Below you’ll find a wonderfully detailed interview with Alf Seegert, designer of a number of excellent board games including Illumination, Haven, The Road to Canterbury, and more. Alf asked a few questions of me during the course of the interview, so I’ve added some thoughts highlighted in orange.
You’ve been designing games for over 10 years now. What got you started? Was there a specific moment where you decided to try your hand at design?
I actually started designing even earlier than that. I began designing in the year 2000, but it took nearly ten years finally to get published. What got me started was finding something I loved and feeling motivated to make something like it myself. Early games that inspired me include The Settlers of Catan, Through the Desert, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Tigris & Euphrates.
I had been given a taste of game design back in high school in the 1980s, when I converted the electronic board game Dark Tower into a mainframe computer version – all ASCII symbols, no real graphics – and the joy of that made me recognize early on that designing can be fun and rewarding. I also found out that I had it in me to devote lot of focused attention towards a single design project.
Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games was interested in one of my very early designs, Ancient Skywatchers, and was kind enough to meet with me personally to discuss it. He even pitched it in Germany but it didn’t make it to print. Thankfully its ideas helped inform mechanics in my later games Heir to the Pharaoh and Haven, and were all the better for the time they were given to “marinate.”
Can you briefly describe your design process? What is your usual starting point? A mechanic? Theme? Do you tend to work on a singular design until you are happy with it, or do you prefer to work on multiple designs simultaneously?
I always seem to be working on three designs at a time, but usually with one in the foreground.
I tend to have a theme grab me by the lapels and insist that a game be made for it. I try to make a viable prototype as early as possible, while creative energy still runs high. But often I find that a certain theme doesn’t actually work and I have to start from scratch. What I like is that the re-theme often changes the mechanics along with it, making an especially effective fit.
I encountered a helpful example of how theme matters to gameplay in my second published game design. When I was pitching my game TEMBO around 2010, its theme centered on elephants delivering baskets of fruit around Africa. Some playtesters complained that the game felt a bit “plodding.” When Zev Shlasinger picked it up with Z-Man Games he asked me to retheme it as a troll game, a sequel to my first published game Bridge Troll. It became a game about Viking trolls pillaging and plundering islands using longboats: Trollhalla. Many reviews praised how fast-paced it was – but the rules hadn’t changed, only the theme! It was then that I realized that there is much more at stake than mechanics in a design, and that you can’t separate mechanics from theme neatly. In fact, I think that designers, publishers, and players alike talk way too much about mechanics. What we need to spend more time discussing is a game’s dynamics – what it actually feels like to play it. And these dynamics involve theme, mechanics, components, the other people you play with, and many other factors. I like this video describing the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics of play and how they all work together. I spend a lot of time on this topic in the courses I teach on video game narratives.
We’ve talked previously about weight vs depth, and you’ve mentioned the idea of “simplexity” – deep choices emerging from simple actions – is this a primary design goal of yours? What other considerations do you focus on?
I aim for mechanics to themselves tell a story, “Mechanics as Metaphor.” For instance, in my game Fantastiqa, the symbol combinations required to fulfill quests are what generated the flavor text. They are not arbitrary. And as you take your turn, the game’s systems promote the creation of an emergent narrative out of the actions you perform. Based on emails I’ve received, some players enjoy “telling the story” of their turn with those mechanics and dynamics in play.
I know that many people play games algebraically and ignore flavor text and theme in favor of mechanisms alone, but I don’t work that way.
I know that you’ve thought hard on these questions, not least in how you mention that Illumination’s depth “exceeds its weight” – I’d love to hear you chime in on that question.
My ideal game would be described as having perfect information, a high degree of opportunity cost, and a good mix of strategic choices and tactical ones. I want to be forced to make choices that I know are mutually exclusive or may involve some risk, while evaluating the state of the game for myself and other players.
I’m not hyper-competitive, but I find it rewarding to play games that support analysis in this way, and I’ve noticed that these games tend to share a few common elements. I don’t want to intrude on Alf’s interview, so I’ve decided to make a video exploring this subject in the near future; subscribe to my youtube channel for more.
Of all your designs, is there one that you are most happy with? What about that title makes it the favorite?
Fantastiqa is my favorite and probably the game I’m best known for, alongside Haven. Fantastiqa is my love letter to everything I loved as a child, from the book The Phantom Tollbooth to the Ultima computer role-playing games to Zork! to Dungeons and Dragons.
Heir to the Pharaoh is a game I adore and worked on for many, many years before it got published. It seems have the label “hidden gem” permanently affixed to it. I wish more people would play it (it’s still easily available as an add-on to the current Kickstarter campaign).
Right now my favorite design is, aptly enough, my latest release, Illumination.
We see a lot of significantly revised “second editions” or “remastered” versions of games these days. Are there any of your previous designs you would want to refine and publish again?
Whenever I play Fantastiqa I use my own customized mix of components from various expansions and I enjoy it much more than I would just the original game on its own. I’d love to see a new edition made sometime with a new art style and with all the expansions included in a single set. The existing style, sourced from original library art, is charming but it could be a nifty change of pace to have a single artist tackle its whimsy.
Eagle-Gryphon Games recently created a new edition of my game The Road to Canterbury which originally came out a decade ago. The benefit this time is that it’s a slimmed-down production and therefore much less expensive (half the original price) while still being entirely enjoyable to play (it’s “The Impoverished Pilgrim’s Edition” this time!) The more time I’ve spent designing the more I’ve come to appreciate that there’s much more at stake than nice components. If you want to have your games played by as many people as possible, that means finding a way to produce your games at a reasonable price.
What degree of influence do you, as a designer, have over the final game? Have you found working with publishers helped to hone your games mechanically or make them more marketable?
I look for publishers which are willing to give me substantial creative freedom. I remain more than a little astonished that my weirder game ideas like Fantastiqa received so much enthusiastic support from Rick Soued at Eagle-Gryphon Games and I’ll always be grateful for that.
As far as publishers honing my games goes, I’ve benefited by working with experienced developers like Rick Soued and Ralph Anderson through Eagle-Gryphon Games who helped make my games with them that much better.
I’ve had very helpful experiences as well when a publisher takes an especially strong hand. The original game that I pitched to Ryan Laukat and Red Raven Games was nothing at all like what Haven became, and his skills as a developer really made it shine and made it more “of a piece” with the rest of their product line. I’m delighted how it turned out.
What advice would you give to a first time designer looking to get published? Are publisher relationships still valuable in the era of kickstarter?
The scene has changed a great deal since I began designing twenty years ago.
Kickstarter has been an especially big change along the way, for both better and worse – better because it means that some wonderful games are getting published that wouldn’t otherwise, but also worse because (among other things) the model of Stretch Goals has resulted in too many instances of “Kitchen Sink Design” with endless add-ons and expansions to games which can undermine elegant, cohesive design. In that connection, I’m delighted at the approach Eagle-Gryphon has taken with “Stretch Credits” in their campaign for my latest game – if a game surpasses its funding goal, credits are applied to the purchase of add-on games, NOT additions to the game being funded. The game being funded is treated as complete as it is, an ideal I strongly support.
Going back to the question of “how to get published,” for me the royal road was competitions. I entered the Hippodice game competition over half a dozen times and placed highly six times. That was confidence-building and demonstrated to prospective publishers that apparently I knew what I was doing. I’d recommend this same path to aspiring designers today: find the best contests you can and enter them. It will hone your skills in design, rulebook writing, and will make you think hard on how to implement viable components for your game. One good option is the Ion Award Competition at SaltCon.
Unless someone really wants to become a publisher and has what it takes to succeed in such a demanding calling, I’d urge them to find someone else to publish their games. Self-publishing via Kickstarter is much harder than it might appear and can very easily go wrong. I’m so grateful to be able to hand my games over to publishers like Eagle-Gryphon and Red Raven Games and have them do the hard part of transforming a design into a viable, sellable product, and have them manage the sizable obligations of getting the game printed and distributed, etc. There’s so much involved and I truly respect the labors of those who do that.
The board game industry feels very motivated by trends, whether thematic (zombies, mars, etc.) or mechanical (deckbuilders, point salad, etc.). Do you try to embrace this? Are there other designers that you have found influential, or would like to collaborate with in the future?
I have a vexed relationship with trends. I do try to pay attention to what is hip but without necessarily buying too much into it. For example, when I was first exposed to deckbuilding with Dominion I thought the mechanic was clever but not my cup of tea unless it did something more than make cards available to “buy” in the game and then add to your deck. With Fantastiqa I found a way to combine deckbuilding with a board in a robust way – as players move in the game they must subdue other cards which are added to their decks – and I was among the very first designers to apply that hybrid approach (I found out later that Martin Wallace had done something similar with A Few Acres of Snow).
As for influential designers, Reiner Knizia will always be a major influence on me because of the elegance of his designs. For many years I’ve challenged myself to make games as simple as he does and with as robust of outcomes. My game Musée was an attempt to make a game as easy to learn and compelling as Lost Cities.
As for designers I’d love to work with – Ryan Laukat and I have worked together on many games – with him as artist and/or publisher, with me as designer and/or co-writer, though our attempts to actually co-design a game to publication haven’t actually panned out yet. I’d love it if they did.
I’d like to ask you what you think are the most interesting trends in board games right now.
I have a tricky relationship with trends as well.
I love seeing the slow, evolutionary process of new mechanics being developed or integrated in unique ways. I feel like the last truly groundbreaking idea was deckbuilding, though there has been a resurgence of focus on ideas like rondels, and I hope to see more innovation here.
I think the industry has really been affected deeply by the Covid-19 situation, and I feel like it has supplied some much-needed downward pressure. Kickstarter updates have a lot more humility than a year ago, and publishers seem to be scaling back a bit on enormous releases. The fear of missing out is a powerful driver and a bit of a greedy blight upon the industry, and I am glad to see it being scaled back a bit.
If I had a trend-related wish, it would be that we have simply hit saturation with roll and write games. Yes, they can be great filler. No, we don’t need a roll and write version of every successful game. Please.
It’s often said that “Necessity is the mother of invention”, and that constraints tend to drive innovation and result in clever approaches and problem solving. Is this something you leverage when designing? Do you try to develop a new mechanic or idea while avoiding existing works, or with well-defined parameters that push you toward innovation?
I am for “design by subtraction” – a principle from video game designer Fumito Ueda, famous for Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. My goal is to have the most interesting and complex gameplay emerge from the fewest and least complicated rules possible. I don’t always succeed at that but it’s something I strive for. My most minimalist game of all, Dingo’s Dreams, embodies that most, with Musée in close second.
Have you ever had to scrap a concept and start over, or can you slowly iterate on a design until you get it to the point where you are satisfied?
I wish it were mandated somewhere that all artists must disclose their failures and rejections by publishers. We usually only see the final product, which creates the illusion that it represents the vision from day one. Some of my games ultimately work out after a ton of iteration, but many times they have to be scrapped entirely, often with no do-overs. I like to say “If you’re not failing regularly you’re not experimenting enough” – I try to go the Dark Souls route of treating failure as education rather than as a true fail state. I have at least ten times more ideas for games than I have successfully functioning prototypes, and I have many more functioning prototypes than I have actual published designs.
Do you have any other projects in the works? What’s next?
I always seem to have several games in the works in various stages of completion. Right now I have three games which are, from my own perspective, virtually “done.” One of those, maybe more, would make an excellent addition to the Fantastiqa universe, and another would work well as a sequel to Haven, so fingers crossed that these work out….
What’s on your reading list right now? Do you have a favorite book from the past year?
I recently reread Robertson Davies’ very strange novel Fifth Business and it continues to blow my mind. I recommend it to anyone who looks for enchantment in unexpected places.
This past year I didn’t read all that much new writing because I had so much work to do converting my courses to fully online teaching. But I did enjoy David Mitchell’s latest, Utopia Avenue. His novel Cloud Atlas still ranks as one of my top-three favorite novels along with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Barry Hughart’s unsurpassable Bridge of Birds, which is my favorite novel, period.
My favorite books published in recent years include Madeline Miller’s Circe, Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, and Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River. All these books weave together the mundane and the fantastical in unnervingly beautiful ways.
What about you?
Unfortunately I have to admit I didn’t get much reading done in the past year. I’ve got three young kids at home, and between work and shifting priorities with education, my time for personal reading took a big hit.
I’ve made a bit of a resolution to do better in 2021. The current focus is a rather practical one, as I slowly work through René Redzepi and David Zilber’s The Noma Guide to Fermentation. I’m trying to get back into fiction as well, with Magician by Raymond Feist on the go.
What are your top three favourite games?
My favorites always change, and I like to say that if your favorite game isn’t the one you’re currently designing, how might you amend that?
Classic designers like Reiner Knizia, Wolfgang Kramer, Michael Kiesling, Klaus Teuber (esp. for Adel Verpflichtet!), Bruno Faidutti, Bruno Cathala, Antoine Bouza, and Mike Fitzgerald have all created especially lasting impressions on me through their games.
A very short list of more recent games that seriously impress me includes Concordia by Mac Gerdts (a case study in mechanical elegance), Ryan Laukat’s storytelling games that began with Above and Below (with delightful characters and the best playable map-boards imaginable, and which I’m pleased to say he invited me to write for), and Root by Cole Wehrle (how on earth did he balance all those different factions in contest with one another, and so charmingly at that?).
I am still in awe of the 2-player game Akrotiri, by Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim, which remains the most amazing two-player title I’ve ever encountered.
I’d love to hear your own response to this question!
Before I respond – I’d just like to note that I love your advice here; “If your favorite game isn’t the one you’re currently designing, how might you amend that?”
I’ve always found it tough to define my favorite games. I think of myself as a collector, and I value variety in game experiences and try to keep pace with what’s out there. I also love the idea of having something to play that fits any occasion – something for any number of players, length, or desired theme. All of that is to say I own lots of games and have few genuine favorites.
If I had to pick, I would include the one that started it all for me:
Agricola. It’s hard to believe that this BGWS video is now 11 years old, but I remember it fondly and it helped me decide from the overwhelming number of boxes lining the shelves of my local store. Agricola was one of the first true “euro” style games I owned, and the gameplay remains excellent.
It’s a bit strange to reflect now – I remember it seemed impossibly heavy and filled to the brim with colorful wooden bits. It retailed for maybe $70-80, which seemed like a crazy amount of money for a single game back in the days before Kickstarter.
Battlestar Galactica is another big one for me. I feel like it has largely been replaced for most groups with newer, faster entries into the social deduction genre, like The Resistance or Secret Hitler. For me, a unique property of BSG is that it is a lengthy game seeded with doubt throughout the experience. As a result of the time spent playing you really feel invested in the outcome, which makes for an incredibly tense experience.
Finally, my most played game is likely Tichu. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who even slightly enjoys card games, as long as you are playing it as it is meant to be played – with exactly 4 players.
You’ve described Illumination as a spiritual successor of sorts to The Road to Canterbury. Is that strictly due to theme, or are they otherwise related? Was there something in particular that made you want to revisit this setting?
I love The Canterbury Tales and illuminated manuscripts have always been fascinating to me, and the Middle Ages more generally.
About a decade ago I bumped into a web app that let you place medieval artwork onto a tapestry or manuscript to create your own free-form stories or battles. (A more recent version is here.) The moment I saw it in action I wanted to make a game with that sort of visual and dramatic effect.
The impulse to see characters on the page “come alive” like that I find very appealing, and it’s a tantalizing narrative device – one used provocatively by anime genius Satoshi Kon among others. I should also mention that board game critic and author Jennifer Derrick dedicated a novel to the fascinating notion of enchanted books with illuminations coming to life in Library of Absolution.
For my game Illumination I thought it would be fun to take the drolleries and doodles of medieval manuscripts and set them in conflict in the context of other monk-ish duties in the monastery like ringing of bells, making bread, lighting candles, and fermenting wine. I loved Bruno Faidutti’s masterpiece Mystery of the Abbey, based on Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, and wanted to offer my own take on the monastery-and-manuscript setting.
Illumination has some super quirky art. Was this part of the vision initially? How did you decide on a designer?
Yes, Illumination’s art is indeed quirky! It reminds me, and others, of a grown-up but still whimsical Ravensburger game like The A-MAZE-ing Labyrinth.
For my prototypes I just use whatever art I can find online as placeholders. Sometimes people see my prototypes and take them as definitive of my vision for the game, which is usually not my intention. We discussed using art with the literal style of actual medieval manuscripts, but Eagle-Gryphon tried something different by hiring artists Jake “Seven” and Claire Campin, which brought a colorful “graffiti-art” aesthetic into play. I found the result irreverent and unexpected, meaning both in a good way. I think it worked especially well because the baddies are so delightfully naughty: crossbow-bearing squirrels and sword-wielding bunnies vs. hapless dogs and monks. It’s fun battling with such cuddly monstrosities.
One item I noted in my Illumination review was related to production quality, and how it seemed to fit somewhere in between your typical 2 player game and larger games. Can you explain a bit about the component decisions in Illumination?
It’s a great question. With Illumination you get a two-player game in a thick box with dimensions more commonly used for 4-5 player games. This isn’t my first game like that. Heir to the Pharaoh (my most-hidden of designing gems, if you ask me) is in the same size of box and was also 2-player. The new edition of The Road to Canterbury plays with a weird but oddly effective 2-3 players and is in roughly the same size box. Haven was in a box a little bigger than many other 2-player games, but the board made Ryan Laukat want to produce it that way and to better showcase the art, I think.
I cut my teeth on the Kosmos 2-player game series, which comes in those smaller, charming, Patchwork-size boxes and I love them. They signify “2-player delight” to me. I like small boxes with charming effects. I’ve made one game in a box even smaller than that, Rival Realms, and it’s among my very favorite designs. My game Musée plays best with two and is in a box about the size of those in the Kosmos 2-player line.
If I can risk a little bit of a manifesto here, I think there should be as many ways to implement 2-player designs as there are multiplayer designs. Because I play games mostly just with one other person, usually my wife, I’ve become ever-more interested in the dynamics of 2 players. I think that 2-player games can be as compelling as multiplayer games, and for that reason I resist the notion that 2-player games somehow have, or deserve, less stature than multiplayer games, or that they should be in smaller boxes, or have a smaller footprint. Part of my goal as a designer is to make 2-player games that feel as engaging as multiplayer games, or which have similar mechanisms (cf. bidding in Heir to the Pharaoh, which works very well even with only 2), and this might mean that they have a relatively large footprint or scale.
The problem — and it’s a real problem — involves logistics and economics. For 2-player games to have any traction in the market, they generally need to cost less than 3-4 player games. That’s why Illumination has thick tokens and a pleasingly solid box but had to trim back the goodies by using mats instead of thicker boards. It would have been too expensive otherwise — the game lists at $39.99 but is available on Kickstarter for $29, which is a very good deal for what the game contains in components and gameplay if you ask me. I’ve learned that going all-out with components in a 2-player game raises the price prohibitively and keeps people from playing a game which would otherwise have a lot of appeal. This is one reason why Eagle-Gryphon is reprinting The Road to Canterbury in a slimmed down “Impoverished Pilgrim’s Edition” for about half the original price, with similar component quality as Illumination.
You’ve described the solo game for Illumination as robust. This feels like a common trend in the industry as of late, with a lot of additional attention being placed on solo experiences. Are there any unique challenges to creating an engaging experience for a single player?
My biggest challenge in designing a solo game is that I’m convinced that only certain games work well as solo experiences. “Multiplayer Solitaire” games are a good choice for solo play, whereas games that focus on the “mwahaha” factor of hosing another player are unlikely to succeed as solo ventures. Illumination is neither multiplayer solitaire nor a spite-filled “take that” game. But it does have a strong “puzzly” feel in which the player is challenged to come up with the best possible use of resources that turn, and for planning later turns. I was pleased that a solo version worked quite well by having the “Mystic Monk” follow his own set of rules, and he can be a genuine challenge to beat. The solo version is highly adaptable in terms of challenge, which I’m quite pleased about.
Thanks for your excellent questions, James!
Alf Seegert’s games Illumination and The Road to Canterbury are currently on Kickstarter here.