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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.