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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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?"

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.