The Train Travels From Afar

Trains have fascinated me ever since I was a child. Growing up in the American Midwest, I often counted freight cars while we waited at crossings in our small town. My parents gave me a starter model railroad set for a Christmas present when I was 6, and my father and I worked on it together well into my teenage years. When I moved to Germany after University, I was able to renew my love for trains with my own sons, whether riding the high speed rail across the country, or visiting Berlin’s Transportation Museum or Hamburg’s Miniature Wonderland model railroad.  I even bought them wooden train sets while they were still babies, in anticipation of the time they would be old enough to build elaborate tracks covering our living room floor.

Board Games that Tell Refugees' Stories

The refugee crisis in the Middle East is no game. There are no clear rules, the information is untrackable, there are hidden variables that lead to utter chaos, and there is no endgame in site.

And yet, tens of thousands of refugees were welcomed into Berlin—my adopted home city—during the past year. As they have taken up residence in makeshift shelters and previously abandoned buildings all over Berlin, I find myself connecting with many of them through the shared language and experience of playing board games.

When we play games with anyone, we share each other’s stories.  The game itself is not required to tell a story, it simply sets up the beginning, and determines when it will end.  My already multicultural game nights are only the beginning to ongoing stories—relationships that go beyond meeting up to play games.

As I have volunteered at the refugee shelters near my home and the church where I work, it has been a privilege to play games with them, and through this shared language, learn their stories and begin relationships that have now gone beyond playing games together.

These are their stories, told through the games that made this possible.

With Tile-Laying Games, The Sky's the Limit: The Making of Skyways

Tile-laying games have always held a special place in both my gaming life and my game design career. It was Carcassonne, one of the best tile-laying games ever made, that first introduced my wife and me to the board gaming hobby in Germany in 2001. Five years later, it was a tile-laying prototype of my own called Heartland that impressed my group of established Berlin game designers enough to encourage me to show it to publishers, and it was that game that garnered my first contract. I returned to the genre a few years ago with Citrus, another tile-laying game that has proved to be my most favorite recent game.

Postcard From Berlin: The Christmas Truce

Editor's Note: this article was originally published in 2007 on the now-defunct Boardgamenews.com website.

World War I was entering its first winter, as soldiers from both sides huddled together in the muddy trenches that lined the western front through Belgium and France. The “No Man’s Land” between them was already filled with bodies of the fallen, soon to be frozen because it was too dangerous to retrieve them for a proper burial. But that Christmas, something quite unexpected happened: the soldiers who had been trained to kill each other suddenly laid down their weapons…and played games.

I was unaware of this well-documented Christmas truce until a friend gave me a copy of the 2005 film, ”Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas).” The Oscar-nominated cinematic version of the story is depicted through the eyes of French, British and German soldiers, and is appropriately presented in three languages. Although it is a romanticized version of the actual events, its message made it a tradition in our household alongside some of the better-known holiday film classics. 

It's Alive!

In the architecture office, my colleagues would often use a curious phrase when making design decisions: "This is what the building wants to be."

Why the anthropomorphism?  I suppose it's quicker than saying, "This seems to me to be the project's most natural direction, based on previous design decisions."  And it sounds more emphatic, not to mention a tad romantic.  After all, there is a mysteriousness to creative thought and the amount of influence our unconscious intuition has on that process.

There are so many different directions a design of any kind can take. It is a tree of possibilities, and each branch offers a number of new, unique choices. And like those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books I enjoyed as a child, if one of those branches leads to an undesirable conclusion, it's simple to back up and follow a different branch.

Game design is no different.  There are so many options for a designer, and each one influences future decisions. At a certain point, I have an intuitive feel for "what the game wants to be," even if it has changed from my original vision.

And that may be the best answer yet for why I view my inanimate projects as if I had designed them to evolve on their own: it's an acknowledgement that, more often than not, the process takes me down paths that I could not see at the outset.  I began with a goal and a vision on how to get there, but in the process of writing rules outlines and flowcharts, of prototyping, testing and tweaking, the journey revealed other interesting paths that I simply could not resist.

It's experiencing the unexpected that make me feel less like I'm in control and more like I'm playing a game--the game of game design.

But I am in control, of course--at least to the point of making the final decisions, of choosing the next branches of the decision tree to climb, and finally declaring when I reach the top, "This is what the game wants to be!"

POSTCARD FROM BERLIN: I Got Rhythm

My latest article in the Postcard From Berlin series on Opinionated Gamers website describes by fascination with the rhythms of life.  I've enjoyed learning to play various percussion instruments over the past several years, and it is also interesting to look at the rhythm of boardgames and how that plays into our enjoyment of them.

Game Design Kit

German boardgames are naturally a favorite gift I’ve enjoyed giving to friends and family back in the United States. In addition to that, I used to design an original boardgame for my two nieces as a Christmas present every year.  It’s not easy to shop for them when we live an ocean away from each other, and this was a way I could give them something personal. I also did try to theme many of the games around activities they enjoyed.

When my designs began to get published, I gave them those as gifts. Now that they are older—and very creative—I thought I would instead give them the materials to be game designers themselves.

A year and one-half ago I sent them a “game design kit” with materials ordered from Spielmaterial.  They included a blank game box, a deck of blank cards, a blank fold-out game board, a 6-color die, one large pawn, 6 normal dice in 6 colors, and large and small wooden discs and “meeples” (human-shaped figures) in 6 colors.

Two New Games, Freshly Squeezed and Uncovered

Two new games that I've been working on for many years in various versions are finally being offered to the public.

Citrus has been announced as an October Essen release from dlp-games.  It was a pleasure to develop the game further with designer/publisher Reiner Stockhausen, and I'm excited to finally have one of my games illustration by Klemens Franz, who I met for the first time in Essen.  In fact, I showed the prototype to him there, and I owe it to him for recommending it to Reiner.

Artifact, which made it to the final round of 6 in the 2009 Hippodice Competition, will also debut in October in Essen, this time from White Goblin Games. This game has also had a long development time and was my first collaboration with friend Bernd Eisenstein.

Unfortunately, I won't be attending Essen as I'm spending the year with my family in North Carolina. But I'll be there "in spirit" with the release of Citrus and Artifact! The stories behind the development will be posted on BoardgamegeekNews in the next weeks as well as here on this blog.

"New" is the new "Nieuw"

Nieuw Amsterdam, my game released through Dutch publisher White Goblin Games last year, has now been picked up by a North American publisher.  Pandasaurus Games in the U.S. has put the game on crowdsourcing site Kickstarter which is the first time any of my games have been funded in this way. It is now over 400% funded with 12 days still to go, and that's without any huge benefits or stretch goals.  It's encouraging to see that the game's reputation speaks for itself, without any major gimmicks and extras. 

The biggest change is in the spelling of the game, with the Dutch "Nieuw" being replaced by the English "New."  Despite having a Dutch publisher for the original game, I was actually the one who insisted on using the original spelling of the colony, mainly because I liked the historical significance and thought that it would help the game stand out in Essen among hobbyists, where Latin names like Agricola and Alea Iacta Est are commonplace. I'm not at all bothered by the name change for the North American market, however, and am excited that the game will now have a wider distribution. If you are interested in the game, there are still 12 days left to pledge!  You can see my explanation of the game at Essen on BoardGameGeek.

104 Games to Play...from my Collection

On the Opinionated Gamers website, we came up with the idea of creating "bucket list" for gaming hobbyists, recommending games to try at least once in their lives.
As I wrote earlier, however, I also have a list of games I'm trying to get though, namely those that I have collected during my euphoric "first years in the hobby" when everything was new and--thanks to Berlin flea markets and department store clearance sales--relatively inexpensive.

Since that time, however, I've come to the realization that too big of a game collection is a bit overwhelming for me (not to mention my wife and children), and I have been intentionally and methodically trying out unplayed games, trading or giving away many of them afterwards.  I've also gotten rid of a few after reading the rules, deciding ahead of time that I'd rather try something else.
I wrote about my first attempts a year ago, and following is an update on which games I've enjoyed and kept, which ones I was ready to part with, and a list of the final 104 games that remain unplayed.

POSTCARD FROM BERLIN #60: Game Design for Grade School

It's been awhile...work and family have taken priority, and game design has taken up any free moments I've had apart from those.  But after teaching a classroom of 4th-6th graders about game design for a whole week, I found myself writing notes about my experience, and it soon turned into an article.  You can read my latest Postcard From Berlin on the Opinionated Gamers website.  Perhaps you'll have the opportunity to teach game design to children too!

The Beautiful Dilemma

One of the main goals of game design is to present the players with dilemmas. Without them, player decisions--if there are any--will seem too obvious, and the game will lack tension.

I actually consider games without dilemmas to be more like spectator sports. Some people are perfectly content to be spectators in a game. They play Candyland or LCR just because they like to watch how things will turn out. To them, playing a game is just another alternative to watching a football game on TV. They do not have any influence on the outcome, but they are drawn in by the action. And they would rather "veg out" than be burdened by tough decisions.

I, however, am not content to be a spectator when I play games. I need to be drawn in by the interactions with the game system and the other players. A game engages its players by providing interesting decisions, in which there are no obviously correct paths to take.

"You can't always get what you want..." - Mick Jagger

The best game experience I can have is when its mechanics present me with several good options every turn. And then it hits me with a beautiful dilemma:

Each turn, I can always do something good, but I cannot do everything that I want to now.

Designing for Competitions

Advantages of Entering Competitions

Game design competitions can be helpful in many ways, especially for the hobby designer (i.e. one that does not work for a publisher or does not depend on game design income).

First, it usually provides clear boundaries as to game materials and other factors, such as target group and even theme.  These outside limits help a designer immediately focus.  I've written before about the need of self-imposed limits, when one is designing on spec rather than on a contract basis.  A competition usually has many of these limits built-in.

Tossing the Point Salad

"Welcome to the show where everything's made up and the points don't matter," Drew Carey was famous for saying at the introduction of the hit improv comedy series, Who's Line is it, Anyway? Lately, I've thought that this same phrase could apply to the that niche-within-a-niche in the boardgame market: complex Eurogames. Afterall, the exotic themes often have much less to do with the mechanics than simply to add a little color to the graphic presentation, and the points...well, there's so many of them to be had, that I can often hear Carey's voice in the back of my head each turn, exclaiming with a smile, "A thousand points for everyone!"

In the comment section of a review of prolific game designer Stefan Feld's newest gamer's game, Bora Bora, Ben McJunkin of the Opioniated Gamers used the term "Point Salad" to describe what has become a popular scoring mechanism in these complex games:

Motivation

I wrote in an earlier post on why I design games, but recently I took a moment to think about what motivates me to work on a particular design over another one.  It’s true that most designers are never short of game ideas.  I have computer files and 3-ring binders full of them, but since my job (not as a game designer) and family take priority, I only have a limited amount of free time to work on them.  So how do I decide which one to develop further?

Should Game Designers Play Other Designers’ Games?

Because our weekly playtesting group at the Spielwiese is open to anyone to participate, either as a playtester or designer, we see all kinds of prototypes.  Some new designers bring fresh and innovative ideas that challenge and inspire our core group.  More often than not, however, the “new” designs are only slight variations of games that already exist.  And more often than not, the designers have no idea that their “inventions” have existed for some time.

My advice to every one of them: ''Play other people’s games.  Lots of them.  Look at the shelves around us piled high with over a thousand games of every kind, and tell me how many of these you have played.  And if you do not have regular gaming groups to try out many of them, read about them online or watch video reviews in order to get an idea of what has already been done."

Most game designers I know have the same approach. There is one very prominent designer, however, who disagrees.

2012 After-Essen Party highlights

Michael and I hosting our 6th annual party in the Spielwiese.

POSTCARD FROM BERLIN #57: The Two Sides of Essen

I finally had a few minutes to finish my report from my second Essen boardgame fair.  In it, I describe what it's like to be a game designer at the fair, squeezing through the crowds with a carry-on suitcase full of prototypes and meeting publishers in little temporary cubicles behind their convention stands.

I did get to look at a few of the new games, and even played a few.  Read more about the two sides of Essen on the Opinionated Gamers website.

Games for the Visually Impaired

Game forums and reviews often mention color blindness and how that should affect the graphic design of a particular game, but not much has been written about designing games that can also be played by people who cannot see at all.

6th Annual After Essen Party!

Six years ago, my friend Michael from the Spielwiese gaming cafe agreed to help me bring a little bit of SPIEL back from Essen and celebrate in his cafe with all the great new games released there--many of them from Berlin designers.

The photo galleries on my After Essen Party page show some of the fun from the past five years.  As you can see, it has been a great mix of games and guests from around the world, and we can even claim that Spiel des Jahres (German Game of the Year) award winner Qwirkle was discovered here!

As always, the 6th Annual After Essen Party is open to the public, athough space is limited and it is best to come early.  Visiting designers are welcome to show their newly released games as well (please, no prototypes, however).  Feel free to contact me or Michael at the Spielwiese in advance (especially if you are a game designer or publisher).  The party is on the Tuesday after SPIEL, beginning at 7 p.m.  Hope to see you at SPIEL and at the party in Berlin afterwards!