This interview is the only one in this series that was not conducted via email. Instead, Greg Daigle had the privilege of phoning Dr. Knizia and carrying out the interview in a much more conversational manner. Consequently, some of the questions we presented to the other designers are not included here. Instead, Greg took the opportunity to expand on that list of questions.

We greatly appreciate Greg's efforts to bring this interview together. Also, we're very grateful to Dr. Knizia for his time and willingness to share his insights with us.

You have created a broad spectrum of games, do you feel that such diversity has helped maintain your high energy for game design, and if so, has this been a conscious choice?

Reiner Knizia: I've made an aware decision not to become a specialist in one particular area but to look at all possible aspects of gaming, because I think they inspire each other. When you play with kids, you get very good insight into peer play and you can use that again in family games. When you play on the Internet, you see how a single-player game can grab you and make you almost addicted to it, so you can say, "Okay, how can I transfer this excitement, this addiction, over into a board game?" And there are many cross-fertilizations among the many play types. So I enjoy it very much and it gives me a lot of insight. And of course it's also the ambition to do new things, to develop new trends, and to find new directions to influence where the games go. You can't do that if you always stand in the same area and just do more of the same, which I certainly don't want to do.

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

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?

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.

I believe I've heard in a previous interview that you have thirty drawers of games that you are currently working on. Is that right?

Reiner Knizia: For the games I've set aside, I have thirty drawers here in my studio. And I don't allow myself to work on more than thirty games at the same time. No sane person can work at more than thirty games at the same time. Not all of them are played at the same intensity, but these are the thirty that are currently on the go. I don't allow myself to start a new one before I finish another one. Finished means I've either completed it, or I've killed it, or I've done anything else with it so that it is not currently open. So that it's not a monkey that needs to be fed. Usually the intense work is on two, three, or four games at a time. Sometimes I work on only one game at a time. It depends on how much energy the game needs, and how big and complex it is. But when we play, and we play almost every day, these games will always come out to the table. When a game gets stuck or isn't very exciting, it's a natural selection process and it goes a little bit to the back burner. But it stays in one of these thirty drawers so I don't get into the temptation of opening more and more cans of worms and then I can't close them any more. The thirty drawers are something I can oversee and manage so that I also take care of my time. Because, as I said, it's so easy to open up these game designs and get them to a sixty, seventy, or eighty percent stage and never finish them. And that's a waste of time. What's the point in starting if you have no intention of finishing, or can't finish? That keeps me essentially disciplined.

When you test a game and you're not satisfied with the results, do you typically test it again with another group or do you know right away to put it aside?

Reiner Knizia: The difficult question but the very important one is, "Has it got enough potential, or do we need to kill it?" Killing a game design is always very hard. You kill your own child in a way. But there's no point in putting more and more effort into it and throwing good time after bad time. If the game hasn't got potential, you have to be cruel; you have to take it out of the drawer and work on something different. It might hurt you, but if you know you can't finish it, if you know it will not be an excellent game, then why not work on an excellent design instead?

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

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.

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

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.

If you start a game with a theme in mind, and as you begin developing this game and you're thinking about your mechanisms, do you reach a point at which you say, "All right, I want to put this in and make it more of a strategy game, or I want to keep it lighter... and keep those random elements in it. Or do you know when you have the theme from the beginning that you're going to make this a heavier game or a lighter game? Or do you let the process evolve to see what you want to add or leave out?

Reiner Knizia: I've learned over the years that it's a good idea to have a clear aim where the game should go or should be, or what you want to create, but then to stay flexible enough if the game turns out to be something different. I mean why should I make the game more complicated for me when I start the design to say that would make a good card game and then it turns out it isn't a card game at all it should be a tile game? And then I need a little board and suddenly it's a board game and then I need a die and suddenly it's a die game. It doesn't matter. My goal is to create an excellent game. I start somewhere and sometimes it's a more straightforward development; sometimes it meanders along and you look like you wouldn't have started where you started to get where you were. But that's the process and in hindsight you're always clear what you should have done. The only thing I can allow myself is to give myself the freedom that the game grows and develops in whatever direction is best for the game. So I do not force it into some direction because I don't need to.

In that respect it seems similar to writing a book, where you have the plot in mind but, as an author, you want to let the characters take you where they want to go.

Reiner Knizia: Absolutely. I think actually in a game you have much more flexibility because it is easier to change things. In a book, once you have written things, rewriting from scratch is a much bigger task than changing some of the mechanisms or thematic things in a game. The game in a way is much more on the surface than a book. A book communicates and transfers much more information than a game can do. A game has other challenges in there. But, yes, it is very compatible with book writing.

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?

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.

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?

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.

It would seem the industry is flooded with new games, but fewer are innovative. How new or different from other available games should a design be to be worthy?

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.

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?

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.

So you see a real difference between someone who is a game tester and a game player?

Reiner Knizia: Yes and no. There are playtesters with whom I play every week, and these are playtesters who are in a way very experienced. I also have a lot of playtesters who do it in on a casual or random basis and I think that's also important because it's closer to the target group. And when you play with kids then I might just test one game and watch what they do. Or I will just meet new people and we would say, "Okay, let's play over the weekend," and they would play some designs. So again, it's a variety. It gives me insight into how these people--and these are the majority of the people--approach games. And not only how a few insiders and playtesters and enthusiasts play games because that can very easily blur your view of what you need to do because the games are not essentially done for the insiders but for the broader market.

By what means do you typically present a game to publishers-via the post or by face-to-face interviews?

Reiner Knizia: That develops over time. Initially it is more by post or at game fairs when you meet them. Of course, over the many years I've worked with publishers you develop a certain understanding of each other and a certain relationship. So very often I would just visit the publishers or they would visit me and we would go over games and discuss things up front over the telephone. It depends on what is practical, what the projects are. It happens on many different levels. I think it all contributes to building a relationship and getting a project going where it's important that we'll meet and discuss it in detail, very often per e-mail. So there is no real one way. All the communication channels are used as in any other business. The important thing is that the more an understanding develops, the more you can concentrate on the design process because you already have a good understanding of what the other party wants.

So what you're saying is that whether it's face to face or by post, the most important thing is relationship building with the publishers?

Reiner Knizia: It's relationship building, but not in the way of networking. It's developing a deeper understanding of what their search fields are and their selection criteria and having a good understanding up front that this is a game that will interest them and this is not a game that will interest them. It's not any criteria of the game; it's more what suits their product line, what they are looking for and what they are selling and not selling. The better I understand that the better I can pre-select things and offer them the right things. There is always a limited amount of time. And if I bring five good games to a publisher that is better than a selection of twenty with five good games among them, because we waste a lot of time on other games that are not suitable for them.

Would you endorse designers playing a lot of other games to get a strong feeling for what these companies produce?

Reiner Knizia: Yes, it probably doesn't hurt. However, the answer cannot only be this way because I hardly play any other games, as I don't have enough time. So I get my experience and my views more from talking with the publishers and most importantly learning from them when I offer them games why they rejected certain games, why they want certain games, and why they want certain changes. I think that's a real important thing for me to learn. So that every time I meet them I learn more and I get better at seeing what they need.

Aside from the time issue, do you avoid playing published games because you find them distracting or cluttering to your thinking process?

Reiner Knizia: It's not that it's cluttering or distracting, but I always say that if the mind knows one solution then it's very difficult to find another solution; because whenever I think of how to do something, the one solution that is there springs to mind. And if you don't know a solution you have to come up with your own. So I make it much easier for myself because I don't know other people's solutions and therefore have to work out my own, which is naturally more divergent than following someone else. And I think the whole world is like this. Once you establish certain ways of doing things, everybody follows doing them. You optimize, perfect this type of method, but if you had headed off in a different direction, things might look very differently. Our cars on the street work on the same principle. We might have come up with a very different principle, and not have petrol engines. Or look at our computer technology. We are all now going in essentially in one direction. We could have gone in a very different direction. But these are more philosophical statements so I guess I'll stop here....

For aspiring designers, what is your opinion on how professional or polished a prototype should look when presented to a publisher?

Reiner Knizia: I feel particularly as a new designer that you want to have a very developed, very beautiful, very functional prototype. Because that's where you can differentiate yourself from other people with publishers, who look at it and catch an eye of it and will be interested in it because you offer something special. The publisher doesn't know as a beginner or a newer designer how good you are. He cannot see in the first view how good the design is. If you have a very primitive prototype it associates maybe more as something primitive. If you have a highly sophisticated production of a prototype it might indicate that there is a highly sophisticated game with more effort behind it, since you've put more effort behind the prototype. I would highly recommend to do that because it creates a tension and opens a door where it otherwise might not open, because you just might stand out a little bit from the others.

Finally, as a game designer, what do you feel is your greatest asset?

Reiner Knizia: From a resource point of view, it's my playtesters and the people who work with me on the games. With respect to the market, it's constantly delivering high quality games. It creates a very good image and people know that they associate good games and good entertainment with your name.

Mr. Knizia, It's been wonderful speaking with you. Thank you for taking the time to talk about game design.

Reiner Knizia: You're very welcome.