On this page you'll find all the responses to each question that we posed the designers. It's important to note that Dr. Knizia's interview was done by telephone and, consequently, that interview was much more in depth than the standard list of questions most designers replied to. We've included only his responses to those ten questions here, but it's highly recommended that you read his entire interview to see everything he had to say.

The Ten Questions:

1. First off, do you ever ask yourself if the world really needs one more game and, along those lines, why do you keep making games yourself?
2. What is the most important thing you keep in mind when designing a new game?
3. Let's say you've got a game that's working well, but there is one clear problem that's still present. Either...

• the game is too dry.
• there is not enough player interaction.
• it's too long.
• or it's not making sense within the current framework of the theme.

Which one or two of these problems would you consider to be most crucial and how might you go about fixing it?

4. Sometimes efforts toward balancing a game lead to uninteresting, nearly equal choices. Do you have any advice on keeping things fair, yet still offering the players interesting decisions?
5. How do you decide upon and achieve a proper balance between randomness and pure strategy for a game?
6. The number or length of rules may be a factor when creating a game. How do you make the decisions of adding or removing rules during development?
7. At what point in the game design process, if any, do you typically become bored or disinterested in a design and what methods do you use to help you push through to completion?
8. If they haven't been addressed already, what types of design issues did you find yourself having the most difficulty with when you first started designing games? How did you overcome these design difficulties and what did you learn from them?
9. We're seeing a lot of new games these days, but not many are hailed as innovative. How new or different from other available games do you think a design should be to be considered worthy?
10. It's often hard for new designers to find good playtesters. Do you recruit your best playtesters or in some way train them? Whichever the case may be, how do you go about it?

We also gave each designer the opportunity to share any advice he wanted to pass along to aspiring designers.

First off, do you ever ask yourself if the world really needs one more game and, along those lines, why do you keep making games yourself?

Bruno Faidutti: Well, I think the world could be completely satisfied with just Poker and Cosmic Encounter, and maybe Settlers of Catan. So, the main reason I keep designing games is that I like to.

Tom Jolly: Yes. I can't tell you the number of times I've said to myself, "I ought to stop making games and concentrate on the development of breakthrough technologies for space travel and clean energy sources." Well, not in exactly those words, but the general idea is there. Problem is, I really enjoy it. There is a lot of satisfaction in watching someone else enjoy something you've created, and that's why I like designing games.

Alan Moon: This question has come up several times in the last months on BoardgameGeek or other websites. As a game designer, my first reaction is dismay. I can't answer for the rest of the world, but for me, I'll always need to design one more game, and one more after that.

Wolfgang Kramer said his ultimate goal is to design a new type of game. He said he doesn't think he'll ever achieve that goal, but he'll keep trying anyway. I believe I know exactly how he feels, and I guess I have the same quest in the back of my mind and that I'll probably achieve the same result. My simpler goal is just to design more games that are successful. Successful meaning games that I will feel proud to have designed and that sell. I've had my years of being a starving artist. Been there, done that. Now I want to be a professional, someone who is well paid for doing his job.

Michael Schacht: Yes, I think the world needs more games. ;-) Otherwise I have to look for other things. Of course, there already are a lot of very good games, but games always reflect the actual times. So, the games do get "old". The older ones are still good, but feel old. On the one hand the exercise for the game designers is to make the ideas fresh so that games stay fascinated. On the other hand, the game designers should keep their eye open for new ideas. For me game desining still is a lot of fun. That’s the most important point for me.

Mike Selinker: Nope, because I always need more games. Think of the video game industry. If they told you that there would be no more titles ever for the PlayStation 2, you'd still love the PS2 games you have. But you'd probably itch for some new fun from some other source.

On the other hand, I have an extremely low tolerance for bad games, and since some people think I make pretty good ones, there's a lot of incentive for me to put new ones on the market. I keep thinking of new ideas, and people keep putting them out, so it works out.

Martin Wallace: Yes I do. Personally I think there are far too many games being produced each year and the rate seems to be increasing. I keep making games because I need the money. I also need an excuse to go to Essen.

From a newbie designer point of view I think it is worth considering the theme of whatever design you are working on. Is it one that has already been done to death? Similarly, with mechanisms, is what you have put together closely related to another game, e.g. El Grande? Don't just think that a different theme will be good enough to dress up an old system.

James Ernest: Constantly. It's a running joke around here: "Game Publishers everywhere realize that there are officially enough games, and decide to stop making new ones." But really, this is an entertainment business, so it is reasonable to argue that the public will always want something fresh, even when "everything" has already been done. There are also new techniques in game design that make today's board games mechanically better than those of ten or twenty years ago, and I think that makes new games genuinely better. Obviously as a designer and a publisher I'm driven to create new games and new products, so it's easy for me to rationalize these things.

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What is the most important thing you keep in mind when designing a new game?

Bruno Faidutti: I think a good game must be tense, meaning there must be some anguish about victory and the way to get it building during the game. It's also nice when a game is fun, but it's not absolutely necessary.

Tom Jolly: Making sure as many copies as possible sell. But seriously, I think that keeping all the players involved all the time is the most important design factor. "Dead time" for players ruins a game. There are a lot of important factors I try to design for. Getting rid of dead time between turns, or minimizing it. Keeping all players involved; there are a number of good ways to do that, let me expound on that one factor for a moment...

There are at least 3 good ways to keep everyone involved in the game for the whole game. One is to have simultaneous action, as in Falling and Light Speed, or simultaneous puzzle-solving as in Set and Ricochet Robot. RoboRally and Star Fleet Battles have everyone programming their movement at the same time. Incorporation of phases wherein everyone performs a common action can be very useful in killing downtime. Apples to Apples encourages simultaneous play, too, as does Pit.

A second method is to encourage trade or interaction between the player whose turn it is, and the rest of the players, so even if it isn't your turn, your opponent could be asking you to trade wheat for stone, as in Settlers of Catan. Bohnanza encourages trade, too. There is a little risk that some players might get a little bored if they are out of the transaction loop more than others, but the risk is usually low.

A third method is to make any action by one player so critical to the game (as in Risk) that other players are sitting on the edge of the seat waiting to see what you do. In this same category is forcing other players to plan ahead while it isn't their turn, forming a strategy that they will launch on their own turn. This has a couple of drawbacks, in that some people won't start thinking at all until it's their turn, which really slows the game down. Also, you have to be careful that the board or card layout doesn't change so much each turn that trying to create a strategy ahead of time is a futile effort. I ran into this problem in Fluxx and Democrazy (both decent party games, but not my favorites for this very reason).

There are some decent games that break this design rule. Take It Easy comes to mind, which is essentially a multiplayer solitaire game that works pretty well, since all players "move" at the same time, but on their own boards.

In the interest of keeping all players involved all the time, killing off players in a game is a bad thing, since it means someone will have nothing to do for the rest of the game, so a game should keep everyone active until the end. This can be stretched quite a bit, I actual had a game design where players died, but reentered the game as zombies with a new goal; make sure nobody else lived through it. So, all the players stayed in the game.

Reiner Knizia: It's thinking about the target group and what stimulates them; it's thinking about novel concepts. There are many aspects. But essentially it all comes down to--and this is also the question as a game designer--what am I giving, what am I contributing? I'm contributing something to the entertainment and to the pleasure of the people and therefore that is to be kept in mind.

Alan Moon: When I playtest a game for the first time, most often the playtest doesn't last very long. I wish I had more games that were that good the first time I played them, but first playtests which go all the way to the end of the game are rare. These days, I want my games to have all of the following qualities (these are listed in relative order of importance):

1. It should be possible to explain the rules in five minutes or less. Elegant simplicity is the goal.
2. The game should take no more than an hour, with 45 minutes the perfect length. Games over 90 minutes are totally unacceptable.
3. There must be some hidden element to prevent mind-numbing analysis. Otherwise, the game is dry, and to me, simply not fun.
4. The game must have luck elements that add excitement.
5. The theme and the mechanics should work together.
6. The excitement should build to a climax at the end of the game.

Of course, game design is a less than perfect art, just like everything else. So sometimes compromises must be made. So I would say that numbers 1 and 2 are the only hard rules.

Michael Schacht: Keep the games simple. Even a four-hour game does not need to have endless rules.

Mike Selinker: It's a mantra I taught myself at Wizards: "I am not the target market." Neither are my fellow designers, nor are their kids. I need normal game players to tell me if I've done my job right. Playtesting outside your circle is the key to quality.

There are a few games I've done that only I can run, and those will never see print. For example, when I was the license director for D&D, I ran some games based on Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I felt confident that they worked only because of who I was and who my players were, so I never suggested pursuing that license for D&D. They were just about the coolest games I ever ran, though.

Martin Wallace: It's not enough to make a game that works, it has to be fun as well. It has to be something that players will want to play again.

James Ernest: Two things. Why to pick it up, and why to keep it. In other words, why will someone play this game the first time (theme, format, concept, etc), and why will he play it again (balance, ease of play, fun).

In the "pick it up" department, I usually start with a theme or a story, not a game mechanic, because I think that's what drives a player to learn a new game. If I told you I had a great new game about rolling dice and counting, would you want to play it? What if I told you I had a game about using mad cows to discover unexploded bombs? Yeah, okay. They're the same game. I prefer to come up with the hook first, rather than searching for the perfect hook for an already-written game, because if that's your plan you can spend months working on a great mechanic and then find yourself with no way to sell it.

I also find that truly inventive game mechanics grow out of the story. In Kill Doctor Lucky, you believe you're the only person who wants to kill him (otherwise the game would be a lot easier). Because of this, you not only have to be alone in a room with Doctor Lucky, but you must also be in a place where no one can see you. This line-of-sight mechanic makes the board and the strategies more interesting, and it would never have come about without the story.

In the "keep it" department, I think the time spent playing the game should vastly outweigh the time spent leaning, setting up, explaining, and taking apart the game. Game rules should be simple and obvious; if it's an economic game, you should have money. If it's a fighting game, it should be fast. I try to be inventive but not to the extent that no one can understand what's going on. Falling is a good example of a game that was too different: lots of people never figured it out. Those who did think it's a blast.

I also, of course, try to build the game so that it's fair and balanced. That's a tall order, and it's easier to give the appearance of balance than to actually create it. For example, a game might be "fair" at the start, but badly out of whack by the end of the first turn. For example, in a purely random race where every player rolls fifty 6-sided dice, a player who rolls a 6 on turn 1 will beat a player who rolls a 1 on the first turn almost 65% of the time. If the gap is higher a few turns in, the lead is almost insurmountable. That means that players who got off to a slow start have no reasonable chance of catching up, so the game quickly becomes less fun. Designers compensate for this problem by installing "catchup" mechanics, which are often obvious and forced. For example, they might force the player in the lead to step back one space at the end of every round, and the player in the back to step forward. To me, that's embarrassing. The game ought to have more texture, and allow better strategy to make up for poor luck. More on that below.

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Let's say you've got a game that's working well, but there is one clear problem that's still present. Either...

• the game is too dry.
• there is not enough player interaction.
• it's too long.
• or it's not making sense within the current framework of the theme.

Which one or two of these problems would you consider to be most crucial and how might you go about fixing it?

Bruno Faidutti: The lack of player interaction or the senseless theme are the most crucial problems for me. I think a game with not enough player interaction usually needs a completely new element added, and a game with a senseless theme needs a new theme - or no theme at all. As for the "lack of interaction" problem, I have it with a game I'm presently working on. It's about looking for treasures with a treasure map - the theme and the whole story behind suggests each player has a different map, but this way they are not going to the same place, and don't even know how to hinder other players. And making the players goals public knowledge destroys the theme....

Tom Jolly: Well, I just picked and answered the interaction item. Let's look at "the game is too dry" and what that really means. To me, a game is dry when player choices are driven totally by external forces, that is, the player doesn't really have choices. This can manifest as actions that you are forced to do each turn, or where your choice of action is to do something either really stupid or not, that is, no choice at all. I've designed games where all the players begin the game building up initial supplies on a farm, then spread out from there. You notice immediately that all the players do all the same things for the first five turns or so, since to do anything else would just be dumb, even though those other options are available. So, the game-start is very, very dull. The solution to that is just to start the game at the point where everyone has already done the initial five turns, that is, give them the gold, food, land, cards, whatever, that they would all get anyway at that point in the game.

Another good "not-so-dry" technique that's popped up recently in game design is to give everyone the same obvious good choices, but limit each player with "action points" as to how many of those good actions you can take. A player sees four good things he'd like to do, but can only choose two of them. I used this in Vortex; players can play a tile as an action, or attack with a tile, or move a tile, but you have to choose which things you want to do. This is an aid to turn-speed, too. If a player can only do two actions, versus moving every piece on the board, then the game is going to move much more quickly.

Theme can obviously make a game less dry. Most of Knizia's games are essentially math games with a veneer of theme spread on top. The games play very well, mathematically, but the theme adds a little more flavor to the experience.

One item I would certainly add to the list of initial game problems you give in your question is; "The rules are too long". But, you bring up this issue in a later question.

Reiner Knizia: You just gave me a contradiction. You said, "The game is working well, but there's a problem with it." If the game has a problem with it, it's not working well.

A game is only finished and only good if it hasn't got any problems, if it's round, if it works. I have a number of examples where things look very good but there is one aspect that doesn't work and it can kill the whole game. A game is something that has to build a unity in itself. The mechanics need to gel together with the theme, so that I naturally, in my role--my thematic role--do what makes good and successful moves with respect to the game system. Of course, the graphics, visual effects, and tactile effects are important. Everything needs to come together to build a unity. It's very difficult, the aspect of the question you're asking, because it is relatively easy to get a game to an 80% design. Yes, it works, but, no, it is not perfect. The big art, the big challenge, and the big time effort and energy that goes into the design is the last 20%, to make it round. The normal players, not the insiders, frieks, or enthusiasts, but the normal everyday player, will certainly not be able to put the finger on what is missing or what's the issue; however, what they'll do is not waste their time in playing. They will just intuitively notice that a game is fun because it's a 100% game. And this other game will play but it doesn't draw them in: the psychology isn't there. There are lots of important psychological aspects of a good game design that people don't notice, but it keeps them in the game; it inspires them. And so building these things in is very important. Even so, they're not very often consciously recognized, but it takes a good game to finalize it and make it very round and therefore there is no other way. Either it is complete and perfect, or it isn't. There is essentially no way in between. So with this respect there is a lot of test work that needs to go into it. If it is done then it is done. And if it isn't done then it needs to rest for a year when you can take a fresh approach. There's no other way to do it.

Michael Schacht: Length is not a problem - this can be changed easily. Same with the theme - it is always possible to create rules that do the same job but fit better to the theme. The other points are more important and much harder to solve. For that there are no general solutions. It will differ depending on the game, but if you know what exactly the problem of the game is, you know a lot. Now you can concentrate to improve this point.

Mike Selinker: You're asking me to pick among cliches. These are not real problems. A problem is something at the heart of a game, like "property doesn't turn over fast enough." You work at the root level, and everything else takes care of itself.

Of that list, I guess the most serious is that the game is too dry. That suggests to me that however long it is, however players interact, and whatever the theme is, it's no fun. Gotta fix that, possibly by starting over with the central mechanic. I think that happened with Dungeonville, where everybody liked the theme and the length, but the core mechanic just wasn't fun. When my partner James replaced it, that reinforced everything people wanted to like about the earlier version of the game.

Martin Wallace: Dryness can be a matter of taste. If it's too dry then sell it to a German games company;).

Player interaction is also a matter of taste, some players prefer to play solitaire.

Length is a key issue when I design a Warfrog game. I try to make sure a game will take between 2-3 hours, which means you can play it in a evening. There are a lot of games that need a whole weekend, they do get played but not often. If you are going to compete with those games then you had better have a good one.

I think a game works better if it feels logical, that what you are doing intuitively fits with the theme. I like to think of Age of Steam as a good example of this - you build track and ship goods, which is what the railways were built for. This is not true of all railway games.

James Ernest: These problems have varying priority depending on the type of game and the audience. For example, if a game is designed for the European market (or American connoisseurs of those games) "too dry" is not really an issue. But for these players, "interaction" is critical. For the American youth market (specifically, selling games to publishers with distribution in that market) the opposite is true: the game must come with a cartoon show, a million dollar ad campaign, and a line of chewable vitamins, but it's okay if mechanically it amounts to two players drawing for high card.

I'll discuss solutions to each of these problems in turn.

The game is too dry...

"Dry" has lots of shades. A game can simply take too long, require to much math, or be about a subject that is not interesting to the players. Usually a game is too "dry" when the mechanics don't suit the theme, or when players spend more time optimizing their moves than taking them. This is in part a function of the group playing the game. However, there are certainly faults with any game that make it more dry than it might be.

I personally like pretty "wet" games: lots of flavor, luck, and fast action. I'm more entertained if I don't have to think too hard, and if there's something funny about the choices I make and the way the game proceeds. A good theme will go a long way towards lightening the load: in part, the theme gives people a reason to learn the rules, and in part (if the rules make sense) it makes them easier to remember. In the Kill Doctor Lucky example above, "I can see you" makes perfect sense and it's not hard to recall. It might be harder if the same mechanic was used to represent something else, such as orthogonally-firing laser-shutdown beams.

If a game is too dry I will usually try to fix the rules, because I have already decided that I like the theme. My guess is that something about the rules isn't engaging enough, or something about the theme isn't coming through For example: I don't take enough chances, get enough little victories, or have enough reason to choose one option over another. Things can also dry out if there seems to be only one clear path to victory. Once everyone decides that Orcs are the most powerful troops, everyone always buys Orcs.

There is not enough player interaction.

The concept of "player interaction" is one of my pet peeves. Not because games don't need it, but because game designers don't seem to know what it is.

Basically, player interaction is what makes multiplayer games different from several simultaneous games of solitaire. In a game with no interaction, such as the 50-die race described above, players are just moving forward as fast as they can and not affecting each other's position. Many complex games can feel just like this. For example, a MMORPG might have its users spending most of their time alone, killing monsters and leveling up. The game is only interactive when players make raids together, or when they buy and sell their characters on eBay.

Board game designers frequently use "player interaction" as a tool with one purpose: to give players in the rear a chance to pick on the players in the lead. One common solution goes something like this: Each player has one rock, and can throw it at any other player to slow him down. The net result: everyone but the leader throws his rock at the leader, and the leader throws his rock at the player in second place.

The worst version of this rule is one in which players must choose whether to help themselves or hurt the leader. In other words, each must decide whether to move forward, or throw a rock. In other games, the rocks are free, so everyone throws them all the time, and the leader always gets hit. In a two-player game, rock-throwing is not so bad: everything you do is targeted at one opponent anyway. But as a leveler for multiplayer games, it's a weak solution at best. At worst, it actually creates a game where no one wants to be in the lead.

What is player interaction, really? In multiplayer games, it's a game structure in which a player's every move can affect the position of other players. It's not a set of superfluous choices that compare to the rock-throwing rule above, but a set of primary choices that often, or always, affect the whole group. For example, in a stock trading game, since everyone might own shares of Company X, when I affect the value of those shares I understand that this will benefit (or hurt) all players who own part of that company. In Kill Doctor Lucky, if I stand where no one can see me, I also stand where I can't see anyone else. Thus, when I am alone, I make everyone else more alone as well.

Player interaction of this sort is not something that can be created with an extra rule or a few extra cards. It has to be woven into the system. (Now, before I get email, I have learned this principle through designing plenty of games with rock rules, so thanks, but I know.)

Another form of interaction is player communication, in the forms of concealment, bargaining, and bluffing. Bluffing is the main form of interaction in Poker. Players must behave in a way that conceals the quality of their hand, good or bad, but it is understood that this is their goal. Lying to liars who think you are lying is a tricky sort of interaction, to say the least. There is no mechanic in Poker that allows you to "pick on the leader" and in fact, in a tournament setting, that's the last player you want to tangle with.

The game is too long...

"Too long" is another of those terms that means different things to different people. I like extremely short games. You can play Brawl in 35 seconds. A hand of poker takes about 2 minutes. I will play poker for hours, but the game is always being reset, so a mistake I make now is effectively erased at the start of the next hand. Yes, I have less money, but that's not the point. Contrast this situation with any hour-long board game in which I can spend the entire game trying to make up for one foolish move.

I find games often go too long because the midgame stalls. A decent game of any length has three phases: a setup, a midgame, and an endgame. Even Brawl has this to some degree. In the setup, players are getting their resources into play, configuring their pieces with opening moves, or otherwise getting ready for battle. In the midgame, the game is in a more or less steady state in which all players are vying to advance. For example, every minute of Scrabble. In the endgame, the game is nearing conclusion, and players are trading in everything they have collected for whatever wins them the game, doing things that might seem foolish in the midgame but are perfectly appropriate at the end.

As a designer, it's important to give players as little midgame as possible. In my opinion, as soon as the game reaches a steady state, it's time for the endgame. Better yet, if the game never quite levels out, people won't be exactly sure when the endgame begins. So people can take chances on exactly when they start "cashing out."

Games can also bog down if individual turns take too long. This can happen when, to borrow a phrase from my friend Dave Howell, the solution space is medium-sized. If the solution space is small, as in Tic-Tac-Toe, a player can analyze all the possible moves and choose the best one quickly. In Chess, or any game with a suitably complex solution space (this can also be created by sufficient randomness), analyzing all possible moves is practically impossible. In these games, players make choices knowing they're not perfect, and they don't take forever to do it. But when the solution space is medium-sized, a player could trace out all the possible solutions if he really wanted to, and some players feel compelled to do this because otherwise they will not be playing their best game. Again, this will mean different things to different groups, but if you're finding that you are taking too long analyzing your strategy, you may be able to solve it by growing or shrinking the number of possible outcomes.

It's not making sense within the current framework of the theme...

When you start with a theme, and your mechanics don't match, it's usually correct to go back to the theme for a solution to your problem. I will typically change a game mechanic to fit a theme, not change a theme to fit a mechanic. A far more respectable game designer than myself, Reiner Kinizia, takes the opposite tack. "Theme is very important in my games," he says, "so I will frequently change the theme several times until I find the right one."

For me, the game is the theme, and the mechanics are just a way of telling the story. So I will redo mechanics from scratch until I find the ones that match the theme. In designing U.S. Patent Number One, I did a total of four completely different game mechanics before I settled on one, and frankly I'm still not happy with how it came out. But the story of that game is the same as when I began.

When the mechanics aren't meshing with the theme, I usually ask myself: what system am I trying to model, and what elements of that system make sense in the game? If it's a real system, it must work in real life (to some extent), so if it's not making sense in the game there's usually a disconnect between the game and real life. For example, in a game about building casinos, I was having trouble coming up with a way to help players who got off to a shaky start. I was rather embarrassed when I finally hit on the solution: gambling! If you're down on your luck, you can enter any player's casino and bet with what money you have. It's a little like a "rock," since the richest players are typically the targets, but unlike the rock it has slightly less than a 50% chance of working. After all, in the long run, the house always wins.

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Sometimes efforts toward balancing a game lead to uninteresting, nearly equal choices. Do you have any advice on keeping things fair, yet still offering the players interesting decisions?

Bruno Faidutti: I think there is a necessity for interesting choices for the players, which means that you must have some control on the effects of your decisions. But I usually don't run into this problem.

Tom Jolly: See my prior comment on giving players action-points to spend. They all have the same choices, but are limited as to what they can do. Another option is to use a limited set of actions which the player can choose from (as is Citadels wherein players select a different character each turn with a different ability), but then rotate the first player each turn so each player has the opportunity to make the first choice. Rotation of the first player each turn is a very good game-balancing technique for games where the first player in each round has an obvious advantage. Other games solve this by saying that you have to play multiple rounds of the game, rotating the starting player, then adding the scores at the end. Another form of balance I've seen is that if players are using different decks to play, then players swap the decks with one another and play a second round. Best to play for some sort of points this way, of course, since you would otherwise end up with a lot of 1:1 ties.

Reiner Knizia: The question as you put it is difficult to answer because it actually doesn't arrive in this way for me. The choices you have in a game, and that means the victory conditions, essentially motivate what the different choices are from the mental starting point for the game. I expect from the game as in life. Life offers so many good choices you can never take them all and that's good because it makes life so rich. I expect the same from a game. So that's one of the key starting points: to have enough choices, enough opportunities, enough strategies and enough alternatives that you always have more than you can follow through. Therefore it's always an aware decision as to which one I take and I hope next time I still have time to do the other ones. That is essential. When I get in a situation where there are no real decisions to be taken then I don't think we have a good game.

Alan Moon: One of the hardest types of games to design is a game where players begin the game with different advantages or must follow different paths during the game. An example would be a game where each player has an individual power. Playtesting this type of game takes more time than a game where all the players begin on an equal footing, and balancing the different advantages, power, or paths can be very difficult. I tend to avoid this type of design if at all possible. Other than Cosmic Encounter and Magic: The Gathering, I cannot think of too many successful games of this type, although those two are certainly games I greatly admire.

Balance in games is an interesting subject. I always think of professional golfers, who when they encounter a very tough course, often describe the course as unfair. What? It's the same for all of them. How can it be unfair? Difficult, yes. More difficult than they would like it to be, yes. Unfair, no. When I hear people complaining that they lost because there is an unbeatable strategy in a game, I always wonder if they won when they used that strategy. If they used that strategy and didn't win, then it wasn't the best strategy for them, at least during that game. It may have been the best strategy for the player who won, but everyone else should have changed their strategy because they lost. For me, the great balancing factor in many games is to play against the leader, or at least the player you perceive as the leader. I'd even go as far as to say that you should begin the game playing against the player you think has the best chance to win. On the rare occasions when people play against me right from the start, I cringe, but I also take it as a sign of respect.

Michael Schacht: There were a lot of games in previous times which were dominated by this equality thing. My impression as a "freak" is you should not sense the correction rules. Otherwise I lose interest. Then I even prefer a straight, not so fair game.

Mike Selinker: If you get in that spot, you have to make the choices flavorful. Think of roulette. It is impossible to change the odds in that game no matter what you do. But you can always bet on your daughter's birthday, and buy her an ice cream cone when you win. Roulette lets the players bring into the game whatever the cold mechanics of the game are missing.

Thankfully, most games offer a little more value to choices than roulette. I like choices where the immediate impact of making the choice is not always apparent until a few turns later, when you can clearly see how you screwed yourself over. But, y'know, not too late to come back from the dead.

Martin Wallace: If your starting conditions are not balanced then make sure there are enough decision points in the game to reduce the effect of the initial imbalance.

James Ernest: As far as I'm concerned, a nearly equivalent choice doesn't count as a choice. "Balance" is another one of those buzzwords that game designers throw around, like "interaction," without really knowing what it means. "Balanced" doesn't mean that no matter what road I take I always get to the same place.

For me, that choice is interesting if, for one player, choice A is clearly better, and for another player choice B is clearly better. It's not interesting if A and B are the same for all players. If Player A can have a strategy that he likes, for whatever reason, and Player B can have an equally effective strategy that leads him to make different choices, that's balance.

In CCG design, creators try to envision as many different combinations as possible, and make sure that none of the prevailing strategies is markedly better than the others. (It's okay if there are also plenty of strategies that are terrible, but no single strategy should be the best). This design parameter embodies the concept of "multiple ways to win" and, when executed correctly, is a brilliant exercise in game balance. No particular card is of equal utility to all strategies: if it were, it would be too strong. When building a deck, one player might desperately need Card A, while another player has no use for it at all. As long as every card has a place in some deck, and no single card is too strong, the game is fair and balanced.

Board game designers can take a lesson from this: no choice has to be equivalent for all players, as long as different strategies make all choices interesting to someone.

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How do you decide upon and achieve a proper balance between randomness and pure strategy for a game?

Bruno Faidutti: I usually start with something very strategic, or very psychological, and add the luck element afterwards, stopping when I feel it's enough.

Tom Jolly: There is no proper balance; there are excellent pure luck games with high humor content (Apples to Apples), and then there's Chess and Go. I guess that the more random a game is, the more that humor should be a factor, since players usually play games for one of three different reasons; social interaction, mental competition, or money. In home-poker, you have all three, but there are examples in which all three are taken to the limit in isolation from the other two, but still produce good games. But, lacking money and strategy, a game better have something else to offer. I can't think of any successful game where money, strategy, and humor were all missing.

Reiner Knizia: There is no proper balance. Chess and Go are games that have no random elements, apart from who starts as white and black. And other games are potentially totally random and can still be, in a way, fun. And it depends on the target group. It also depends on the game as such and on the mechanics in the game system, on the situation you want to create. If you look at dice games, some dice games are highly random. Some dice games don't even give you any influence. But you still shout at the dice, and you want to get your 6 or whatever you need. So it's not a matter of how much or how little randomness. It's having the right amount for the right type of game. There is no good and there is no bad, there's just appropriate for this type of game and it needs to gel together with all the other things in the game. Usually--and this is now a subjective remark-usually people like some randomness in the game but they also like to have decisions and be able to influence things. So with this respect, I think going to both extremes is not always advisable. And then one player can say, "Yes, I played better. I was the superior strategist. And the people who lose will say, "We were unlucky this time. Next time we'll do better." And then everybody's happy.

Alan Moon: I simply have no interest in designing games of pure strategy. I think luck makes a game fun and exciting. Only serious gamers really appreciate a game of pure strategy, which means greatly limits a game's sales potential. There are enough other limiting factors without adding one more.

Michael Schacht: Depends on the feeling. Just testing helps to decide.

Mike Selinker: Depends on the client, really. We get beat down by our German clients for having too much randomness in a game; we get beat down by our American clients for not having enough. Americans like to roll lots of dice, Germans not so much. (Hand-waving on Settlers.)

I think the randomness has to come from the theme more often than not. Rolling dice makes a lot of sense in a wild combat game like Risk Godstorm or a gambling game like Dust & Sin, less so in an all-skill game like Chess. So I look to what I started with and figure my mechanics from there.

Martin Wallace: Taste. I prefer a degree of randomness, the alternative can be a dry, predictable game. A number of my games have to deal with battles. These were largely random affairs and so luck must be incorporated to a degree. What I try to do is give players the option to reduce the risk of bad things happening. It should also be the case that a bad result does not knock a player out of a game.

James Ernest: This is the most subjective factor in game design. Some players like games with no luck, some players like games that are entirely luck. (Note that the amount of skill in a game, as Dave Howell would point out, is independent of the amount of luck. More about that below.)

Luck serves several purposes in games. It allows players who are not skilled in the game to have a chance of winning, and it gives them something to blame when they lose. A Chess player never says "the pieces were against me" or "my opponent lucked out," and for some players this is why Chess is a great game: players take full credit for their wins and losses. By contrast, few people claim to have "skill" at playing slot machines, yet they are a hugely profitable business, because sometimes people don't want to be responsible for whether they win or lose. Personally, when I am tired or drunk, and in the mood to gamble, I will seek out a game that requires no strategy at all!

One German game publisher wrote that luck in games represents the influence of death in real life. I'm not sure where he got that, but I take it to mean a game with luck is not perfectly predictable, and is therefore not worth over-thinking. Luck provides the "cognitive fog" required to grow the solution space I mentioned above, making it impossible for players to look too far ahead, and therefore limiting their decisions to a manageable few. In a game like Button Men, where dice are rolled every turn, the number of possible outcomes becomes overwhelming pretty quickly: enough so that one can play the game reasonably competitively by only looking one or two moves ahead. Analyzing all possible outcomes becomes geometrically more difficult as you look further ahead.

On luck versus skill: Many players like to rate games on a single axis between luck and skill, but this is a limiting metric. Luck and skill actually fluctuate independently. The linear metric is descriptive of "what percentage of the game's outcome is reliant on luck or skill" and in that context the two attributes can be seen as opposites. But games can have very little skill and absolutely no luck (like Tic-Tac-Toe) or a whole lot of both (like Poker). In a game with both, short-term fluctuations mean anyone can win, but in the very long run skilled players always come out ahead. I like games with this pattern because I like to give everyone a chance to win, while still rewarding good play over the long term.

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The number or length of rules may be a factor when creating a game. How do you make the decisions of adding or removing rules during development?

Bruno Faidutti: There are two phases. First, I start from a rough idea and add some "chrome" rules, usually because they make sense with the theme and I feel they could add something to the game. I usually end up with something a bit too convoluted, and there is a second phase of simplification, of removing what's unnecessary and trying to group single rules into more general ones.

Tom Jolly: Usually, if the rules are too long, then there are too many fiddly rules. That is, rules that are there for the purpose of exclusion-handling and special cases. Get rid of special cases whenever possible. Don't be afraid to trash that special card in your deck that's "so cool" if it requires a whole page of rules just to explain what it does. Every rule should affect the whole game, not just an exception.

Alan Moon: I think complicated games are easier to design. You want to add a rule, add it. You want to create an exception, create it. The real art of game design is the elegance of simplicity. When a game has the least amount of rules necessary to make it the most fun, then it's possibly a perfect design.

Michael Schacht: Ok, if I make a gamers game I can keep some "luxury" rules to make the game more interesting. For a family game I would discard these but I would try to find an easy way to have the same result.

Mike Selinker: I don't think I've ever had more fun and more heartache on a game than the revision of Axis & Allies, where I had to be the guy to decide which rules got in and which got cut. I often try to limit rules by the game element so that you can easily describe that game element to your friends. So when I say, "It's an aircraft carrier. It's not so good at blowing stuff up, but it's really solid. And you can land fighter planes on it. Here's how." The aircraft carrier doesn't get a rule about how it can carry relief supplies like they did after Hurricane Katrina, because you don't think of an aircraft carrier doing that. You think: solid hull, planes land on it. So that's what it does.

Hopefully, when you're done, you've got a set of rules that people can remember. But some games have to have the rule book nearby, and that's okay too.

Martin Wallace: Nearly all my development work involves removing rules. Struggle of Empires started with three times the number of rules it ended with. The aim is always maximum effect for minimum number of rules.

James Ernest: A rule should carry its own weight. The hassle that a player must endure to memorize the rules must be justified by the benefit that it has to the game. For example, "You need the most points to win" is probably worth keeping. "On a turn number divisible by 2, if you have fewer points than the leader, you can call a vote among the players with fewer points than you to take one point away from the leader, but only if a majority of those voting can decide which other single player to give it to" is probably not. I don't care if this rule perfectly recapitulates the semi-annual General Council meeting in Burma, and if you feel that without these rituals Burma would be no different from any other place. No one is going to remember this rule, and even if they do, they're rarely going to invoke it. (This one also requires remembering which turn number you're on...)

It's always tempting to add more rules than you need. For example, when it's discovered that a player who collects more than three coconuts can win the game by standing on a certain space on the island, the designer might add a rule that says no player can own more than three coconuts. This isn't a rule you would expect from the context (what island nation prohibits people from owning more than three coconuts?) so players have to remember this rule in a relative vacuum, and make decisions based on the fact that while they can and should accumulate coconuts, they can never accumulate more than three. It's even more perplexing if the stand-on-that-one-space trick isn't obvious, since even once they know the rules, people are still mystified as to why they can't own more than three coconuts.

Rules like this are called "patch" rules, and they are annoying. The real solution to the coconut problem is obviously not the coconuts, it's the space, or the rules that let you stand there and win the game, or something else entirely. Chances are, the designer has got it in his head that the space and the rules are critical, and the max-three-coconut rule, irritating as it is, is the best solution. I think that's ridiculous, of course, and I'm always looking for a more invisible solution to a problem like this. The challenge is that it's always harder to change or remove existing rules, than to add just one more.

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At what point in the game design process, if any, do you typically become bored or disinterested in a design and what methods do you use to help you push through to completion?

Bruno Faidutti: It's very simple. When I'm getting bored with a game design, I just stop working on it and start on something else. Sometimes I can come back a few years later, if I still remember it. The computer helps a lot. I sometimes browse my "game creations" folder and find game projects four or five years old that I had completely forgotten, and for which I immediately get completely new ideas.

Tom Jolly: If I find a reluctance on my part to have my friends playtest a second time, chances are good that it won't be successful without some tweaking. Usually I don't get bored on the initial design; those come out in a rush, usually with the whole design popping out in a few days, and playtest graphics in the following week. Boredom comes if it doesn't play well. Then I'll put it aside for months or years, pulling it out and considering it only when I stumble across it in my boxes or files. New ideas I've had since then might change it quite a lot. I rarely, if ever, force myself to "push through to completion", unless I'm doing spec work for someone.

Reiner Knizia: There are two answers here. One answer is, as we discussed with the 30 drawers, there's a natural selection process, which is a very healthy process. The games that have the most potential, that advance nicely, that are exciting to play, will always be in the foreground. Those games that are not exciting to play and become troubled and have problems will fall backwards. Those that have potential will develop and those who do not have potential will be selected out and finally die. And that's a good thing because the good ones select themselves and the bad ones stay behind. It's a good thing, too, because you're not always interested in all the games. But the more exciting ones come to the foreground so you always work on the high potential ones.

There's a second aspect to that, and it's the second part of the question: I am not always free to develop a game in whatever direction it wants. Quite often there is an agreement up front to do games to certain licenses, to certain date lines-like The Lord of the Rings game or the Star Wars game, or now the Beowulf game. These are licensed developments, contracted developments. Of course I can't just let if fall by the wayside and not deliver. The first thing for me when I enter into such an agreement is to give myself a lot of time because I know sometimes it goes straightforward and sometimes it's a long, winding process. Essentially my best approach is I play with lots of different people so that fresh ideas come in from different groups. We don't go down a blind alley because I keep the groups with whom I play very big. But it sometimes happens as it happened with Beowulf, which is now on the market: the first two designs did not work at all so essentially I had to throw them away. What you see today on the market is the third design, which is completely different from the first two designs. Nobody will ever see the first two designs and very few people, if I didn't talk about it, would ever know about it. It's in a way then more of a selection process not "this game will not work, and I'll do another one," but "this design doesn't work and I need to find a new design, a new approach to it." Yes, it is sometimes a matter of motivation. Sometimes it's better just to walk away from it for two or three weeks and then come back to it. The time span for these developments is, anyway, a year or so. If you need to get a fresh view do something else in the meantime and then come back to it and hopefully it will work. So far I have been in the lucky position that some of them were hard work, but all of them turned out to finally get to exactly where I wanted them. I would rather like to not deliver and explain to the publisher I can't do it than deliver something half-cooked. But so far, happily, I haven't been in that situation.

Michael Schacht: The first idea is very strong and fascinating but then ... :-) You have to have patience and discipline, I think.

Mike Selinker: Oh, this happens all the time with me. I have shiny object syndrome, and so it's important for me to stay disciplined. At Wizards we had designers and developers, who handled different ends of the same project. Every now and then, I had to do both, which meant a long haul on a single project. These were usually pretty hard slogs for me.

These days, though, I'm working on a dozen things at once. I love that. So when I get bored or frustrated, I put project A aside and work on project B. Usually while working on project B, I think of something cool for project A, and switch back again. Yesterday I worked on five different puzzle and game projects. No time for boredom in there.

Martin Wallace: Depends on the game. I never got bored of Struggle of Empires. Same with Age of Steam. There are other games that I will not mention that I did grow bored of. Usually these end up in the bin. If I've been asked to design a game then it's a case of gritting your teeth and getting on with it. A first time games designer will find it hard to finish a game. However, once you complete your first game then you will find it easier to finish others in the future.

James Ernest: Actually, boredom is a sure sign that a game is going wrong. I won't "push a game through" if I am getting bored with it; I will analyze why it's getting boring. Obviously, playing the same game over and over can get tedious, but I have to hope that fans of the game are going to do the same. So the worst thing to do is ascribe the boredom to repeated play and assume it won't affect anyone else.

Now, if a game is boring me and I don't see an immediate solution, I will usually shelve it. There are plenty of half-baked games filling the bookshelves of this house, waiting for the day when a second look or a brilliant new idea makes them more fun. Deadwood sat around for a year like this, and in fact, when I found it again I had the cards and board but no copy of the rules. When we made up new rules to play with the same pieces, it worked much better!

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If they haven't been addressed already, what types of design issues did you find yourself having the most difficulty with when you first started designing games? How did you overcome these design difficulties and what did you learn from them?

Bruno Faidutti: My first games tended to be far too somplex, strategic and simulationist, and I had to train myself to make things lighter, in a more "German" way. Now I have troubles going back to the full chrome games I used to design when I was young.

Tom Jolly: The first games I designed (Wiz-War, GOOTMU, and Knots), I can't say that I actively considered any game design elements. The process consisted of "Design game, play game, see if it's fun". In retrospect, I probably wouldn't have brought out GOOTMU and Knots, but for different reasons. Knots main problem is that there are a dozen other games with the same object (build a path from one edge of the board to the other) already in print and it's a two player game. I'm a believer in viral marketting; one of the best ways to sell a good game is for one player to play it with six other people, two of which go out and buy a copy to play with other people. This sure saves on advertising for those on a shoestring budget. GOOTMU has a stupid name, and the pieces are too small. Better graphics, higher density space instructions, and another level of player interaction (which is very limited) and a new name would all have been good choices in the design.

Reiner Knizia: Well, initially I didn't have any design issues. For a long period I simply designed games to play with my friends. There was never the idea of publishing anything. It was just "Oh, we can't find that theme," or "I've got a good idea to change that game," or "Let's try this one." So we just developed things and played very odd games. Games which needed the right approach or a specific approach, as well as the good will of the players to make it work. So it's not a publishable game then because people in the market expect--whatever type of people they are-that when they open the box they want the entertainment to work for them. So with this respect I didn't have any design problems because they were just for me, and designing something for yourself, you can always suit yourself in the best possible manner. I think the problems or the challenges arrived when I started thinking about publishing and get a game robust that it works for many different people and many different approaches. But at that time I had a lot of game design experience. So with this respect I naturally dodged the initial difficulties because I had the opportunity to learn a lot about game design and how things go without being exposed to the public and the pressures of publishing.

Alan Moon: One of my weaknesses is symmetry. I tend to want to always make things symmetrical. I fight this as much as possible. This was a huge obstacle when I starting creating the tickets for Ticket to Ride. After several abortive attempts, I was finally able to force myself to throw out all the rules in my head that I was trying to use and just try to make a set of tickets that "worked" during play. Having gone through this process already, I found it much easier to create the tickets for Ticket to Ride Europe. But I'll forever be on guard against my symmetrical tendencies.

Michael Schacht: The easy games. In my opinion, it is easier to make a good gamer's game than to make a good easy game with just a few rules (please, don’t hit me :-)). I always try to keep things easy. That’s my aim, and there are always new and surprising solutions.

Mike Selinker: When I was the new kid on the block, I had trouble with the big picture. I could always design a cool little mechanic here, or a fun character there, but the long view was always hard to grasp. That's why I was always doing an encounter in an RPG here and a few TCG cards there. I think I've gotten better at being the overall visionary on a project, where other people handle the details. People seem to listen when I say, "I want this kind of game and that kind of story. Who can do that?"

Martin Wallace: The key design issue is coming up with a game that somebody a) wants to publish, and b) people want to play. All of my early games were not publishable. I must've thrown away twenty or so games before coming up with something that was OK. If there is a lesson here then it is to not be afraid to throw away a game that is never going to be right. Nothing is wasted, the experience of a designing a game that does not work is in itself positive. One example of this would be an early version of Stockers that would not work. Later I went back to one of the ideas in the game and turned it into a card game which was published as Und Tschuss, my first game published by a German company.

James Ernest: Designing games is pretty complicated, and I'm seriously considering writing a book. (I feel like I have today). I think the right approach is to design with the player in mind, and remember that no one cares about your game nearly as much as you do, so they'd better have a really good reason to want to play it. A lot of designers kid themselves and think that other people really need to see their new version of Chess...

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We're seeing a lot of new games these days, but not many are hailed as innovative. How new or different from other available games do you think a design should be to be considered worthy?

Bruno Faidutti: I think it's with games like with books, innovation is not a good thing per se. There can be bad innovative games, and fantastic derivative ones - like Ticket to Ride. I don't try systematically to make things completely new and different.

Tom Jolly: That's a really loaded question! Just because a game is uniquely innovative (Camelot, for example) does not guarantee any degree of success. Icehouse, very innovative, never really took off. Eluesis (and Zendo) are very innovative, and might yet have some moderate success. Diskwars did really well, but died after two years. But the games that seem to occupy the top 50 slots in sales tend to just rehash known design elements shuffled around in a new format and theme. Why are these successful? Because players are already familiar with the concepts and don't feel confused by them. So if you're just in it for the money, using familiar and successful design elements in a new pattern is the way to go. Study the bestsellers and factor in the bidding, the trading, the player interaction, whatever the design flavor-of-the-week is and run with it. But, that said, I rarely do that myself. I like to innovate, which is one of the reasons none of my games is really a best-seller.

Reiner Knizia: This is a question that is almost unanswerable. How do you measure the difference? People have very different approaches. Also it depends on how knowledgeable people are about the games. You talk to somebody who essentially does not play games and they would say there is already a card game, so why do you need to invent another card game? They are thinking in very broad categories--this is a board game, this is a card game, and this is a dice game. The same can be said of books. There is a hardcover and there is a softcover, so why do we need another hardcover? I'm overdoing it a bit, of course....

Once you're closer to the subject, there are many different aspects. It's the materials, the theme, the game system, or any new technical abilities to do in the game. It's essentially a judgment that is very subtle: to do something that is new with new aspects in there, and has a new target group. People always think that there is a very thin area of varied kind of games. I think there are an infinite variety of different things you can do. And times change. Games are a mirror of the times. People want to play what they find exciting. Games over the last decades have become much more dynamic as our times have become faster and more dynamic. Attention spans are shorter therefore the game duration is shorter. We now have many more materials that are easily accessible and affordable. We now have electronics we can put into the game. We have the Internet and online games. So there are many more aspects. A designer's concept would be: "I'm in the entertainment business. I want to deliver a good time to people so that they can play and enjoy themselves." The platform from which you deliver it can change and will change and does develop. The range is really very wide if you see it from a bigger perspective, I think.

Alan Moon: Lots of people have said that there is no innovation in Ticket to Ride. Maybe they're right, maybe not. I don't care. It's my biggest hit by far. If I have a choice between creating another game that is as successful as Ticket to Ride or a game that is totally innovative that doesn't sell more than 10,000 copies, I'll choose the former every time.

I think almost all games come from other games, in whole or in part. Very few games strike me as really innovative. Usually only games that start a genre seem totally innovative, with Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering being the most prominent examples I can think of at the moment. I think Settlers of Catan is innovative because it takes traditional game elements and uses them in new ways. For instance, the dice roll. Commonly, one player would roll dice and have it effect his move or his turn. In Settlers, one dice roll produces commodities for all the players. I also think the way Settlers uses the sides of the hexes instead of using the hexes themselves is incredibly clever, as is the trading system. I think one of the reasons Settlers has been such a big hit is because it seems both familiar and different when you play it. It has one or more elements that everyone can relate to from other games and/or from life. But it blends these and the new elements so seemlessly together, that the result is an innovative game that is both comfortable and pleasing, as well as new and exciting.

Would I like to create a truly innovative game? Absolutely. But I won't be bummed if that never happens. I will be bummed if I can't create another big hit though.

Michael Schacht: The most important point should be the fun. If the game has a lot of fun perhaps it is worth being published even it is not so innovative. But anyway, it is better to have even some small innovation in it.

Mike Selinker: I don't agree with the premise. Plenty of games are innovative these days. Pirates, Hecatomb, HeroClix, Clout, and the like are all about companies taking chances. I think we might just hit a renaissance of trading object games and German-style board games at the same time this coming year, after a lot of sameness in both categories. Just like we saw in RPGs a few years ago. It's all cyclical.

Worthiness isn't just about innovation. It's about staying power. I don't think Carcassone is a very innovative game. I do think it's a great game, and I'll play it whenever someone brings it out.

Martin Wallace: Cannot see how I could possibly answer that question. The only really innovative games are those that open a new field, such as D&D, Magic, Trivial Pursuit. Settlers was not really innovative, it just caught on in a way that was completely unexpected. Boardgames are functionally identical to those first made by the Sumerians, you just have lots of variations on a theme.

James Ernest: Innovation is a double-edged sword. You can be so imaginative that no one understands you. Nobody bought Magic: the Gathering at first, and for awhile before it shipped, it was indistinguishable from a flop. In fact, most innovative new ideas are just that: flops. Once Trading Card Games became a known quantity, plenty of other companies tried the same thing. They usually made a little money, or lost a little money, but they could never do as well in the same market, because Magic was the first. So, if your creative idea is a success, it's got the potential to be huge. When you copy someone else, you have a more guaranteed result: you won't have a giant success, but you're less likely to have a flop.

I don't know what makes a game worthy to be hailed. But I do know that there are periods in any industry when the manufacturers are not as risk-oriented, and are therefore less likely to come up with anything truly innovative. Puerto Rico was hailed as innovative, but from where I sit it's just another Euro-style game with most of the same ingredients, and this is why it sells well, but not better than Settlers of Catan. Settlers wasn't the first game to work like that either, but it was the first to take hold in the American market.

At the moment it's really hard to make money in gaming, so most established companies are hunkering down and sticking to what they know. It will take another upstart like Wizards of the Coast (as they used to be) to get lucky with the next big thing. Big things come from little publishers, because big publishers don't like risks. Little publishers take risks because they have to, and that's why most of them fail. But that's also why, once in a while, you hear about the one that succeeds.

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It's often hard for new designers to find good playtesters. Do you recruit your best playtesters or in some way train them? Whichever the case may be, how do you go about it?

Bruno Faidutti: I think my problem is more with finding time to playtest the game myself - I usually play only one a week, sometimes less - than with finding playtesters. Some of my good old playtesters are getting old, though, and there are now babies, etc., which sometimes make things more complex.

Tom Jolly: My front-line of playtesters is just the same game group I've had for over 20 years, before I had any intention of designing games. Other than that, some folks over the years that I've met at cons and in emails have voluteered to use their groups to playtest my designs. Once I've got my own group to help remove glaring design errors, I make a nice prototype and ship it off to the "blind" playtesters. This stage is important because, at home, I teach the rules to my friends without reading them out loud. When someone else reads and interprets the rules, it can often show up some stupid mistake in the rules that you completely overlooked, or show something that you took for granted but shouldn't have.

Reiner Knizia: I don't know if there is a real process there. The people who play with me have been together for many years. Yes, every now and then a new person comes in but it is a very close circle--a big circle, but a close circle. We understand each other very well. And the game testers contribute a lot of ideas to the games and it's simply a symbiosis. The playtesters have fun playing it, they have fun contributing, they see that their ideas go into the games and they see the final published games and say, "Oh yes, I contributed this aspect," and they get their credits in the games. So I think it's rewarding for them and it's highly rewarding for me as well because I get lots of new creativity out there and I get the big variety into the games that I in isolation could not do. But it is keeping the eyes open, always inviting new people in. Some people will come and will naturally find it interesting while others will not be inspired by it and will not come any more, so it's a natural selection process. Those people who find it exciting will be there and they will contribute and of course they will become better and more experienced, as I the designer became more experienced.

Alan Moon: My friends sometimes joke about whether they are on the A List or the B List. To me, good playtesters come in two varieties. One type are people who come and play the game as well as they can, and will only give me feedback when asked and may not actually say more than whether they like the game or not. The other type are people who have lots of comments, but know when to present them (sometimes this means holding them until the playtest is over, sometimes it means interrupting the game in progress, sometimes it means emailing me the next day, etc.). On the other end of the scale are the people who don't make good playtesters. These people usually come with their own agenda: the person who wants to be funny when they should be concentrating, the person who gets upset when I end the game halfway through, the person who is distracted or does not play as well as they can, etc. I'm willing to give almost anyone a chance to playtest my games. But I'm rarely willing to give people a second chance if they fail that first test.

My best playtesters are all among my best friends, although they were good friends first. I think the same qualities that make them appealing as friends also make them good playtesters. They just naturally understand what I'm trying to accomplish, they understand how they can help, they understand what won't help and they are enthusiastic and committed to the goal of making a good game.

I get requests from people to blindtest my games. But I don't use blindtesters for several reasons. Blindtesting would mean I'd have to make additional copies of my prototypes to send to people. Plus, every time I made a change, I'd have to send that out to the blindtesters too. Sometimes changes happen very rapidly, so that would mean I'd have to be very conscientious about noting every change. It's hard enough to keep the rules and changes straight in my head, without having to pass that info on. Heck, sometimes, while I'm thinking about a change, I'm changing it again. So documenting the changes might actually interfere with the creative process at times. Finally, the amount of correspondence that blindtesting would require simply boggles my mind. I spend enough time emailing now. Adding more is not inviting.

Michael Schacht: The longer you work with the same testers the less the result is worth. So, always changing the "team" is important. However, I have some long time testers I don’t want to miss.

Mike Selinker: I recruit playtesters all the time. James has a core group, and I have another, and I had a bunch more when I was at Wizards. You don't train playtesters, you just listen to them. If you're smart, anyway.

Martin Wallace: I just grab who I can. It can be difficult to get people to playtest, very often a game will end half way through because it's broken. Some gamers will complain they have waste precious gaming time. You have to have a bit of a brass neck and cajole folks into trying your game. You cannot afford to be shy - be positive, tell them it's the best game they will ever play, and then find a new set of testers when they find out you lied;).

James Ernest: I think anybody can be a good playtester, in the right circumstances. When I test a game I am always looking for people's reasons for making all the choices they make, and their immediate reactions to the rules and the story. My group is happy to tear a game apart and make frequent re-starts until the core mechanics work. I'm open to comments about mechanics that make no sense or turns that take too long. And by playing open-handed (sometimes) we can collaborate on strategy that would be harder to see if we played normally. Basically, they don't need to know a lot about game design, as long as they know when they are having fun.

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If you have any other comments for aspiring game designers, we'd love to hear them.

Bruno Faidutti: When I'm blocked on a game, or when I have an idea I think great but don't know how to develop, I often ask some other game designer to work on it with me. It's much easier when there are two of you.

Tom Jolly: The success of an entertainment industry is inversely proportional to the amount of thought required to engage in that entertainment. Think about it; Movies with no mental effort, video games with minimal mental effort, books with light mental effort, games with substantial mental effort, wargames with serious mental effort. The sales plummet as you slice off a larger and larger portion of the population. Most people who are doing game design (at least, paper games) aren't doing it to get rich; they do it because they enjoy doing it. This is a very tough industry in which to make any sort of a living, and even I have a day job.

Michael Schacht: For starters, be honest to yourself. Don’t just test with your best friends. They will always love your game designs. If you have the vague idea that there is still point that is not perfect in your view, then try to improve it before you show the game a publisher. Don’t be sad if you get a "no" from a publisher. That will happen most of the time.

Mike Selinker: Play other people's games, figure out what you don't like about them, and don't do those things. What you're left over with might well be great.

Martin Wallace: One way of breaking into the business is to publish your own game. Just remember not to bet more than you can afford to lose. All because you think your game is fantastic does not mean other people will feel the same. Do not assume that if you produce a game that it will sell. Think about potential sales outlets before publishing.

James Ernest: There's a sign on my wall that says "write the game you want to play." I think designers write games for other people, especially when they perceive their fans as somehow different from themselves. As a result, some pretty unplayable games come out under the banner of "being for someone else." For me, if I'm not having fun playing my own game, I can't really expect anyone else to like it. So I always have to decide at the end of a session whether this game is something I'm willing to play. If the game isn't for me, I need to change it.

Now, that said, it's also important to realize that other people don't like exactly what you like. So be aware that while you're writing the game you want to play, and making sure it's fun for you, you should have some indication that it will also be fun for someone else.

I like a lot of different kinds of games. Not all kinds, but plenty of them. I like the formats I've pioneered, and I like the other formats I've worked in, like board games, card games, CCGs, and dice games. I won't usually do a historical wargame or an RPG just because I don't play those games and I don't feel like I bring much to the table. But once in a while I get the chance to do a miniatures game, and it turns out pretty well. :)

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