Interviews by an Optimist - # 17 - Kory Heath
Kory was born in 1970 in San Jose, California, and lived there until he was almost 30. He taught himself computer programming when he was in grade school, and eventually dropped out of college to do it full time. He saved up some money, inherited some more, and then in late 1999 he moved to Maryland and started designing board games with a great group of designers and playtesters. He’s had two games published so far. He still occasionally does freelance computer programming for a bit of extra cash.
Tom: Kory, can you tell us a little about each of the two games you've designed, and how the designs came about?
Kory: My two published designs are 'Zendo' and 'Why Did the Chicken...?'.
Zendo is a game of inductive logic in which players ("students") set up groups of little colored pyramid pieces which the "Zen Master" marks with white and black stones. The students are trying to figure out the Master's rule that determines how these groups are marked. For instance, the rule might be: if a group contains a red pyramid pointing at a blue pyramid, it gets marked white; otherwise, it gets marked black. The first student to
guess the rule wins.
I'd been mulling over ideas for an inductive logic game ever since I was a teenager and first heard of Eleusis and Bongard Problems, and played parlor games like "Crossed and Uncrossed" and "The Five Pencils Game". However, nothing ever really jelled until I discovered Andy Looney's Icehouse pieces, which were exactly what I was looking for. I started work on the design soon after I moved to Maryland, but it took me and the design-group there a couple of years to really hammer it out. If anyone's interested, I've written a very detailed design history of the game, which you can find at (http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Kory/Games/Zendo/DesignHistory...)
'Why Did the Chicken...?' is a party game about making up funny answers to riddles. You have a small deck of question cards and a large deck of noun cards, and each round you turn up a question card and two noun cards to create a riddle - something like "What did the penguin say to the plumber?" or "What do you get when you cross a flat tire with an ant?" Then everyone has two minutes to write as many funny answers as possible. The Judge picks two favorites, and those players get points. Every player gets one chance to be the Judge.
For me, this idea started as a game about analogies. We'd take two random nouns and create an analogy problem like, "What is the duck-billed platypus of cars?" or "What is the Grand Canyon of Christmas?" Then everyone would come up with an answer, and the group would vote on their favorite. At Protospiel 2003 (an annual convention devoted to game design and playtesting), I met Mike Petty and learned that he had a similar idea. He had a bunch of cards with funny questions, and you'd plug player's names into them to get stuff like, "If Tom was a superhero, what would his name be?" After playtesting, we decided that we really liked the noun-juxtapositions of the analogies game, but we thought it would be interesting to have additional question-templates. After batting a lot of ideas around, it became clear to me that this was really a game about riddles; so I axed the analogy template and started calling the game "Why Did the Chicken...?" After the group here in Maryland did a lot more development-work on it, Jacob and Lisa Davenport decided that they wanted to publish it as the flagship product of their new company Play Again Games. As you can see, Mike Petty really deserves a lot of credit on this project, as do many of the designers here in Maryland.
Tom: Yes, I've recently received a game from Mike that has a similar feel - Get Paul that Promotion. Now, with Zendo and Why did the Chicken, people often double-take when they hear the same designer did both, as the two games aren't remotely similar. What can we expect from you in the future?
Kory: In fact, the designs that I'm currently shopping around are very different from both Zendo and WDtC. I would classify them as "designer games" (a.k.a. "German games"). This is probably my favorite genre, so it's sort of funny that my published games don't belong to it. Anyway, I can't predict when these new games will be available, since they haven't been licensed for publication yet. But they will be. Oh yes.
As for what I'm designing nowadays... I've had a growing desire to create something with stronger thematic and narrative elements, so I've suddenly found myself working (very slowly) on a new kind of role-playing adventure game - a role-playing game with "German game" sensibilities, if you can imagine such a thing. I don't know if I can imagine such a thing. I guess we'll find out!
Tom: Which do you consider more important - theme or mechanics?
Kory: That's a tough one to answer succinctly. The first thing I should say is that, however strongly some people may prefer games with strong themes (and I do like them myself), the fact of the matter is that, in a technical sense, mechanics are more fundamental. Many great games have no theme at all, but a game that has no mechanics is a contradiction in terms, like a married bachelor.
Most of my designs have focused on mechanics and not on theme. My primary goal has been to create a simple, elegant, and juicy rule-set. Only after the basic mechanics take shape do I start thinking about what real-world activities they might map onto. If a theme does suggest itself, it will provide a framework for subsequent design, but my focus is still primarily on the mechanics.
In a few cases I've begun a design with a theme already in mind, and in such cases theme becomes as important as mechanics. However, I'm still just as adamant about simplicity, elegance, and juiciness; and it's a tall order to design a strongly-themed game without compromising those other three criteria. In fact, I've never quite succeeded. But I know it can be done, because I've watched Jacob Davenport do it. He created a game called Piracy with a stronger theme than any pirate game I've played, and at the same time it's simpler and more elegant than most Designer Games.
I should say a quick word about how I define strong theme. If I claim that I want to design a strongly-themed pirate game, what I really mean, fundamentally, is that I want the players to *feel like pirates*. It's my experience that no flavor text or artwork or pirate-ship-shaped pieces can give a player a strong feeling of being a pirate. Only a game's mechanics can do that. If you can strip away all of a game's thematic veneer (the
artwork, the colors, the flavor text, the shapes of the pieces) and still recognize that it's about pirates, then you've got a strongly-themed pirate game.
Imagine playing an action card that says, "You successfully pirate an opponent! Steal one gold from any player." This probably won't make you feel much like a pirate. That's because the mechanics of the action don't resemble, even in an abstract way, the actions of a real-life pirate. If I strip away the artwork and flavor text from this card, you'll never guess that it's supposed to represent an act of piracy. If, on the other hand, I strip away all of the thematic veneer from Jacob's pirate game and play it with you, there will be no question in your mind that you're playing a game about pirates. The black-and-white board will quickly become a sea; the little featureless cube that you're moving around will quickly become your pirate ship. When you move in to intercept me just as I'm about to deliver my precious cargo to its destination, you'll feel unmistakably like a pirate. That's because the actions and interactions defined by the game's mechanics really do resemble - in an extremely abstract way - the activities of real pirates. I think that's the real purpose of theme in games: to give players this experience of being something or someone else, of performing these courageous or brilliant or dastardly feats.
A game doesn't have to have a strong theme to be great, but a strong theme can give the players a special kind of experience. A strongly-themed game does have to have strong mechanics to be great, because the theme is really just an aspect of those mechanics. I think strongly-themed games can and should be as simple, elegant, and juicy as the best abstract games. A tall order, I know!
Tom: I'm curious about your statement about how a game should still feel like the theme even if the theme is stripped away. Do you have any specific examples of games that fit this criteria?
Kory: Settlers of Catan is a perfect example. If we strip away all of the theme and color from Settlers and give it to a group of players (who have, somehow, never heard of Settlers!), they will very quickly catch on to the fact that this game is about settling an area of land. It would become clear to them that certain pieces represent settlements and cities, and that other pieces represent roads, or perhaps train-tracks. It would become clear to them that the letters "A", "B", "C", "D", and "E" that we've put on the uncolored hex tiles represent different types of terrain and different commodities, and they may even guess that among the commodities are basics like wood, stone and wheat. I wouldn't be surprised if they guessed that the board represents an island, due to its shape and to the port-like behaviors of the special edge-nodes. They will feel fairly certain that the board *doesn't* represent (say) an ocean, or a large pizza. The basic mechanics of the game will make the players feel unmistakably like settlers. That's what I mean by strong theme.
Notice that even a strongly-themed game can have weakly-themed elements. Consider the soldier cards in Settlers. I don't think that our hypothetical group of players would be likely to guess that these are supposed to be soldiers, and that you're trying to create the largest army. The mechanics themselves don't make you feel like you're building an army. In contrast, the piece-placement mechanics do make you feel like you're trying to build a long road. So the game gives players a strong experience of being road-builders, but only a weak experience of being army-builders. And that's fine - the thematic elements of a game don't all have to be equally strong. As a designer, I just need to make sure I'm aware of which of my thematic elements are strong and which are weaker.
I want to emphasize that I don't think there's anything wrong with weakly-themed games. I only argue that *if* you want to give your players a strong (rather than a mild) experience of being pirates, or settlers, or whatever, then you need to design your mechanics in such a way that the players would feel like pirates or settlers even if you stripped away the thematic veneer. Most of the Designer Games I own don't have themes as strong as Settlers, and that suits me just fine. I think it's neat when a game really makes me feel like a pirate or a settler, but that's not the primary reason why I play strategy games. (Note that I'm not even considering role-playing games and LARPs in this discussion.) I play strategy games because I love to explore the consequences of elegant rule-sets, to struggle against intelligent opponents, and to be faced with agonizing decisions. A game doesn't need a theme to give me those things. Of course, the decisions I'm faced with in a game have a greater chance of being compelling and agonizing if they somehow resemble real-world decisions. But I would also be perfectly happy to play a game like Einfach Genial, whose mechanics don't resemble anything in the real world that I can think of. The problem I have with very abstract games is that they're sometimes too dry for my taste. For me, an abstract game needs to be colorful, and, more importantly, it needs to have an element of chance. As long as it meets those criteria (and is simple, and elegant, and juicy!), the lack of a theme won't bother me.
Tom: Can you give an example of a theme that clashes with the mechanics - actually makes them worse?
Kory: I can't think of any good examples off the top of my head, although there must be some out there. In order for a game's theme to really clash with its mechanics, the mechanics themselves need to strongly suggest a theme. As I've indicated, most mechanics are actually pretty abstract, so there really isn't much to clash with. When a game's mechanics do strongly suggest a particular theme, the designer probably had that theme in mind during the design, so a clash is unlikely.
It's very common for a game's thematic veneer to extend way beyond what the mechanics themselves suggest - for a theme to be "pasted onto" a set of relatively abstract mechanics. The game Cartagena is a great example of this. It's ostensibly about a group of pirates escaping from the island fortress of Cartagena, but the mechanics themselves would never suggest this. If you theme-stripped this game, no one would ever guess that it's supposed to be about pirates. However, people certainly would guess that it's a game about groups of people or animals racing along a path or a tunnel and trying to get the end first. The mechanics are abstract, but they aren't totally abstract. The pirate theme doesn't actually clash with this thematic core; it just embellishes it quite a bit. If, on the other hand, the publishers had given the game a gardening theme and said that the pawns moving along the path were supposed to represent flowers, *that* would have been a thematic clash. A clash like that would be bad for a game, but I think it's actually very hard to make that kind of mistake.
Tom: Zendo is one of hundreds of games designed using the Icehouse set. However, it's one of the few commercially produced ones. How did you manage to get it packaged as a separate game?
Kory: Well, Andy and Kristin Looney - the publishers - had been aware of Zendo since its inception; almost all of the design and playtesting of it occurred at their house. (They host a weekly game night for a small circle of their friends.) From the beginning, I felt that Zendo was going to be something special, and this was confirmed by the positive reactions it received from the Icehouse community when we finally released it - first on
the web, then in a newsletter that the Looneys sold at the Origins game convention, and then in their book of Icehouse games called Playing With Pyramids. I felt that Zendo was good enough to be published as a stand-alone commercial game, and I began to discuss this possibility with the Looneys. Up until then, they'd been selling the pyramid pieces either in individual stashes, or in a boxed-set entitled Icehouse: The Martian Chess Set. They were finding that a lot of people didn't quite know what to make of these pieces; people wanted to buy a game, not a gaming system. Our friend Mike Sugarbaker - who was working at a retail game store at the time - finally convinced them that more people would be willing to buy the Icehouse pieces if they were packaged in the form of individual games, like Zendo. So the Looneys decided to give it a try. Two Icehouse games (Zendo and Icetowers) have now been published as boxed sets, and there are at least two more in the works (Volcano and Homeworlds). Note that these are not just four different ways of packaging the exact same set of components. For instance, in addition to the standard Icehouse set, Zendo comes with a set of black and white "answering stones", a set of green "guessing stones", and a little deck of Zendo cards containing good rules to try during your first games. Icetowers contains four new colors of Icehouse
pieces. Volcano will come with a special Volcano board, and Homeworlds will also contain extra components to be used during gameplay. Of course, you can still buy Icehouse pieces in individual stashes, if you want to mix-and-match colors, etc.
Tom: Have you seen the online games of Zendo at www.boardgamegeek.com?
Kory: Yeah, a friend pointed them out to me, although I haven't been following them closely. In the old days, I occasionally played Zendo variants via email, using words, sentences, or letter-strings as koans. The idea behind Zendo is very general, so you can play it with all sorts of different piece-sets (including abstract ones like letters of the alphabet). I still really prefer the Icehouse pieces, though.
Tom: What games have influenced you, as a designer, the most?
Kory: Probably the ones I played in the late 90s influenced me the most, simply because they were the first German games I had ever played. Elfenland, Settlers, and Bohnanza come to mind; from games like those I sort of intuitively grokked what this style of design was all about. (Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride would have worked just as well, if they'd existed at the time.) I was also really impressed by the simplicity and elegance of some of Knizia's stuff, like Quandary, Lost Cities, and Schotten-Totten.
Tom: A lot of people are influenced by the "German" invasion, myself included. What about American games? Did any of them find merit in your eyes?
Kory: Well, when it comes to strategy games, I really only like Designer Games. Insofar as American games tend to be of a different style, I tend not to like them. (Of course, Acquire is a classic American game, which is also a Designer Game; so all generalizations need to be taken with a grain of salt.) I don't like wargames, miniatures games, or "take that" card games, which are all prevalent here. I have a grudging respect for Magic: The Gathering, and plenty of respect for the role-playing genre, even though it's still too wargamish for my taste.
I also enjoy party games, which seem to be an American specialty. I played a lot of Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit growing up, and Balderdash (a.k.a. Dictionary) is still one of my favorite games. Of course, my own Why Did the Chicken...? bears a family resemblance to games like Apples to Apples and Balderdash.
Tom: You mention that American games tend to be of a different style. But what about Face 2 Face, Days of Wonder, Out of the Box, Eagle, Uberplay, Mayfair, Rio Grande, Fantasy Flight, and other companies? Don't you think that the majority of American games being published (with the notable exception of Hasbro) have changed considerably over the last couple years?
Kory: You're right, of course; there are lots of Designer Games being published here now. But in the context of your previous question, I was focusing specifically on those games that are published here in America which don't seem to be a part of this Designer Game trend. I mentioned wargames and "take-that" card games as two styles that don't tend to exhibit the sensibilities that I associate with Designer Games, and I think it’s safe to say that these two styles are more popular in the US than in Germany. But, of course, I wouldn't want to refer to them as "American games", just as I don't want to refer to Designer Games as "German games". I wish I had a good term to refer to those designs that exhibit distinctively un-Designer-Game-ish sensibilities. Anyway, it's clearly true that more and more Designer Games are being published here, and elements of this sensibility seem to be seeping into all areas of gaming. On the other hand, people are always looking for something new, so it will be interesting to see how this sensibility changes over the next five years.
Tom: Can you tell us a little about Play Again Games LLC?
Kory: It's a Maryland-based game publishing company owned and operated by Lisa and Jacob Davenport. Why Did the Chicken...? is their first product. Jacob has been helping me design games for years; he was one of the principal playtesters and developers of Zendo. He's also a great designer in his own right - his games Pikemen and Thin Ice appeared in Playing with Pyramids, and, as I mentioned above, he's designed my favorite pirate-themed game. We often toyed with the idea of starting a company to publish some of the various games we've worked on, and in 2003 Jacob and his wife Lisa decided to take the plunge. I expect that they'll be publishing great games for years to come. In my business relationship with them, I'm simply a freelance game-designer. I've seen enough of the action behind the scenes at Looney Labs and now at Play Again Games to know how hard a publisher's job is. I prefer the life of a starving-artist game designer.
Tom: What are the benefits of designing games? I'm assuming a lot of money is not one of them.
Kory: Yeah, I haven't made a whole lot of money from game design, although I still like to believe that I can scratch out a living from it. For me the real benefit of game design is the intense pleasure it gives me. I've done other creative things - written short-stories, drawn pictures, composed songs, played musical instruments, even recorded a full-length CD; but game design is the most pleasurable creative activity I've engaged in. I think it's the algorithmic nature of the domain that I find so compelling. Game design is all about creating and playing with rule-sets and their emergent properties, which I find endlessly fascinating. The process of inventing rules is entirely creative, and yet the consequences of those rules are pre-determined by mathematics and logic, and they must be discovered. So game design is a real mix of creativity and discovery. Most other arts - like writing, drawing, or composing music - are skewed towards the creative end of the spectrum, while mathematics and physics are skewed toward the discovery end. I really like the balance that game design provides.
The only other similar activity I've engaged in is a kind of recreational computer simulation. In elementary school and high-school, I spent a lot of time writing computer programs that would make little molecules or bugs race around the screen, or bits flash on and off, following their little rules. This activity resembles game design, with its rule-creation followed by exploration and rule-tweaking. However, game design has the added interest that there are people interacting with the rule-set, attempting to achieve goals within it. This makes the emergent behavior of the system even more fascinating, because intelligent choice becomes a basic element of the system's "physics". More importantly, I like the fact that people get to interact with these creations. With the computer simulations, all I could really do was point at the screen and say, "Look at my neat bugs." So, along with the pleasure I get from tweaking rule-sets and exploring their emergent consequences, I also get a lot of pleasure from showing a finished rule-set to people and watching them have fun interacting with it.
Tom: Kory, this has been a fascinating interview. Thanks for all your insights! Do you have any final words for our readers?
Kory: Thanks, Tom, this has been great fun! Let's see, final words... Well, I'd like to mention that I have a new website, www.koryheath.com . It's still under construction, but I'm adding content bit-by-bit. Your readers may enjoy checking out the Board Games link there, which leads to my Exquisite Chicken pages. The Exquisite Chicken is a generalized framework that encapsulates all sorts of different creativity-based games (including Why Did the Chicken...?). To play, all you need are pencils and a lot of scrap paper. There are many games to try, and I've put up some galleries of results from the games I've played.
For those readers who are interested in game design, I highly recommend the two annual design and playtesting conventions that I've attended called Protospiel and PowWow. Check out www.protospiel.org for Protospiel contact info, and search for "powwow" at www.bgdf.com for PowWow contact info.
Finally, I want to mention that Play Again Games will be exhibiting at Origins and GenCon, so I, along with an intrepid band of Chickeneers, will be demoing Why Did the Chicken...? non-stop for many days in a row. Come on by and help us write some jokes!
-Tom Vasel
March, 2005
“Real men play board games.”
Kory was born in 1970 in San Jose, California, and lived there until he was almost 30. He taught himself computer programming when he was in grade school, and eventually dropped out of college to do it full time. He saved up some money, inherited some more, and then in late 1999 he moved to Maryland and started designing board games with a great group of designers and playtesters. He’s had two games published so far. He still occasionally does freelance computer programming for a bit of extra cash.
Tom: Kory, can you tell us a little about each of the two games you've designed, and how the designs came about?
Kory: My two published designs are 'Zendo' and 'Why Did the Chicken...?'.
Zendo is a game of inductive logic in which players ("students") set up groups of little colored pyramid pieces which the "Zen Master" marks with white and black stones. The students are trying to figure out the Master's rule that determines how these groups are marked. For instance, the rule might be: if a group contains a red pyramid pointing at a blue pyramid, it gets marked white; otherwise, it gets marked black. The first student to
guess the rule wins.
I'd been mulling over ideas for an inductive logic game ever since I was a teenager and first heard of Eleusis and Bongard Problems, and played parlor games like "Crossed and Uncrossed" and "The Five Pencils Game". However, nothing ever really jelled until I discovered Andy Looney's Icehouse pieces, which were exactly what I was looking for. I started work on the design soon after I moved to Maryland, but it took me and the design-group there a couple of years to really hammer it out. If anyone's interested, I've written a very detailed design history of the game, which you can find at (http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Kory/Games/Zendo/DesignHistory...)
'Why Did the Chicken...?' is a party game about making up funny answers to riddles. You have a small deck of question cards and a large deck of noun cards, and each round you turn up a question card and two noun cards to create a riddle - something like "What did the penguin say to the plumber?" or "What do you get when you cross a flat tire with an ant?" Then everyone has two minutes to write as many funny answers as possible. The Judge picks two favorites, and those players get points. Every player gets one chance to be the Judge.
For me, this idea started as a game about analogies. We'd take two random nouns and create an analogy problem like, "What is the duck-billed platypus of cars?" or "What is the Grand Canyon of Christmas?" Then everyone would come up with an answer, and the group would vote on their favorite. At Protospiel 2003 (an annual convention devoted to game design and playtesting), I met Mike Petty and learned that he had a similar idea. He had a bunch of cards with funny questions, and you'd plug player's names into them to get stuff like, "If Tom was a superhero, what would his name be?" After playtesting, we decided that we really liked the noun-juxtapositions of the analogies game, but we thought it would be interesting to have additional question-templates. After batting a lot of ideas around, it became clear to me that this was really a game about riddles; so I axed the analogy template and started calling the game "Why Did the Chicken...?" After the group here in Maryland did a lot more development-work on it, Jacob and Lisa Davenport decided that they wanted to publish it as the flagship product of their new company Play Again Games. As you can see, Mike Petty really deserves a lot of credit on this project, as do many of the designers here in Maryland.
Tom: Yes, I've recently received a game from Mike that has a similar feel - Get Paul that Promotion. Now, with Zendo and Why did the Chicken, people often double-take when they hear the same designer did both, as the two games aren't remotely similar. What can we expect from you in the future?
Kory: In fact, the designs that I'm currently shopping around are very different from both Zendo and WDtC. I would classify them as "designer games" (a.k.a. "German games"). This is probably my favorite genre, so it's sort of funny that my published games don't belong to it. Anyway, I can't predict when these new games will be available, since they haven't been licensed for publication yet. But they will be. Oh yes.
As for what I'm designing nowadays... I've had a growing desire to create something with stronger thematic and narrative elements, so I've suddenly found myself working (very slowly) on a new kind of role-playing adventure game - a role-playing game with "German game" sensibilities, if you can imagine such a thing. I don't know if I can imagine such a thing. I guess we'll find out!
Tom: Which do you consider more important - theme or mechanics?
Kory: That's a tough one to answer succinctly. The first thing I should say is that, however strongly some people may prefer games with strong themes (and I do like them myself), the fact of the matter is that, in a technical sense, mechanics are more fundamental. Many great games have no theme at all, but a game that has no mechanics is a contradiction in terms, like a married bachelor.
Most of my designs have focused on mechanics and not on theme. My primary goal has been to create a simple, elegant, and juicy rule-set. Only after the basic mechanics take shape do I start thinking about what real-world activities they might map onto. If a theme does suggest itself, it will provide a framework for subsequent design, but my focus is still primarily on the mechanics.
In a few cases I've begun a design with a theme already in mind, and in such cases theme becomes as important as mechanics. However, I'm still just as adamant about simplicity, elegance, and juiciness; and it's a tall order to design a strongly-themed game without compromising those other three criteria. In fact, I've never quite succeeded. But I know it can be done, because I've watched Jacob Davenport do it. He created a game called Piracy with a stronger theme than any pirate game I've played, and at the same time it's simpler and more elegant than most Designer Games.
I should say a quick word about how I define strong theme. If I claim that I want to design a strongly-themed pirate game, what I really mean, fundamentally, is that I want the players to *feel like pirates*. It's my experience that no flavor text or artwork or pirate-ship-shaped pieces can give a player a strong feeling of being a pirate. Only a game's mechanics can do that. If you can strip away all of a game's thematic veneer (the
artwork, the colors, the flavor text, the shapes of the pieces) and still recognize that it's about pirates, then you've got a strongly-themed pirate game.
Imagine playing an action card that says, "You successfully pirate an opponent! Steal one gold from any player." This probably won't make you feel much like a pirate. That's because the mechanics of the action don't resemble, even in an abstract way, the actions of a real-life pirate. If I strip away the artwork and flavor text from this card, you'll never guess that it's supposed to represent an act of piracy. If, on the other hand, I strip away all of the thematic veneer from Jacob's pirate game and play it with you, there will be no question in your mind that you're playing a game about pirates. The black-and-white board will quickly become a sea; the little featureless cube that you're moving around will quickly become your pirate ship. When you move in to intercept me just as I'm about to deliver my precious cargo to its destination, you'll feel unmistakably like a pirate. That's because the actions and interactions defined by the game's mechanics really do resemble - in an extremely abstract way - the activities of real pirates. I think that's the real purpose of theme in games: to give players this experience of being something or someone else, of performing these courageous or brilliant or dastardly feats.
A game doesn't have to have a strong theme to be great, but a strong theme can give the players a special kind of experience. A strongly-themed game does have to have strong mechanics to be great, because the theme is really just an aspect of those mechanics. I think strongly-themed games can and should be as simple, elegant, and juicy as the best abstract games. A tall order, I know!
Tom: I'm curious about your statement about how a game should still feel like the theme even if the theme is stripped away. Do you have any specific examples of games that fit this criteria?
Kory: Settlers of Catan is a perfect example. If we strip away all of the theme and color from Settlers and give it to a group of players (who have, somehow, never heard of Settlers!), they will very quickly catch on to the fact that this game is about settling an area of land. It would become clear to them that certain pieces represent settlements and cities, and that other pieces represent roads, or perhaps train-tracks. It would become clear to them that the letters "A", "B", "C", "D", and "E" that we've put on the uncolored hex tiles represent different types of terrain and different commodities, and they may even guess that among the commodities are basics like wood, stone and wheat. I wouldn't be surprised if they guessed that the board represents an island, due to its shape and to the port-like behaviors of the special edge-nodes. They will feel fairly certain that the board *doesn't* represent (say) an ocean, or a large pizza. The basic mechanics of the game will make the players feel unmistakably like settlers. That's what I mean by strong theme.
Notice that even a strongly-themed game can have weakly-themed elements. Consider the soldier cards in Settlers. I don't think that our hypothetical group of players would be likely to guess that these are supposed to be soldiers, and that you're trying to create the largest army. The mechanics themselves don't make you feel like you're building an army. In contrast, the piece-placement mechanics do make you feel like you're trying to build a long road. So the game gives players a strong experience of being road-builders, but only a weak experience of being army-builders. And that's fine - the thematic elements of a game don't all have to be equally strong. As a designer, I just need to make sure I'm aware of which of my thematic elements are strong and which are weaker.
I want to emphasize that I don't think there's anything wrong with weakly-themed games. I only argue that *if* you want to give your players a strong (rather than a mild) experience of being pirates, or settlers, or whatever, then you need to design your mechanics in such a way that the players would feel like pirates or settlers even if you stripped away the thematic veneer. Most of the Designer Games I own don't have themes as strong as Settlers, and that suits me just fine. I think it's neat when a game really makes me feel like a pirate or a settler, but that's not the primary reason why I play strategy games. (Note that I'm not even considering role-playing games and LARPs in this discussion.) I play strategy games because I love to explore the consequences of elegant rule-sets, to struggle against intelligent opponents, and to be faced with agonizing decisions. A game doesn't need a theme to give me those things. Of course, the decisions I'm faced with in a game have a greater chance of being compelling and agonizing if they somehow resemble real-world decisions. But I would also be perfectly happy to play a game like Einfach Genial, whose mechanics don't resemble anything in the real world that I can think of. The problem I have with very abstract games is that they're sometimes too dry for my taste. For me, an abstract game needs to be colorful, and, more importantly, it needs to have an element of chance. As long as it meets those criteria (and is simple, and elegant, and juicy!), the lack of a theme won't bother me.
Tom: Can you give an example of a theme that clashes with the mechanics - actually makes them worse?
Kory: I can't think of any good examples off the top of my head, although there must be some out there. In order for a game's theme to really clash with its mechanics, the mechanics themselves need to strongly suggest a theme. As I've indicated, most mechanics are actually pretty abstract, so there really isn't much to clash with. When a game's mechanics do strongly suggest a particular theme, the designer probably had that theme in mind during the design, so a clash is unlikely.
It's very common for a game's thematic veneer to extend way beyond what the mechanics themselves suggest - for a theme to be "pasted onto" a set of relatively abstract mechanics. The game Cartagena is a great example of this. It's ostensibly about a group of pirates escaping from the island fortress of Cartagena, but the mechanics themselves would never suggest this. If you theme-stripped this game, no one would ever guess that it's supposed to be about pirates. However, people certainly would guess that it's a game about groups of people or animals racing along a path or a tunnel and trying to get the end first. The mechanics are abstract, but they aren't totally abstract. The pirate theme doesn't actually clash with this thematic core; it just embellishes it quite a bit. If, on the other hand, the publishers had given the game a gardening theme and said that the pawns moving along the path were supposed to represent flowers, *that* would have been a thematic clash. A clash like that would be bad for a game, but I think it's actually very hard to make that kind of mistake.
Tom: Zendo is one of hundreds of games designed using the Icehouse set. However, it's one of the few commercially produced ones. How did you manage to get it packaged as a separate game?
Kory: Well, Andy and Kristin Looney - the publishers - had been aware of Zendo since its inception; almost all of the design and playtesting of it occurred at their house. (They host a weekly game night for a small circle of their friends.) From the beginning, I felt that Zendo was going to be something special, and this was confirmed by the positive reactions it received from the Icehouse community when we finally released it - first on
the web, then in a newsletter that the Looneys sold at the Origins game convention, and then in their book of Icehouse games called Playing With Pyramids. I felt that Zendo was good enough to be published as a stand-alone commercial game, and I began to discuss this possibility with the Looneys. Up until then, they'd been selling the pyramid pieces either in individual stashes, or in a boxed-set entitled Icehouse: The Martian Chess Set. They were finding that a lot of people didn't quite know what to make of these pieces; people wanted to buy a game, not a gaming system. Our friend Mike Sugarbaker - who was working at a retail game store at the time - finally convinced them that more people would be willing to buy the Icehouse pieces if they were packaged in the form of individual games, like Zendo. So the Looneys decided to give it a try. Two Icehouse games (Zendo and Icetowers) have now been published as boxed sets, and there are at least two more in the works (Volcano and Homeworlds). Note that these are not just four different ways of packaging the exact same set of components. For instance, in addition to the standard Icehouse set, Zendo comes with a set of black and white "answering stones", a set of green "guessing stones", and a little deck of Zendo cards containing good rules to try during your first games. Icetowers contains four new colors of Icehouse
pieces. Volcano will come with a special Volcano board, and Homeworlds will also contain extra components to be used during gameplay. Of course, you can still buy Icehouse pieces in individual stashes, if you want to mix-and-match colors, etc.
Tom: Have you seen the online games of Zendo at www.boardgamegeek.com?
Kory: Yeah, a friend pointed them out to me, although I haven't been following them closely. In the old days, I occasionally played Zendo variants via email, using words, sentences, or letter-strings as koans. The idea behind Zendo is very general, so you can play it with all sorts of different piece-sets (including abstract ones like letters of the alphabet). I still really prefer the Icehouse pieces, though.
Tom: What games have influenced you, as a designer, the most?
Kory: Probably the ones I played in the late 90s influenced me the most, simply because they were the first German games I had ever played. Elfenland, Settlers, and Bohnanza come to mind; from games like those I sort of intuitively grokked what this style of design was all about. (Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride would have worked just as well, if they'd existed at the time.) I was also really impressed by the simplicity and elegance of some of Knizia's stuff, like Quandary, Lost Cities, and Schotten-Totten.
Tom: A lot of people are influenced by the "German" invasion, myself included. What about American games? Did any of them find merit in your eyes?
Kory: Well, when it comes to strategy games, I really only like Designer Games. Insofar as American games tend to be of a different style, I tend not to like them. (Of course, Acquire is a classic American game, which is also a Designer Game; so all generalizations need to be taken with a grain of salt.) I don't like wargames, miniatures games, or "take that" card games, which are all prevalent here. I have a grudging respect for Magic: The Gathering, and plenty of respect for the role-playing genre, even though it's still too wargamish for my taste.
I also enjoy party games, which seem to be an American specialty. I played a lot of Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit growing up, and Balderdash (a.k.a. Dictionary) is still one of my favorite games. Of course, my own Why Did the Chicken...? bears a family resemblance to games like Apples to Apples and Balderdash.
Tom: You mention that American games tend to be of a different style. But what about Face 2 Face, Days of Wonder, Out of the Box, Eagle, Uberplay, Mayfair, Rio Grande, Fantasy Flight, and other companies? Don't you think that the majority of American games being published (with the notable exception of Hasbro) have changed considerably over the last couple years?
Kory: You're right, of course; there are lots of Designer Games being published here now. But in the context of your previous question, I was focusing specifically on those games that are published here in America which don't seem to be a part of this Designer Game trend. I mentioned wargames and "take-that" card games as two styles that don't tend to exhibit the sensibilities that I associate with Designer Games, and I think it’s safe to say that these two styles are more popular in the US than in Germany. But, of course, I wouldn't want to refer to them as "American games", just as I don't want to refer to Designer Games as "German games". I wish I had a good term to refer to those designs that exhibit distinctively un-Designer-Game-ish sensibilities. Anyway, it's clearly true that more and more Designer Games are being published here, and elements of this sensibility seem to be seeping into all areas of gaming. On the other hand, people are always looking for something new, so it will be interesting to see how this sensibility changes over the next five years.
Tom: Can you tell us a little about Play Again Games LLC?
Kory: It's a Maryland-based game publishing company owned and operated by Lisa and Jacob Davenport. Why Did the Chicken...? is their first product. Jacob has been helping me design games for years; he was one of the principal playtesters and developers of Zendo. He's also a great designer in his own right - his games Pikemen and Thin Ice appeared in Playing with Pyramids, and, as I mentioned above, he's designed my favorite pirate-themed game. We often toyed with the idea of starting a company to publish some of the various games we've worked on, and in 2003 Jacob and his wife Lisa decided to take the plunge. I expect that they'll be publishing great games for years to come. In my business relationship with them, I'm simply a freelance game-designer. I've seen enough of the action behind the scenes at Looney Labs and now at Play Again Games to know how hard a publisher's job is. I prefer the life of a starving-artist game designer.
Tom: What are the benefits of designing games? I'm assuming a lot of money is not one of them.
Kory: Yeah, I haven't made a whole lot of money from game design, although I still like to believe that I can scratch out a living from it. For me the real benefit of game design is the intense pleasure it gives me. I've done other creative things - written short-stories, drawn pictures, composed songs, played musical instruments, even recorded a full-length CD; but game design is the most pleasurable creative activity I've engaged in. I think it's the algorithmic nature of the domain that I find so compelling. Game design is all about creating and playing with rule-sets and their emergent properties, which I find endlessly fascinating. The process of inventing rules is entirely creative, and yet the consequences of those rules are pre-determined by mathematics and logic, and they must be discovered. So game design is a real mix of creativity and discovery. Most other arts - like writing, drawing, or composing music - are skewed towards the creative end of the spectrum, while mathematics and physics are skewed toward the discovery end. I really like the balance that game design provides.
The only other similar activity I've engaged in is a kind of recreational computer simulation. In elementary school and high-school, I spent a lot of time writing computer programs that would make little molecules or bugs race around the screen, or bits flash on and off, following their little rules. This activity resembles game design, with its rule-creation followed by exploration and rule-tweaking. However, game design has the added interest that there are people interacting with the rule-set, attempting to achieve goals within it. This makes the emergent behavior of the system even more fascinating, because intelligent choice becomes a basic element of the system's "physics". More importantly, I like the fact that people get to interact with these creations. With the computer simulations, all I could really do was point at the screen and say, "Look at my neat bugs." So, along with the pleasure I get from tweaking rule-sets and exploring their emergent consequences, I also get a lot of pleasure from showing a finished rule-set to people and watching them have fun interacting with it.
Tom: Kory, this has been a fascinating interview. Thanks for all your insights! Do you have any final words for our readers?
Kory: Thanks, Tom, this has been great fun! Let's see, final words... Well, I'd like to mention that I have a new website, www.koryheath.com . It's still under construction, but I'm adding content bit-by-bit. Your readers may enjoy checking out the Board Games link there, which leads to my Exquisite Chicken pages. The Exquisite Chicken is a generalized framework that encapsulates all sorts of different creativity-based games (including Why Did the Chicken...?). To play, all you need are pencils and a lot of scrap paper. There are many games to try, and I've put up some galleries of results from the games I've played.
For those readers who are interested in game design, I highly recommend the two annual design and playtesting conventions that I've attended called Protospiel and PowWow. Check out www.protospiel.org for Protospiel contact info, and search for "powwow" at www.bgdf.com for PowWow contact info.
Finally, I want to mention that Play Again Games will be exhibiting at Origins and GenCon, so I, along with an intrepid band of Chickeneers, will be demoing Why Did the Chicken...? non-stop for many days in a row. Come on by and help us write some jokes!
-Tom Vasel
March, 2005
“Real men play board games.”
