Designer Henry Audubon and I are finishing up a wonderful Indian feast in Sparks, Nevada during the 2022 RageCon Convention. And with our caloric requirements more than fully sated, our spice addled minds are bouncing from topic to topic, lighting on every tangent and shiny bauble that crosses our minds’ peripheral eye. Always the professional interviewer, I gently nudge the topic back to game design. It won’t stay there…

DTD: Yeah. And have you thought about doing more complex games, or is this your comfort level in game design?

Audubon: No, I’m going to expand and people will see a little bit more weight from my next batch of games. You know, Floe… All of my games are… I’m trying to make them easy to play, and I don’t want to ever get in people’s way of just playing around with the systems that I put into the games. So I’ll try to have it be easy to play, but yeah – Floe and Cosmoctopus and Iron Horse and… They’re all like a notch above, you know, Parks and Trails. And the true, like entry-level stuff. But they’re still not heavyweight games by any stretch. I mean they still play in 90 minutes or less.

DTD: No. And that definition’s changing all the time, too. The things that are the heaviest games now are different than what they were 20-30 years ago. They just are.

Audubon: Right.

DTD: ‘Cause I think we’ve got a different audience. We’ve got, I think younger entry-level people coming into gaming now. And whereas we had hardcore miniatures wargamers who were the big market back in the 70’s. I forget who it was, someone told me that the games of the 70’s were about simulation, not about entertainment.

It was Glenn Drover. I got to interview Glenn during the Dice Tower Cruise in January 2020. Glenn is one the original wargame gurus from the 1970’s for sure.

Audubon: Right. Interesting.

DTD: And the more realistic you could make the simulation, the better the game would play.

Audubon: Well, that… Isn’t that what the wargamers call “Chrome”? Little rules that just bring the simulation to life in some way?

The Art of Wargaming by Peter Perla defines Chrome as “…the little details added to try to represent some specific, critical elements of a particular campaign or battle”. There’s a great discussion of Chrome in the BGG forums.

DTD: [laughs] But they love it. I love it, too. I definitely have had my moments of being so excited about little… What we’d call the “The Pasta Rule” Which is… There’s a famous war game where there’s actually rules about the Italian army, having enough water to boil their pasta. This is a whole section in the rulebook, it’s crazy. I’m giving myself things I have to look up before I publish this. I’m just giving myself more work.

The game is the infamous Campaign for North Africa by Richard Berg. North Africa is also known for being incredibly detailed and incredibly long. Playing time with the maximum 10 players is listed as 1200 hours. At 8 hours a day, that’s 150 days of playing. In fact, it is said it was so long, the designer never fully play tested it.

Audubon: It’s a trip.

DTD: So, what do you think about, as a designer, what do you think about repeat play? ‘Cause I know nowadays one of the big things a lot of people talk about, is that a lot of new board games don’t get repeat play. And when you’re designing, do you design a game to be played a few times, or do you design it to be played 50 times? Does that make sense? I mean, I know I’m biased, I’m coming at it from the crazy gamer side, where I buy every new shiny and play it a couple times. On the most part, but there is a lot of that in our industry.

Audubon: Yeah. I’m not sure if you follow e-sports at all?

DTD: No.

Audubon: Are you interested in professional competitive gaming?

DTD: Oh, e-sports! Yeah, I know about it. My son is a video game designer, and his designs are usually e-sport oriented.

Shout out to Shatterpoint Games and their latest work, Breakthrough.

Audubon: I see. Okay. Well, I follow some competitive gaming scenes, and I’m also interested in just top-level gameplay in other domains, too. Whether it’s Go or Chess and traditional games, or it’s whatever tournament scenes are out there. I’m always curious of competitive play, and how far people are pushing games. And so, to me in the back of my mind, I am always hoping that my games could stand up to a competitive circuit, if there ever… People ever wanted to do it.

DTD: Oh, that’s cool.

Audubon: I mean, maybe not the lightest stuff that I’ve done, like Space Park and Trails. But, you know, certainly Parks and the next batch of stuff that I’ve got coming out. It’s like, I want them to be deep enough and robust enough games, where you know you could you could spend a long time playing them and get better and better. And you know you have a whole hierarchy of different skill levels, and you know climb the ladder, and you know have an ELO system. And all like that’s kind of, that’s the fantasy in the back of my mind.

DTD: ELO system for Parks. I love it.

An ELO system is a scoring method named for its creator Arpad Elo. ELO systems are used in Chess, Football, and esports. Theoretically one can predict the outcome of a match by comparing the two competitor’s ELO ratings. And ratings dynamically change depending on how strong an opponent one beats.

Audubon: Well, it’s interesting ’cause we basically have that now. Parks is played on BGA [Board Game Arena] a lot, and we… You can go on and see who the top players are, and spectate their matches.

DTD: I love the idea that you can pull out the data from these online plays, and learn just crazy weird stuff about how people play.

Audubon: I would love to see all that back end data from BGA about like what pieces of gear have the highest winning percentages. Things like that.

DTD: [laughs] Yeah.

Audubon: How many parks on average does the winning player have, over you know 100,000 games of Parks? There are just questions that I lack the data to know the answer to.

DTD: The statistics junkie in me wants to know all that.

Audubon: You know, getting back to Slay the Spire for a moment. They’re extremely data driven in their balance and development of that game. Where they built all these back end tools to have all these stats and all the different cards and enemies and everything, and they’re getting fed the data from all the players across Steam and wherever else the game is played. And they balance the game using the data.

Slay the Spire is a card driven fighting computer game created by MegaCrit in 2019. Publisher Contention Games crowdfunded a tabletop version of the game in November 2022 for nearly $4M. The title should be delivering in early 2024.

DTD: An easy thing to do in video games: One, you’ve got patch systems so you can update things really easy. And you can often do it without people knowing. And you’ve got all the data right there, it’s a perfect feedback system.

Audubon: Right.

DTD: I love it. That’s so cool.

The waiter brought by the check, which I diligently lept upon not unlike a battle hardened warrior laying on a grenade. Except much slower, due to all the biryani in my system.

DTD: Thank you so much. Do you wanna take anything back? I don’t really have room in my room. If you want something to snack on for later?

Audubon: I see. Sure! We’ll box.

DTD: Thank you. [pause] I’m realizing I forgot to take pictures again. [laughs] I need a nice empty plate to show how delicious the food is.

Audubon: Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t use my plate as an example.

Amateur…

DTD: Oh, your plate is dug into, so that’s all good.

The waiter returned with the paid bill and a look of wary suspicion.

Both: Thank you, thank you.

DTD: So, I gotta just get an after shot. Cool, can you get one of myself? Awesome man, thank you. I hate taking pictures.

Audubon: It’s all good. I try to design games that would stand up to competitive play, that’s my last memory.

DTD: I love hearing that, ’cause I get a little jaded and I get a little disappointed that sometimes you hear about games that… It’s designed, and they’ll say, “Yeah, we kind of know people are going to play it once or twice and forget it”. So it’s designed in order to have everybody have about the same score no matter what their skill level. And that just seems odd. I mean, it gets into that argument too, of the difference between a game and an activity, if you want to make that distinction.

Audubon: Right.

DTD: You know, these are all entertainment products to use up a certain segment of time and make you happy. And that might be heavy competition to have a score, and actually get better at it. It might just be something to tell stories, and let the time go by. It’s kind of the difference between, I want to say, like Concept and these fuzzier exploratory games, and a Splotter game, where the famous quote there is “If you can’t lose on the first turn, why have a first turn?”

Concept is a wonderful activity board, much like the icon boards scientists have used to try and teach primates to communicate. And Splotter is famous for very complex, competetive, strategic titles.

Audubon: Right. [laughs] I think about… Jonny [Pac] and I were actually just talking about that this morning. Because, we were talking about how in Parks, it is basically possible to lose on the first turn, if you just decide to move one of your hikers all the way to the end of the trail. Which there’s not really normally a good reason to do that. Or ever a good reason to do that, frankly. But it is, you know, when you demo a game to new players enough times, you see all possibilities. And I’ve seen players move really deep down the trail to the end.

DTD: On purpose or not realizing what they’re doing?

Audubon: Yeah, well, they don’t understand the game yet, and they’re trying to make a move and they haven’t realized yet the meaning of position on the trail, and what it means about your capacity for future actions. And so, I usually intervene at that point, and give advice.

DTD: “You probably don’t want to do that…”

Audubon: Yeah, give a heads up. But it’s an interesting thing. I think it adds a little bit of sharpness. It’s like a, it’s a third rail that’s just electric and kind of… It has this lethal quality to it, right? It’s like, if you… It’s a little dangerous. It’s like if you move too far, you know? So I kind of understand where the Spotter people are coming from, but for me, I really want games that work in both domains. Of the competitive, serious gamers, and then just the families breaking it out. Just whatever.

DTD: Just having fun.

Audubon: So, to me that’s my ideal game, is things that work on multiple levels.

DTD: That’s very cool. So, what kind of games do you like to play? I know you don’t play much.

Audubon: No, no, I do play my favorite games, for sure. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Dune Imperium. That’s my favorite game from recent times. Got the Rise of Ix expansion and I…

Since the interview, two expansions have come out for Paul Dennen and Dire Wolf‘s Dune Imperium, plus the follow-up title Dune Imperium Uprising that can share expansions and components.

DTD: It’s nice. I felt Dune Imperium was really clever and fun, but it needed more content. It felt a little sparse, a little thin, just on how much was in the box.

Audubon: I see. I got a lot out of the base game of Dune. But then the expansion kicked it up a bit, and so that’s one of my favorite games from recent years. Before Dune Imperium I was really loving Res Arcana.

DTD: Oh yeah!

Res Arcana by designer Tom Lehmann is a tight card driven resource management game, released in 2019. The title went on to win multiple awards, including a Spiel des Jahres recommendation in 2020.

Audubon: That’s one of my favorites, and I’ve got, you know, the new Perlae Imperii expansion. Yeah, that’s just one of my favorite games. I think it’s just a missed goal. Just a strange game.

DTD: I remember it just came out of nowhere. I remember it just sort of showing up without much hype or fanfare. And it was an odd company, it was a new company that had it.

Audubon: Yeah, Sand Castle. And that that was their only release for quite a while. And they just came out with First Empires.

DTD: Yes!

The story is that Res Arcana was ready for a while, but the designer could not find a good home for it with a publisher. So he orchestrated his own publishing company just to produce Res Arcana.

Audubon: Which I’m keen to try.

DTD: I’ve played it, that’s a really colorful dice game, with the tracks.

Audubon: Yeah, yeah. With the tracks and the little world map.

DTD: I’ve played it a bunch and I dig it. It has the feel… Sorry, I usually don’t like high conflict games. So war games/area control are usually not my favorites. But there’s a couple that are so fast-paced, that you can’t build up, turtle, wait a while – you just have to go go go go. And this has that feel. It’s ridiculously fast, and there’s no reason to ever wonder whether you should do X, you just do it.

Audubon: And the battling, I mean really, you’re just displacing the other people’s units, right?

DTD: For only a turn, even.

First Empires by designer Eric B. Vogel released in 2022.

Audubon: So, it’s framed as war and combat and fighting, but it’s like really, it’s just you’re just bumping. You’re bumping over, like “Hey, scoot out of the way!” You know it’s…

DTD: I was fascinated with it. I thought it was really neat. I hadn’t realized it was Sand Castle. And I think they also have the new big block, actually sandcastle-themed thing, don’t they?

Audubon: I’m not sure if they do.

DTD: Oh, what is it it’s called – the fact that the company is called Sand Castle has bumped the other name right out of my head, ’cause it is so close.

Audubon: Yeah, isn’t it Castles in the Sand?

I messed up here. I had played early versions of Castles by the Sea by Brotherwise Games, and my mind had conflated it with the publisher Sand Castle Games. Completely wrong. Not related. Sand Castle Games has only released Res Arcana with its expansions and First Empires.

DTD: Yes! I think so.

Audubon: Yeah, yeah, I don’t know if they’re doing it though, are they? I’m not sure. I don’t know who’s doing Castles in the Sand.

DTD: I’ll edit it, so I sound smart. [laugh]

Oops. I believe I, in fact, edited it so I look more dumb. Next time.

Audubon: That game did seem interesting though.

DTD: Yeah, I got to play with it at the Gathering [of Friends] and it was pretty neat. Res Arcana was really fun, really neat. Just the efficiency of that tiny little deck of cards was really amazing. And there’s so many different ways you could go.

The Gathering of Friends is an invitation only board game convention founded by Ticket to Ride designer Alan Moon, and held in Niagara Falls every year.

Audubon: I know that’s the thing that really stood out to me about it from the beginning, is just the minimalism, and giving people 8 cards and asking them to squeeze as much juice out of these cards as you possibly can. It’s a pretty interesting thing. And then I think just the vibe in the art. I think to me there’s so many fantasy games, and to create a fantasy game that really has a unique vibe… And I think they really achieved something really interesting, in the art by Julien Delval – it’s super interesting and very deep and layered and textured.

DTD: It had that very oil painting, classic fantasy vibe or look.

Audubon: Well, he’s a traditional artist. He’s working in traditional media, and it’s interesting how they just laid out the cards, where you’ll have the, say if it’s an artifact, you’ll have an image of the artifact kind of in the foreground, but then the background of the image is all these sketches and diagrams and different things in the back that just lend to a sort of, like a psychedelic depth of when you look at it’s like “Whoa! All these weird lines.”

DTD: An alchemical mystery.

Audubon: Yes, exactly. I love that game.

DTD: See, I want you to have Moebius art in your things now.

Audubon: I was just talking with Luke Laurie about his Cryo.

Jean Giraud, or “Moebius”, was a very distinctive artist from the 1960’s that was hugely influencial. And Cryo’s art from Bree Lindsoe, Jasmine Radue, and Samuel R. Shimota definitely brings up comparisons.

DTD: Oh, I love the art on Cryo. I so do.

Audubon: Exactly. I’m a huge Moebius fan, and I wish that, yeah, more games looked like that. Have you seen Jodorowsky’s Dune?

DTD: Yes!

The director Alejandro Jodorowsky has made several extremely strage, artistic movies with heavy symbolism over the years. In 1974, Jodorowsky obtained the rights to Frank Herbert’s Dune, and set out to make the movie. The story of the people involved and the pre-production is simply incredible – so many people from that failed project went on to have very famous careers.

Audubon: Yeah, I love that documentary. I find it…

DTD: Me too, now I’ll take you one further. Have you looked at Incan?

Audubon: Oh yeah.

Jodorowsky and Moebius worked together on a graphic novel series called The Incal, released in 1980. Very psychodelic stuff.

DTD: OK, awesome.

Audubon: Yeah, I’ve read all the Jodorowsky / Mobius. I like Incal.

DTD: Incal – sorry I misspoke.

Audubon: Yeah it’s OK. And Metabarons…

DTD: Yes!

Metabarons is another Jodorowsky collaboration, this time with artist Juan Giménez, published in 1992.

Audubon: Yeah, Metabarons is really crazy.

DTD: They’re so pretty.

Audubon: Yeah, yeah. Although that’s not Moebius, but that is Jodorowsky writing, it’s Juan Giménez, I think doing the art.

DTD: Yeah, well, Jodorowsky is such a mixed bag for me. Like his artsy movies don’t do a lot for me, they’re just so crazy – Holy Mountain.

Audubon: El Topo.

DTD: El Topo – Oh my god…

Audubon: Yeah. I know.

DTD: They’re insane.

Audubon: Truly, yeah.

In El Topo, characters are covered in houseflies, characters dig up eggs from under sitting women, and gunfighters shoot stigmata into their victims. Very artsy stuff.

DTD: But the art stuff, I think his Dune would have been weird, but magnificent. Just everything he describes about it is beyond belief.

Audubon: Right. That is, it was so beyond that it never would have worked, and it’s almost better as a description.

DTD: I think, yes.

Audubon: Because, I mean when I think about Salvador Dali playing the Emperor of Universe, and Orson Welles playing the Baron Harkonnen…

DTD: With a giraffe on fire in the background, is what he [Salvador Dali] wanted. And a score by Pink Floyd. From what I understand that whole score that… They started working on it, writing it. It went into their Meddle album. And so, it’s… I went back after I watched Jodorowsky’s, I went back to Pink Floyd Meddle. And was listening, and I’m like, “Oh. I can, kind of picture this.” And then when they advertised the new Dune movie, yeah, the trailer had Pink Floyd in the background, and I’m like “Oh my God! This is it.”

Yup. This interview took place after the new Denis Villeneuve film was announced, but not yet released. And now, as I write the commentary, the second movie has just hit theaters.

Audubon: It’s amazing.

DTD: [HR] Giger’s art on that! Oh man! That was insane.

Audubon: Well, I mean the super team that was assembled for that project, that then disbanded and went on to do tremendous work.

DTD: Every other thing! Yeah, Alien came out of that.

Audubon: Yeah, because both [HR] Giger and Dan O’Bannon, as well was on that project. So yeah, I mean, I find it just as a creative person that that movie and that story and Jodorowsky’s eccentric creative energy that he has… I mean I find it very inspiring.

HR Giger is the Swiss artist best known for the look and feel of the movie Alien. And his first movie job was on the failed Jodorowsky Dune.

DTD: Well, what about in the movie when he’s showing his storyboards, and he has a book like a foot thick, or foot and a half thick! I want that! I want that to show up somewhere. I will pay you $500,000 bucks for that.

Audubon: Corey, if you get your hands on that I would…

DTD: I never will.

Audubon: Well, there’s like a dozen of them out there.

DTD: None of them are ever going to be for sale. Now I’ve bid on some crazy things… But this…

Audubon: You’ve got an Enigma machine. So, I know that. [laughs]

The Enigma was the code machine used by the Germans in World War II. Alan Turing built one of the first computers at Bletchley Park to crack the code in the 1940s. The image is of an Enigma machine, a Turing Award and the board game Turing Machine. I’m very proud of that picture.

DTD: I bid on Han Solo’s vest.

Audubon: Oh really?

DTD: Just just lost it. That was so close. So, that one was dumb.

Audubon: Well, the Moebius, the Moebius storyboards would be even cooler than that, in my opinion.

DTD: Oh, beyond a doubt. That I would go hard on.

Well, one of the original storyboards went on auction in February 2024. It closed at $2.9M. I did not win it.

Audubon: Wow, yeah. Incredible.

DTD: No, I love Jodorowsky’s Dune. That is such an amazing, weird documentary about… I mean, it’s impossible to think it got as far as it did!

Audubon: I mean, well, he’s just such a singular person. He’s so driven and he’s got such a vision, and I love how he’s talking about assembling his team of “spiritual warriors”. And how, for him, it’s almost like this project… It’s gonna expand the minds of the next generation.

DTD: [laugh] He’s crazy!

Audubon: Yeah, you know it’s gonna be like… Watching this movie is gonna be like taking LSD without any LSD, you know. It’s like… Wow!

DTD: But that was the vision of science fiction in the 60’s…

Audubon: Right.

DTD: Was that it was psychedelia. You know, look at 2001.

2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick released in 1968 and completely changed the way science fiction movies were perceived. Previously, the model was rubber alien suits, rockets on wires, and silver space suits. 2001 interestingly brought both a sophistication and a 60’s inspired laser light show. And here we are, 23 years after the titular date, and I still can’t book a space station flight on PanAm.

Audubon: Totally. Totally.

DTD: Big segments of that are nothing but drug trip. And there was a whole series of really bad science fiction movies that were right in there. The Man Who Fell to Earth, and all this stuff. They were nuts. I loved them, but they were nuts.

Audubon: Hmm… I haven’t seen that one.

DTD: The Man Who Fell to Earth was David Bowie.

In The Man Who Fell to Earth, a naive extraterrestrial crash lands on Earth, seeking water for his draught suffering planet. He then succumbs to corruption and vice. And he jumps naked on a bed for a surprisingly long time. In his defense, Bowie was quoted as saying he has no recollection of making the film, due to the prodigious amounts of cocaine.

Audubon: Oh.

“Oh” is right, sir.

DTD: Weird sci-fi. Strange, nonsensical sequences. It’s… I can’t say it’s worth watching, but it’s worth knowing about.

Audubon: [laugh]That’s terrible.

DTD: Did you want to pack up or you…? I don’t want to keep you if you…

Audubon: No, I’m not in any kind of big rush, but we can… Whatever you think is right, you’re the Captain here.

Oh Captain my Captain. With respect to Walt Whitman. Interestingly, the original poem, written in 1865 and included in the compilation Leaves of Grass, is an homage to the recently deceased Abraham Lincoln.

DTD: I feel, oh, I feel guilty… Now, now you’re putting the power in my hands. Come on, that’s not fair..

Audubon: Do you want any more of this?

DTD: No, I’m picking because I’m full already, but it was really good tonight. I like picking. So, you don’t need to save anything for me. But I do know that there’s not a whole lot of vegan fare around, if you’re looking for a snack or something.

Audubon: Yeah, that’s true.

DTD: Mmmm. That’s good stuff. How did we get on Jodorowsky?

Audubon: Oh, great question. Oh, it was through Moebius!

DTD: Moebius, oh yeah. My big reason that I love Moebius, is that style of art was used in the original Boba Fett cartoon in the Star Wars Christmas special.

Much maligned, the Star Wars Holiday Special (yes, it released around Thanksgiving, not Christmas) was a major influencial event for me. I loved it at the ripe old age of 10. And it did include the first images of a yet undescribed Boba Fett. And he was a bad-ass. The cartoon was produced by Toronto based Nelvana, and animated by John Celestri. He also worked on the 1983 video game Space Ace. I think I love him.

Audubon: There you go – that’s a throwback!

DTD: And that was like… That hooked me to that style instantly. And I’m like, this is what I want. I mean, obviously it wasn’t any of the big names, but it was in their style.

Audubon: Gosh, whenever I think of the holiday special, I just think about Chewbacca’s grandfather watching who knows what and that VR headset. That was like crazy.

DTD: It was nuts. There was so much wrong with that special.

OK, Chewbacca’s father is named Itchy. Short for Attichitcuk. He watches strange VR porn set to a music video of Jefferson Starship’s song Light the Sky on Fire. Harvey Corman does a slapstick cooking show with 4 arms. Art Carney is the local trader. Bea Arthur runs the Mos Eisley Cantina. There’s a list of craziness a mile long.

Audubon: Yeah.

DTD: There was… And it was big names! I mean, every member of the original cast was in it.

Audubon: Right.

DTD: What the grandfather was watching was actually a music video from Starship, like Jefferson Starship.

Audubon: Right?

DTD: Which is nuts. And then they brought in those weird comedy sequences that just did not work. With Art Carney, Harvey Korman. I think Bea Arthur was in it. It was just crazy.

Audubon: Well, gotta get Chewie back for Life Day. That’s what’s important.

Fun trivia fact: The Star Wars Holiday Special is the first time James Earl Jones is credited as being Darth Vader. He was uncredited in the original Star Wars.

DTD: I remember being absolutely in love with the thing. And I, you know, my play after watching it, was I was always that kid Chewbacca.

Lumpy! His name was Lumpy! Short for Lumpawarrump. Played by Patty Maloney.

Audubon: Right.

DTD: Who was… so there was Chewy. And I think the grandfather was Lumpy. I don’t remember the kid’s name. But the kid put together things. Like, he built robotic and computerized toys, and I wanted to do that. I vowed that I wanted to be that. So it, you know, it made me happy as a kid. I thought it was cool. But that was back before we thought Star Wars would actually go anywhere. Nobody took it seriously. It was crazy.

One more segment left on this epic, yet delayed interview! Next time Henry and I talk about Star Wars. A little about art films, but mostly Star Wars. Because we are 12 year olds. Then we drive off back to the classiest of near-Reno hotels, and rejoin the world of RageCon.