Welcome back to a lovely Indian feast with game designer and philosopher Henry Audubon. The food has arrived, and we are relaxed and rambling. Henry has started discussing his method for creativity, which is a bit different from the standard “create, iterate, edit” method in gaming.

Audubon: I’m a very theory-crafting kind of designer, trying to work out a lot of stuff and build up my own mental model to be very rich, the game. And to where I can start building it in a way that is coherent or understandable to me. So I’m not one of the types who throws things on the table very early and just sees what happens.

DTD:OK.

I understand this viewpoint entirely. I tend to think over creative projects for 10 times longer than it actually takes to write them down the first time.

Audubon: So Cosmoctopus was designed completely in isolation, in solitude. I just created it, spun it out at my place.

DTD: [laughs] Yeah.

DTD:But I brought it to PAX Unplugged, just to see what people thought. And I had showed it to my girlfriend and another friend of mine in town, and just they thought it was cool. But I hadn’t really gotten like any outside opinions on it. So I brought it to PAX Unplugged last year, 2021, and broke it out at a late night event, and I had a sell sheet for it that I styled like a movie poster: Presenting Cosmoctopus. And I had this big octopus looming in the distance, and all these things. I had a kind of like a movie poster.

DTD: I love it.

Audubon: So William [Brown] from Hungry Gamer was playing, and he took a photo of the sell sheet and posted it to a Facebook group.

DTD: And he’s the first one who told me about it.

William is a great friend, and a formidable freight train of energy. If he is excited about something, you will hear about it.

Audubon: Oh well, he’s great. I mean he’s an evangelist for a lot of cool games.

DTD: He’s all energy man, he’s just non-stop.

Audubon: True. So, he snapped a pic, uploaded it, and I got a lot of buzz from that upload. People were really digging the sell sheet, and to me it speaks to the power of like… If you can get a good sell sheet together, it can really do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, in terms… It can pitch on your behalf. Really.

DTD: Yeah.

Audubon: And I think that’s one area that I would encourage, if anyone was asking me for my advice. I would encourage game designers to think more about the kind of marketing angle that their game… That could be used for their game. ‘Cause if you can communicate to a publisher how they might actually be able to turn your thing into a viable product, and give them some taste for how it could be marketed. I think your product, your game, can be a lot more appealing as a product to them. So, I had a lot of that kind of… the humor and what we could do with it, in terms of marketing the game, if we if we wanted to make it. So I had that in the sell sheet. So after that upload I got contacted from different publishers about it, but one of them was James from Stone Sword Games, which is a UK-based publisher. They did Senjutsu which was a samurai dueling kind of Kickstarter game. And James… He and I arranged a meeting and we hopped on a call. And he really got it, you know. Cosmoctopus, he got the humor of it, he kind of got the kind of critiques and… that were going on inside of it. Anyway, we wanted to do it together, and we made a deal. So that’s happening and it’s going to be kick starting I believe in October of this year on Halloween, and then will come out next year.

The Cosmoctopus Kickstarter launched as expected in October 2022 and raised £100k. Interestingly, Lucky Duck Games released the title to retail after the crowdfunding fulfillment, and did the same for Senjutsu.

DTD: That is awesome! Wow. Everything about it is just exciting to me. I mean it’s… I didn’t think that it could be more intriguing and bizarre, but then you brought in Numerology and Fibonacci into it and that’s so cool.

Audubon: Well, I think the other thing about it that you might enjoy on some level, is just like the language. Because use a lot of just arcane words. You’re playing as a devotee to this crazy octopus that doesn’t even know about your existence. It’s just totally indifferent to you at all, and you’re devoting yourself completely to it. And so, there’s certain humor just in the game, and your perspective as a devotee. But the cards are meant to reflect your own mental state that may be compromised in your devotion, your obsession with Cosmoctopus, and how obsessed with ink and with numbers and with different things these individuals get. So anyways, I tried to be playful with language and include a lot of just memorable words and things like that.

I was blown away by the B Movie art style and the sneaky numerology within Cosmoctopus.

DTD: That’s great. Cause I forget what it is… There’s a great word that refers to just a packet of 8. It’s an octogeny or something? Oh, I used it in something, and it’s just escaped my mind, and just tickled me no end.

Audubon: Oh, I know.

DTD: I mean, English is such a flexible, plastic language, that you can prove anything is a word. You just put the right roots together and it just works. So, you know, you can make up anything with octo- and it’s probably right in some bizarre manner. I actually, I did mollusk research for a while when I was in grad school.

Audubon: Oh, interesting.

DTD: So, I worked on all sorts of weird critters. I took care of some of the cephalopods and octopi. We had a big saltwater room in grad school, and I was in charge of it for a while. And we actually had a smart octopus who would open his cage, crawl along, go in another one and eat things, go back to his home and close the top.

A very sneaky octopus was eating other researchers experiments. Because they were super tasty.

Audubon: That’s incredible.

DTD: Took a while to figure that out. But they are they are amazing, weird beasts. They’re definitely another planet kind of creatures.

Audubon: Oh yeah, completely alien. And that’s part of the inspiration for Cosmoctopus, is how alien the life forms in the deep sea are. And that’s kind of the idea of this being is that, if you go deep enough into the ocean, you kind of enter into space, and the cosmos of where the aliens are. And in the inverse, if you go far enough out into space, you can actually wrap underneath the ocean. And come up from the deeps.

DTD: There was so much of that art in the 60’s that had you know the whales in space, and black light, and all that.

I am, in fact, stuck in the 60’s. A decade where I spent only 2 years that I dont remember.

Audubon: So that liminal space, where… As we say, where the water meets the void, that’s the inky realm where Cosmoctopus bathes.

DTD: There you go. So did you do any nods to [flying] spaghetti monster in there?

The Flying Spagetti Monster is a clever parody of religion, using questionable statistics to prove unrelated points. And he has touched me with his noodley appendage.

Audubon: Not too specifically. I was really trying to really do my own thing because another aspect of this was that although I like… I’m totally fine with Cthulhu and I like the cosmic horror stuff that has come before, I really wanted to do my own spin. So I was deliberately trying not to be too referential to any other properties, and really have something new that flowed from within, you know?

DTD: Wow. That’s very cool. Were there any others that you’ve been working on, around Cosmoctopus?

Audubon: Any other games?

DTD: I know Cosmoctpous was a big one, but there are other ones on the burner that you’ve been flipping around? I know that some designers will have one or two backburner things, and I know some that have like 20.

Audubon: I don’t have 20, but I tend to have a half dozen projects rolling at a time. So the Western game that I mentioned I was working on with Keymaster long ago… They ended up at a certain point at the start of the pandemic, like dropping a lot of games that were in their pipeline, including the Western game for me. And a lot of other designers had their games kind of cut as well. And so, when that returned to me, I got in touch with Chad Elkins from 25th Century Games, and he and I played the game together and he really liked it. That’s called Iron Horse, by the way. And so, Chad is putting that out through 25th Century Games, and I’m just seeing all the art for it now recently. Jacqui Davis is doing the art.

DTD: Oh, she’s so good.

Audubon: Yeah, and it looks incredible. So I think people are going to be happy with the final production on that. And this is a game that goes all the way back to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. So it’s been a long time coming, and everything’s wrapped up by now.

DTD: See, I’m never going to be able to take it seriously as a Western game now – It’s like, “Oh, this is Star Wars.”

Audubon: Instead of the dark side moving, there’s a train moving now. It’s a bit of a difference. That’s been being worked on, and I’ve been doing some dev work on that this year. And in preparation for the the crowdfunding campaign. Then I’ve got a big project that I got put onto by Jonny Pac. He connected me with the team at Fantasia Games who do Endless Winter, and Jonny works for them as a developer. They wanted to start a new imprint company that does more family-weight games called Pika Games. and they had this concept for an Arctic fantasy game, and they wanted to do it. And Andrew Bosley was going to do the art. It was all kind of like a dream project kind of thing, so I was l like “Okay great, let’s do it.”

Jonny is an amazing person. Someone should interview him.

DTD: I saw the initial… I know I broke the timeline there a little bit, but I saw that initial art. It’s just gorgeous.

Audubon: Yeah, it’s incredible. And we’re about to… Andrew is about to get into a real art period for us, a productive period coming up. So I’m really looking forward to just seeing the art kind of roll in, and all the things that he imagines for the world.

DTD: And this is Floe?

Audubon: Yes. F-L-O-E. Like “Ice Floe”. It’s a game that you know still has a ways to go, and we’re not even… We’re not gonna be crowdfunding it until early next year, quarter one of next year. But I’ve been working on it since last year, and it’s kind of a big project and I’m putting a lot of myself into it, and hoping it’s going to work. I think it will, but I’m deep into it right now ,and just trying to land the plane, so to speak.

Floe is currently on Kickstarter, running until March 19, 2024.

DTD: So what’s the gist of the game on Floe? Is this cooperative? Competitive?

Audubon: Yeah, it’s a competitive open-world adventure game, in a kind of iceberg fantasy landscape. And basically it’s just about The Hero’s Journey, and each character is going on their own hero’s journey. And so, there’s a lot of different things that you can do in the game to kind of place your hero tokens onto the board, from exploring the caves and fighting monsters and acquiring crystals deep in the caves, to building homes in your neighborhood, and housing unhoused people – that’s another way to engage. Or to sail across the seas, and find ancient artifacts below the depths of the water. Anyways, it’s kind of a sandbox-y thing or a snowbox-y kind of game, if you will.

DTD: [laughs] I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t say “Snowbox”.

They didn’t use it.

Audubon: Yeah. But it’s meant to be very open-ended and playful and let players find their own path through it, through it all.

DTD: There’s been a lot of designers recently that have been embracing the “exploratory journey” game, specifically taking out conflict, trying to break the mold of your traditional “I progress by beating the crap out of everyone” game. So, is this in mind, is this part of this mindset in here?

Audubon: My hope is that both approaches are possible within this game. Where you can be a warrior character who’s really focused on fighting and doing well in that regard. But, you know, there’s much more peaceful aspects of this game you can focus on, being more of a pacifist hero. One, as a foodie, you might enjoy. The food culture plays a role in the game.

DTD: All right!

I like food. Nearly everything I eat is food.

Audubon: There’s a plant called “fire kelp” that grows underneath the water, and it’s like a spicy seaweed. It’s a red seaweed. And a staple dish in the in the region of Floe is to boil the fire kelp, and when it, when you do that, the kelp kind of breaks apart and dissolves a bit into noodly… glass noodle strands. And the spiciness from the kelp comes out, and becomes a spicy broth. And so it’s almost like a ramen, like a noodle culture. So there’s these noodle shops.

DTD: I love it. Noodle culture out of like, spaghetti squash.

Audubon: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so, there’s a bunch of those cards. And so, eating noodles is like a part of the game. So anyways, the point being, it’s not like a game that’s all that, like hack and slash, kill as many monsters as you can. Even though you can play that way, if you want to. And that was part of it, is that we really wanted players to be able to find their own pathway through it, and make their own story as a hero.

DTD: Oh, that’s fantastic. I’ve always kind of seen these trends, where you know, yes, we do have several tropes in board games that are almost becoming standard. And people want to break against it, but they break 180 degrees against it. And you get this swing back and forth, where I’m making the anti-game. And then I’m making the anti-anti- game. And I’m waiting for it to sit in the middle, where we just have you know a lot of free choice in there.

Audubon: Yeah, interesting. I would say that I’m not trying to make… I’m not trying to prove a point about anything, about what should be or should not be in board games. I’m trying to tap into a certain kernel of childlike joy, that again going back to visiting your inner 7-year-old, your inner 11-year-old, getting back to games we played as a kid and whatnot.

DTD: Yeah.

Audubon: There were certain kind of role playing style games for the Super Nintendo that were really formative for me, including Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana.

DTD: Yeah. Everybody loved Chrono Trigger.

Audubon: Yeah, Chrono Trigger is an absolute classic. And so, those two games play a role in Floe, in terms of my inspiration, and just my thinking about it. Trying to tap into like what excited me about those games, and what spoke to me about them. And then also, have you played much of the Heroes of Might and Magic series?

DTD: Yeah, of course. There’s like 9 of them.

Audubon: Yeah, I mean I haven’t… I didn’t play the later ones. But Heroes of Might and Magic III was…

DTD: That a big one, ’cause they had come into their own, kind of, at that point.

Heroes of Might and Magic III was made into a board game by Kamil Białkowski and Jakub S. Olekszyk along with Archon Studio. The studio ran a Kickstarter Campaign in November 2022 that raised €3,834,885.

Audubon: Yeah, in my opinion, that was kind of peak for that franchise.

DTD: I’m with you. But it was also kind of a stereotypical, hack and slash game of the time.

Audubon: Yeah, but it had this vibe of moving across a map and exploring a fantasy world, and never knowing what was around the next corner, or what was concealed by that bit of fog of war or whatever. And I’m trying to do a similar thing with Floe, of presenting an interesting map that opens up and allows for exploration and movement over top of that, so yeah.

DTD: That’s cool. Did you think about doing like the flipbook map style, with tons of different lands, or…

Audubon: No, the map is fully tile-based and modular, and gets built as you as you play, as the world gets explored. Part of it is that the game takes place in the Iceberg Islands, and so the…

DTD: It can move!

I can be a little excitable I’ve been told.

Audubon: It always does move. And so yeah, the surrounding land always needs to be scouted out when you first start playing. You discover where everything is sitting anew each time.

DTD: That’s really cool. I like the idea of having a map of things you need to go to or get to, or you know your places, but they always move around.

Audubon: Yeah.

DTD: And it seems like there’s been a little more movement towards these, these plastic flexible maps. Things like rotating maps and planets that orbit, and things of that sort. That’s very cool. … Did you get enough to eat? I mean, this is one of the things I know that I do, when I when I do these dinners. Is, you know, I don’t let… I don’t let you eat. [laughs]

Most of these interview have my guest telling the greatest stories while I sit back and eat all the food.

Audubon: I’m good. Thank you.

DTD: No, I know I know. It’s the… The east coast Jewish upbringing in me, is, you know, I have to force you to eat. Terrible. That’s really cool. So you say you don’t play many games, but I mean obviously these ideas are… I can tell you’ve played games.

Audubon: Yeah. I’ve played games and I do research a lot of games. And then I watch a lot of the coverage and different YouTube channels, and try to, you know, I check in on BGG [BoardGameGeek] and what’s new, and what’s hot. And I’ll read… I’ll check out rulebooks. So, it’s just a matter of, I don’t always play them.

DTD: Sure.

Audubon: But part of the reason for it for me, is because I like to exist in a state of imperfect understanding of other peoples’ games. Rather than knowing in every detail how they work, because that’s more… Sometimes, at least from a creative perspective, I find that a little bit more useful to me, rather than knowing the details.

DTD: It’s this whole concept of your natural creativity will be able to flow better if you don’t know the restraints other people have put on you.

There’s an argument for being creative without having the contraints of knowledge. The very rules of how to make a game or how to draw a board can restrict what you create.

Audubon: Yeah. Actually, I’ll just say that the game I was talking about earlier, Pirate Land that became Space Park… That game originally was made when my, one of my brothers, described Splendor to me over the phone. He had just played Splendor, and he was like, “This is a really elegant game – I think you’ll like it. I was like, “Okay well how does it work?” and he described it to me. I was like “Okay”, and so then I went, and I made something that was my interpretation of what he had described to me over the phone.

DTD: It’s a game of Telegraph.

Audubon: And it’s not… There’s like no similarity, in the end, of like Space Park to Splendor. It’s so… They’re so different.

DTD: I do love that.

Audubon: So, it’s about mutation. I think there’s a power in mutation. And obviously from an evolutionary perspective, all we have is mutation. That’s what got us this far, so…

DTD: Absolutely, but it’s a little crueler than that.

Audubon: Yes, well of course. But I believe in the kind of a creative mutation of ideas, too.

DTD: I get it.

Audubon: Famous story of Herbie Hancock.

DTD: Yes!

Audubon: Trying to play with Miles Davis. And Miles tells him something, and Herbie thinks that Miles says, “Don’t play the butter notes”. And Herbie doesn’t know what exactly that means, but he interprets it.

DTD: He interprets it.

I remember in music camp being told to play more organically. None of us knew exactly what that meant, but we went for it. Hancock reasoned that butter is a kind of fat, and it’s the obvious choice to add to almost any food for flavor. So, Miles must be saying to leave out the easy and obvious notes, the ones that make the other ones “go down easily.” Hancock immediately began avoiding certain notes, forcing him to radically change his playing which, to his delight, added the spice he felt was missing before.

Audubon: And his playing gets this great reception, and it was just a day that changed his life as a musician forever. And the band loved what he’s doing, the crowd loved he’s doing. He’s like “Wow, don’t play the butter notes.” Then he talked to Miles after. He was like, “So wait, what did you mean by the butter notes?” And he said, “No, I said don’t play the bottom notes.” It’s just like this misinterpretation that then led to him having to figure out what does this mean, and then he filters it through his creative mind and plays in an innovative way.

DTD: Do you know the story of The Shaggs?

Audubon: No.

DTD: Oh my God.

Audubon: What is it?

The story of the Shaggs is by far my favorite story. I’m pretty sure I’ve told it during interviews before.

DTD: This is a true story by the way. There was a guy in the 50s-60s who went to a palm reader who told him that he would have three daughters and they would be famous musicians. So, it turns out he did have three daughters and sad side, his wife passed away, then he raised these three daughters. So, he decided to buy them musical instruments and essentially lock them at home and not let them go out. He also did not let them be exposed to real music. He just made them play. And he probably coached them and taught, but it was he was not a musician. And he didn’t you know, didn’t say base it on these things, they didn’t really have music in the house. He just made them practice all the time. And then when they were 18 or something, he said, “Okay, we’re ready.” And took them out and had one record pressed and he paid for it. And it was The Shaggs. And it didn’t go anywhere, it was a tiny record. They lived in New Hampshire I believe, and it didn’t sell at all. It was a pressing of 1000 copies. And the story might have just ended there. Well we jump now to the 1980s, and the band NRBQ. And one of the band members in a tour… They were driving on tour said, “Listen to this great music I found.” and played The Shaggs. And they loved it, and they bullied their label to reprint the album.

Audubon: Wow.

NRBQ, the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet, was formed in 1965 by Terry Adams. The band continued to produce music and perform until the present day, and they have appeared on film and in many compilation albums.

DTD: And they found the girls, who were understandably traumatized by their upbringing. But they got it, and they reprinted the album. And it became this cult album to the point where big-name musicians would say “This was the most influential album I’ve ever heard.” And it’s this concept of talent without influence. Almost like the punk movement which was, you know, energy without talent – it was intention to play, without ability to play. And there is… The music, you have to listen to it. And it’s strange. It has this sound of “This isn’t right. This is unique and odd and not done right.” But it’s also been described “as if The Andrews Sisters all had lobotomies”. Or there’s you know, the standard three piece set, but the drummer obviously is not playing in the same room as the other people. But I find it fascinating, this concept of trying to bring unmodified, uninfluenced creativity to light somehow. So, I’ve always wondered about stuff like that. And the other side, more in board games – Reiner Knizia has said that he does not play other people’s games. He has said in interviews flat out, he does not play anyone else’s game, so his ideas only come from his own mind.

Audubon: Right, but the catch to that is that he does have a team of people who do play games and then describe them to him.

DTD: Yes, like describing Splendor.

…and it comes full circle!

Audubon: That’s what I’m saying. What I want is the Reiner team who comes to me and tells me about the world of games. And then I just get to imagine what they’re all, what they’re all like. Interesting approach.

DTD: I dig that concept. Yeah, I don’t know. I wonder about that stuff all the time. You know, what is an inherent thing. And then it gets into the more philosophical question, like “What’s the most original game that you’ve seen or played?”

Audubon: Wow.

DTD: ‘Cause almost none of them are original any more. If you’ve played enough, and I’ve played more than enough – you play a game and you go, “Oh, this smacks of that. And this has DNA from this other one. And this feels like that one over there.” And then I often wonder, “Okay, what’s the base originality? Where can I go to, and say this is really original?”

Audubon: Yeah, hard to say. I don’t have a good answer for that. Maybe Caylus. I was talking to Jonny [Pac] about old games that innovated a lot, and Caylus was a huge one for worker placement.

2005’s Caylus by William Attia and Ystari Games is generally considered the first worker placement title. Caylus went on to win many awards, including the Spiel des Jahres “complex game” award in 2006.

DTD: Caylus was rally divisive as well. A lot of people screamed that worker placement was not a unique concept, that it was an extension of action point allotment. But Caylus was definitely influential, like Dominion was influential.

Audubon: Right.

DTD: Yeah, people mimicked it. It was popular and interesting enough, that there were a lot of children off of it. Which is more… different from original. I think the… Because I’ve wondered about this question a lot. I think the only one that came to my mind was The Mind felt really original – doesn’t mean I was thrilled with it, but it felt very, very original.

Audubon: That’s true.

The Mind by Wolfgang Warsch uses a unique mechanism, where players can play cards anytime they want, but need to play the numbered cards in order. So you wait for others to play until you think you can get away with playing your card. Very original.

DTD: I can only imagine… I’ve had those long “philosophy of games” and “genetics of games” discussions with Jonny a bunch of times. [laughs]

Audubon: I mean, you’re asking about the most original, and I’m more interested in the lineage, and the mutation, than I am in the in the discontinuous breaks. I’d be curious if a game does come along, that’s a quantum leap, and I certainly want to know about it.

DTD: I don’t know if I’d recognize it this point. It’s always a tough question, ’cause like in my lifetime I know that there’s been quantum leap changes: I saw microwaves come, I saw remote controls come, I saw video games come.

Yeah, I’m old. And no, color TVs were around when I was a kid. Just barely.

Audubon: Right.

DTD: But at the time, nothing ever felt quantum. Nothing felt like a big jump. So, I’m thinking I’m not sure I’d recognize it if a board game came out that was a big jump. Right, so how about this approach – and I’ve completely lost my train of thought here – So, I was talking with a designer who was adamant about protecting game mechanics. He had this idea that if I put out a game, and it has a really, really cool thing in it, other people are gonna wanna use it. But they’re going to feel guilty about using “my” thing, so they’re going to mutate it. They’re going to change it and use it into their thing. But he took the stance of “You shouldn’t do that. You should protect the good, good mechanism. Credit them, but don’t change it. Use it, but don’t change it.” It almost like protecting an endangered species or something. It was an approach I’d never heard before.

Spoiler: This discussion about mechanisms happened in my interview with Uwe Rosenberg.

Audubon: There’s an assumption in there though, that the designer who innovated the mechanic, like arrived at the best possible version. Or that the version they arrived at is universally good in all other systems, that that mechanism might get involved with. Which doesn’t really ring true to me.

DTD: No, no. I agree with you. And his approach to it, was that people felt a compulsion to change it, only to not steal or not cross lines or insult.

Audubon: I see.

DTD: And that compulsion to change it was not the same as a creative idea.

Audubon: I see. So, don’t change it just to change it. If a mechanism as-is would work well, just use it and credit.

DTD: Just use it, rather than feel a need to… What’s the word I’m looking for… It’s to dumb it down or to lessen it just for the fact – like when viruses get less virulent as they go on. There’s a word that I’ve lost. Attenuate! Don’t attenuate it. I think about that a lot. It always looks just an interesting idea to me. This was Uwe Rosenberg was talking about this. And specifically, Uwe had played the game Habitats by Corné van Moorsel. And had loved the mechanisms in it, amazingly. And he thought of a game using the same mechanism, so he created Nova Luna, and fully credited Corné in the game. And he was adamant that it was much better to take the mechanism and credit, than to feel a need to change the mechanism to make it his own game.

Audubon: I mean, except that you’re making your game more redone.

DTD: You’re making your own game.

Audubon: I think that you’re, you know, trespassing on their place in the marketplace more if you use the exact same mechanic, even if you credit them. It’s like, now you’re only 50% of the games with that mechanic, where you used to be 100%.

DTD: I guess.

Audubon: So I prefer personally, if anyone listening or reading, that they would you know – I’d rather you mutate my stuff then credit me, personally. I prefer the mutations.

I bet you never thought board game design interviews could use the word mutation so much. This is the seventh time here. The evolution of board games.

DTD: [laughs] Nope, I’m stealing your stuff flat out.

Audubon: Or that. It’s all good.

DTD: I kinda… the more I think about it, I’m towards the mutations as well. And yeah, a lot of them are gonna suck. A lot of them are gonna be bad. But that’s how we get better things. I still think that deck building is a mutation off of the collectible card games, and the preparatory stuff, and things like that. And I think Dominion – if it’s the first deckbuilding game, ’cause there’s arguments about that too – I think that was hugely influential, ’cause it’s such a predominant mechanism now in everything.

Audubon: Yeah. Right.

DTD: So what’s the next big mechanism going to be, that’s…

Audubon: Gosh, I mean, I feel like we’re living in a trick-taking revival right now – not a new mechanism.

Even since this interview, trick taking games are still a very popular format. I mean, I still love them.

DTD: I was going to say that actually.

Audubon: I mean, there’s just this…

DTD: Well, I’m going to take it one step beyond that, because I think we’re in a period now, where people have recognized the power of mechanisms. And the mechanisms are becoming defined. And it may just be that we have the taxonomy to talk about mechanisms. So the big burst of games that I’ve seen in the past couple years are blending mechanisms – “This is both trick taking and worker placement.” This is…

Audubon: Deck building and work replacement…

DTD: Oh, did I say ohhhh…

Audubon: You said trick taking and worker placement.

DTD: Oh I’m… yeah. You knew what I meant, but along that line, the big one that’s coming now is blending trick taking with something else.

Audubon: Right.

DTD: And it’s a hard one to use as a mechanism, but there’s a lot of those being announced, that I’ve seen. I’m excited about it. I love trick taking games.

Audubon: Well Arcs from Cole Wehrle and the Leder Games team is gonna be a, just another big game that uses trick taking as a part of its core.

Arcs was crowdfunded on Kickstarter in May 2022 and raised nearly $1.5M. The game is due for release later in 2024.

DTD: It’s true.

Audubon: Brian Boru recently.

Brian Boru by Peer Sylvester combines trick taking with area control.

DTD: Yes! And Banner Festival, the new Title Blades. That uses a trick taking mechanism to do actions.

In Banner Festival by J.B. Howell and Michael Mihealsick, players get different actions depending if they come in first in a trick, last, or in the middle. So sometimes you aim to win, sometimes aim to lose.

Audubon: And then Scout of course.

DTD: Well, Scout is just a trick taking game.

Audubon: It’s not a hybrid, you’re right.

DTD: It’s a neat take on it. And technically it’s a Shedding game. I’ve been yelled at for calling shedding games trick taking. Purists get mad at me.

I have always considered ladder climbing games and shedding games, like Tichu, Scout, and Gang of Four, a subcategory of trick taking games. My dear friend Stephen Buonocore disagrees strongly. But he’s wrong.

Audubon: Oh, I see. Yeah. I haven’t actually played Scout.

DTD: Well, I’ve got it here. I taught some games of it. I’ve got a real connection to Scout. I flooded the market with Scout.

Audubon: Right.

I may have purchased nearly 100 copies of Scout from Japan, then disseminated them to multiple game conventions. There’s no proof.

DTD: I just loved it so much, it was so neat. But even that, I can see Scout has DNA from Krass Kariert. A German game, which in the US it came out as Dealt. And that has genetics from Bohnanza.

Audubon: Right.

All three of these titles, Krass Kariert (Dealt), Scout and Bohnanza share the rule where players are not allowed to order their hand. The cards must be dealt with and played in the order they sit in the players’ hands. It is by far my most favorite mechanism.

DTD: With the “don’t change your cards”, which also has genetics from Hanabi. I’m bad, I don’t remember if Bonanza or Hanabi came first.

Audubon: I think Bonanza was first.

DTD: I think Bonanza was very early.

Bohnanza by Uwe Rosenberg came out in 1997 and was a Spiel recommended title that year. Hanabi by Antoine Bauza came out in 2010 and won the Speil des Jahres.

Audubon: Bonanza is pre- Agricola.

DTD: Yes. Uwe actually, in an interview, told me that Bonanza sells more, both in numbers and money, than any of his other games. Which is crazy. ’cause it’s a tiny little $10 card game.

Audubon: That’s amazing.

DTD: Yeah, and he says he made it purely because he had heard that card games were becoming very popular, so it would sell well. And that was because Magic [the Gathering] had just come out. So, it was his Magic.

Audubon: I see. Wow. That’s such a European response to Magic, is to make a bean-farming gardening game. I love this story.

DTD: But it’s so good! Bohnanza is so good!

It still is one of my favorite games. I tend to be a very calm, nonconfrontational player, but in Bohnanza, my haggling instincts kick in and I get downright mean.

Audubon: Yeah, Bonanza is pretty cool. And you never know what is selling super well sometimes. If you’re in the hobby, ’cause what resonates with gamers, or what’s hot in BGG, or what the critics love, is not always the same as what just now are buying out in the world, so.

DTD: And watching the hobby for a long time now, I kind of feel like the hobby is going more and more towards simplicity and elegance, and away from rampant complexity. I’ve brought this up to a couple different designers, and I get a lot of different responses, mostly that I’m full of crap. But back in the 70’s, what sold a board game was complexities: it sold better if it had more pieces, longer rulebooks, and took longer to play. And those are, I mean, it’s almost swung 180 degrees, that those are detriments to your game now. If I try to sell a game on the basis that it has a 50-page rulebook without pictures… I mean, no one is going to going to take it, but this really was the selling point. I mean, most of your games are on that lighter entry-level

Audubon: Definitely.

Come back next time for part 5 of dinner with Henry. I can promise empty plates, the lingering smell of fragrant rice and spice mixtures. Plus discussion of Jodorowski, Moebius, Floe, Res Arcana, and of course the Star Wars Christmas Special.