic happened. Sure, right.

The last game of Oath we played before the office closed, literally that Friday before we left and didn't come back for a long time, we played a version of Oath that was a radical branch with single action impulse because I was like, these turns are taking a little too long. What if we have single action impulse?

and it was cool and it didn't work but it was workable and then when we start and then i was like oh god are we gonna be able to finish any games now yeah sure and so we we got a little conservative in our design approach and the long turns of oath

were really easy to play digitally. Because now we're only doing, you know, we're playing a game of both. You're going to take eight turns. And so it's like, do your turn. You want turns to be pretty long in digital. Yeah, in digital games. For various reasons, but yeah. And a lot of the things, like the Chronicle phase, we're just...

scripting and you know that that sounds like pure downside but there was a huge upside in it which is uh the pandemic completely changed how we conduct play testing because there were all these people who wanted to play test with us but Their game groups didn't. And now, like little electrons, they became free radicals. And they could find each other. And then also, because we're doing all of our testing digitally,

we were able to switch to more of a software model for game development, where previously I would release versions. I mean, this gets this rudimentary. I would release versions on Mondays because somebody would... Use their work computers to print it out. They go to Kinko's use the paper cutters to print it. They get their game to group on Friday They would teach and play it but that meant for every version

I knew I was exhausting this play tester. They were going to be going Kinko's for the next 10 weeks. And so I used to, when I was working on Root, when we would do testing...

Even though it was mostly made by just a few groups, when we did other external testing, I had like a little heat, like a gap chart, where I'd say, I'm going to burn through this group, I'm going to burn through that group, I'm going to burn through this group. Certain groups were better in the early part of the process, certain groups were better in the later group.

part of the process. And with Oath, what we found was it was like a game in early access. And so I'd say, all right, it's Friday, everyone. Here are the patch notes. Here's the TTS file. Go for it. And as we went through the testing process, I had all these second and third wave testing groups I was going to start inviting to the Discord, and I didn't need to because people would start inviting their friends.

They'd say, oh, cool, the game's really stabilizing. We want to play it this Friday. Let's wait for the new version, and then we're going to excitedly go test out the new features. And so by the end of Oath, our testing discord had bloomed from 10, 20 people to 150. And they were playing the game so much more.

Right. Because a lot of these people, you know, they were working from home now. They had a lot of free time that first year. I wonder if Old World, I imagine, would have benefited from this a little bit. Yeah, we got a lot more playing, I think, because of that, for sure. Well, we built tools. We had, like, this digital FAQ for the... all the cards, like the Oath Cards database. I mean, it's really interesting because I feel like for sure, you know, yeah, like...

The world you know the possible paths for oath forked there right like it would have definitely been a different game if he kept in the office But on the other hand you know like if you make a you know if you make a digital version of it it's kind of like better prepared for it yeah because you know you were you were playing it kind of already in that format and that's that's something i'm really interested in if board game designers are going to start thinking about a lot more going

forward. Yeah. Well, and it's something that, you know, when we were working on Oath, we were really conscious of it because at that time Root was being developed digitally. And so as we were working on Oath, we said like, okay, well, let's make sure that it's good. Right. in a digital space that kind of lends itself to it. And actually, it was a weird... There are things that digital games do really badly. One of the worst things is...

Extremely disruptive rule modifications or like negotiation phases and things like that Which is a bummer because like that's what board games are best at And so at the very end of both when we were working on like the last like 20 cards we designed for oath

were all the cards with, like, weird negotiation powers. And when we started doing it, we were like, oh, this is, like, getting silly. Like, all the vow cards in Oath, I don't know if you've seen any of those yet, but, like, you get the vow of silence and you're like, hey, you, like, can't use secrets. And they're really disturbing.

but this is also like we were finally getting so comfortable with the system and saying like, no, actually these really disruptive powers, they're opening up the game in a totally different way. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, that's tricky. I mean, based on what Oath's about, there's no way you could like, okay, we need to tamp down the negotiation side of the game. Like that's what it's about. And it's true that that will always be a problem. I mean, I don't know, like maybe, you know, you can find a way to innovate.

make it work better in digital because it's kind of a necessity, right? Yeah, I mean, the game we're working on now, ARCs, has, like, a huge negotiation component that is handled in a way that I think could work well digitally, but... I haven't seen a good digital game that handles negotiation really well.

Oftentimes, it's just like you're like, you know, I mean, you know, it's from Civ, like when you're making offers to other players and all that stuff. It's always so slow and so outside of the norm of the game, whereas in a board game, it's so fluid. Yeah, I'm already thinking about like the binding agreement cards. Yeah. I'm like, those are going to be a real pain. I ran into a person at Essen who told me that...

Oath really opened up for him after about the tenth game because they had the tribunal out which allows players to make binding agreements and they agreed to mint a new currency. that they could use to regulate favors for deals that spanned over games. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. And also like. That can't happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, one thing we want to do with the expansion, though, is really build out...

We want different types of governance and arrangements of the way the hegemon works. We want to engage player lineage a little bit. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the other thing I wanted to talk about was just the whole... chancellor, citizen, exile thing, because that's really pretty unique. And when I first went through the rules, I was like, the citizen thing seems like a lot of work.

Like a lot of extra, you blew a lot of the complexity budget on this very specific thing that maybe you could have. maybe you could have not had the citizen, right? But I could tell it must have been very important to you. So like, well, you know, in the way I think that it makes sense in the context of having just worked on Pamir a bunch. Because Pamir is all about these coalitions. And I wanted to explain, I was just trying to think about like, well, how do...

How does any government stay in power? Well, it stays in power not because of some social contract, you know, lock-in nonsense. It stays in power because... There are more people interested in keeping it in power than not keeping it in power. And that led me to think like, well, OK, well, you want we want one player who is who is the winner of the previous game who is sort of like.

who has set the table, and then you've got the other players who are trying to disrupt that. And what you need is a player who decides, I would like to keep this table set the way it is. And I will even, like, not win. And so they need a way to collaborate with the other players. And the citizen structure kind of came from that. And it was almost always in the game, but weirdly was in...

very different places in the design. So one of the early versions of the game, all the players started as citizens. There were no exiles. Okay. And you'd start the game and everyone's like, okay, this is where we live. This is our home. Here's like the hinterland or whatever. And then... Players could make the decision to leave and then to be put in an opposition and what happened was the first act of the game was was boring people didn't really know

how to work, they didn't have anything to orient themselves around. And so we eventually moved into the kind of hybrid solution where it is now, where it's like the players are gonna largely default to be in exile positions. And then the second problem that we ran into with the decisionship problem is What are the conditions under which anybody would, A, offer citizenship, and B, accept citizenship? And this is a place where the design went through.

Like countless iterations. I can imagine. And the way where we settled with it was, you know. Negotiations have to do with two players reading the same situation and coming at different values. They're like, well, I actually think this is worth more or less. But the way we put that noise in was. the relic offer and then that also it has to like the offer has to like weirdly power up both players and when you do that there's a bunch there's enough noise about how much

is this power actually going to give me? That it started creating space for there to be meaningful negotiations. And we've actually, I've run into this on a bunch of products I've worked on where sometimes like the best thing you can do to to lubricate the negotiations is to offer like consent negotiations where you give players, you say like, hey, I'm going to give you the power to like take a dollar and you can give me the power to take a dollar.

And then what that does is we could just decide to each make each other richer. Or if there's something you want, you could say, well, I will give you a dollar from the bank if you give me this little thing. And that just creates like a little injection of action potential. that rewards players for talking to each other and then can create space for negotiations. And people use the citizenship in different ways. I mean, it's one of the fun things about working on Oath.

has been that people will tell me like, oh, we've never seen a citizen. Any of our games right and then other times people were like, oh, yeah We've had five games in a row where everyone's a citizen Yeah, and the entire game is just set in that single that single spot Yeah, it seems really important to frame for people that like oath is a specific type of game, you know, it's it's bored

on role playing it's bordering on like we're trying to make a narrative like we're you know like to some extent it's not really about victory i i always whenever i start arabian nights with people like the very first thing i say is like don't worry about winning

This game is not about winning. Just get that out of your mind entirely. Forget that that's even a process, but you're going to have a good time. But you don't worry about winning. I think about this a lot with Zia, which is usually when we sit down to play Zia.

which is a big open-world space game, will say, let's play Zia for a few hours. We want to talk about the end. We'll just play for two or three hours, and then we'll stop playing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But you get something for it. I mean, one of the things... I was really interested in this question of kingmaking when I was working on Oath. And it was funny, when I gave the GC talk a couple years ago about kingmaking, I was working on Oath at that time.

trying to think through it. Because what I wanted players to do is to start caring about certain parts of the design more than winning, so that they would make a calculation and say, like, actually, I like this element of play so much. that I will behave in suboptimal ways, and that will start opening up whole other parts of the design. And that's stuff that I think the design does do, but now that we have a better sense of it.

as we're working on new content for the game, I'm like, well, now I know what the game is really about, like having seen it played and all that stuff. Yeah. Because, I mean, this is a funny, this is a small note about Oath, but one of the funny things about working on Oath is...

It's a campaign game that we almost never played in campaign because during testing, we're just working on the single session. And then the last couple of months, we're like, OK, can we daisy chain these together? And so we did a fair amount of campaign vetting, but we didn't really know how the campaigns worked when we published it. It's like a theoretical version of the game.

Yeah. And when I'm talking about like kind of like that audience difference of like the expectation, like also like that's a huge contrast from like the root audience. Yeah. Right. And did like some some people actually consider that a major risk to aim for. a very different audience from your previous title, right? You may have not even perceived that as the time. Yeah, it was a risk, and it's interesting because when Oath came out, it sold pretty well, and then...

there was this weird soft period where the secondary market got flooded with copies of Oath. And that was very clearly like people who had bought it thinking it was Route 2 and then had sold it. And then thankfully, we're now in this third phase where people who buy Oath now... know what they're buying they're interested in it and we've seen a nice like long tail start to emerge that is a long tail that isn't it's almost like not related to root anymore

Yeah, a lot of people think of marketing just in terms of selling the game, but a really important part is selling the game to the right people, trying to make that communication. I love telling people not to buy our games. When people come to my booth, I'm always like, look, you have to know that

the game's reward repeated play and that you're going to put pieces on the board and then your significant other is going to remove them. And if you don't like those things, please, please, please don't buy our game because I would much rather have someone who's passionate about it get it. Cool. All right. Well, we're probably close to the end. So one question I like to always ask to wrap up is why have you committed your professional career now to making games?

Oh, my gosh. Just a light question at the end. No, it's a good question because there are other things that one could do. I was thinking about... This is a long answer, but... Jeff Vogel, he got in trouble for a tweet many months ago where he was like, are there too many people making games? And everyone was like, oh, you're gatekeeping. And he's like, no, no, no, no. I mean, just like, people could be like nurses and stuff. Instead, they're making games.

And maybe we're over-allocating in entertainment, right? I mean, I think it was met in a very good-natured way. It wasn't, like many things on Twitter, taken in that way. But I, you know, when I'm working on a project... I actually try to ask myself this question when I'm working on a project where I say, you know, is the thing that I'm trying to communicate, is it actually a game at all? Like, maybe it's a play. And I'm not a playwright, so that means I don't get to make it.

Or maybe it's a poem, or maybe it's like an essay. I mean, I actually had this thought a lot when it came to John Company, where I thought, like, am I actually trying to write a book about the East Indy Company, and it's not a game at all? And what happens is... Many of the projects end up being like, oh, this is a game. And I feel like I just have a good footing for making that thing. I mean, it's a funny, you know, you don't want to...

When I decided to go to graduate school, I went to graduate school because I thought, like, well, I'd gotten really lucky and had a lot of wonderful teachers, and I had a lot of things in my upbringing that just made that I was well-suited to it. And I sort of feel like the games I work on, I have a similar kind of footing. And so I do it because it feels like a really good application of my own background and my own interests.

And, you know, I always tell people that one of the things I love about working in the game industry is I've never felt better utilized in my life, which is a very clinical way of thinking about it. But it is this funny thing where... I've been lucky to pretty much always have loved my jobs, but there's no job where I feel like it better draws on everything I know how to do than working in games. Is this like the best way for you to communicate?

Yeah, it's funny because I think a lot about like the kind of Christian idea of vocation a lot in the context of games where I just feel like I am well suited to it and should do the thing that I'm well suited to. And the fact that I can derive a living from it and things like that, that is all wonderful too. But at a more core level, it is something that I feel like I can, you know.

leverage all of my previous experiences doing and then you know also there is a kind of urgency to it too because I try to work on games that wouldn't exist if I weren't working on them and I think This is something that I always tell folks when they're starting in games to think about, you know, if they're working on a game because they're trying to beat somebody to market on a particular idea, they need to contend with the fact that they are incidental.

to the existence of that idea sure and that can be okay especially if their priorities are just to make a career in games then like yeah go beat the person to market but for for myself i try to find projects that i feel like I'm the only one who's gonna who's gonna make it when I when I delayed my dissertation to work on John company and my professor asked me why

One of the things I said was, if I don't finish this game about this indie company, I don't know if there's ever going to be a board game about this. Sure, right. And so I know that that's not going to save a life or anything, but it was this very small thing where like... The fact that any game happens is a real miracle. I never can think very many projects ahead because I'm really just interested in finishing the existing project because the fact that it gets done at all.

This is just an absolute gift. And then maybe you get to do one after that, right? And that... makes me think that this whole process is so precious and that if you're in a position to make something you should just absolutely make it and not worry too much about the ramifications yeah cool well i definitely relate to the concept i feel like almost anything any other

thing i chose to do with my career i would be worse at than what i'm doing now you know which which is kind of like like well maybe i am doing the right thing in the right spot um and uh but yeah no it's really interesting way i think of it like that

I was just struck by the phrase of, like, you know, if you don't make an East India company a game, like, there may not be one, right? And, you know, I think that a lot of people should think about that when they make games because it's very tempting to make... something very similar to what's out there because it's it's safer right and there's lots of reasons to but um you know

We should all think about where we come from and our own unique experiences. And the whole point is to make that game that is unlikely that probably anyone else would make besides ourselves. I think that's a good priority. That's absolutely right. I agree. I agree with myself. Cool. All right. Well, thanks for taking the time. My goodness is my pleasure. It went really well. Cool. It was fun. Bye.