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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.