Now Then Readers,
Today we are talking to the head of Republicof1 Benjamin Green, who is going to tell us a little about his thought processes and their newest game SoftWar.
“Hello Benjamin, Thank you for taking some time out of your busy schedule to talk to us today, Could you please tell us a little about Republicof1 and the projects that you have been working on?”
Aw it’s no problem, in fact it’s really great to pop in and say hi! Republicof1 is the name I work under, when I’m making games, games components, art, illustrations, websites, or anything creative that I work on basically. I’ve got a pretty long history in games, I’m ex Games Workshop staff, I’ve been playing board and video games for as long as I can remember and I studied videogames development at university! Like a lot of other indie tabletop designers, the actual work of making and producing games isn’t yet my full-time job, but I consider myself to be super lucky as I’m able to design and produce games as part of my day-to-day job as well. So projects I’ve been working on recently; I made some artwork for an Telecoms NGO for their fabulous disaster relief training game, I’ve been working as a consultant with some fab chaps on their first tabletop project and, of course, I’ve been working on my long running tabletop game project Softwar, a game about cyberespionage where players act as spymasters controlling digital agents in operations to break out secret data.
Considering your past with Games Workshop, what is your opinion on miniatures in board games?
In general I really like good minis, however it gets a bit weird when I think about minis in boxed games… Sometimes they’re a reason why I’d avoid a game. I feel like miniatures just like any other design decision, Should feel like they make sense to be there. I really don’t like seeing minis in games that didn’t really use them well. This is probably better explained with examples. Take Scythe, it’s really rooted in its world; the artwork is such a big part of the experience that the pieces really work as sculpts, they’re well considered and measured, they could not be minis, but it would be that litte bit weaker as an experience for that. Alternatively take GKR: Heavy Hitters; I’d argue with ideas like facing and all the information needed to tell one Giant Killer Robot from another, it’s just not as achievable by any other means.
Thinking about it, I can even think of examples, like Game of Thrones The Board Game, where really, I’d like to see minis instead of the meeples it comes with. What I’m really not that into is where the models are basically the key selling point, and when the game suffers as a consequence. I’ve played a few games that just miss the mark because the minis seem pointless and the game experience seems incomplete.
Perhaps I’m not the right market for those types of games, I was more stunned than excited at Kingdom Death Monster, though the ambition of that project was awe inspiring! In fact that was probably the moment that seemed to change the way most people thought about games and price; before that you built the game that fit the price point (~£20 for a card game ~£40-45 for a boardgame). These days I’m seeing card games for £35 and boardgames that are well over £100, even in retail stores. In that way I think KDM, was a really important title in raising the bar to allow fellow developers to come up with more unusual component lineups. I’ve never played KDM, so I can’t comment on its strength as a game, but I hear rumours. When the models represent about 90% of the project with a thin game bolted on the side it’s just not for me. To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with making minis, I just would rather have a great game with no minis than a super thin game with loads! I’m a bit of purest on that front, if the game is just okay, as a backer, I’m disappointed. From a production perspective, let’s be honest, great minis help you fund well on KS. Sure, but translating that into a product could be a nightmare that some just aren’t prepared for. I personally don’t have much sculpting experience so minis would be a massive risk for a dev like me! I remember a game maker who had funded but they were sharing, in worried tones, that they were really worried that they would lose money because they had a large margin of loss between their fund goal and their break even point. I won’t name the project, but I just know as a maker, I’d really hate to be where they were. So, yes I’m fine to have some minis in a boardgame, but it really has to be a good game above anything else to have me interested. And barring commissions, large investments, or a 3D artist, there’s no way I’d be in a position to try and make a straight up minis game without a external help!!
“What was the inspiration behind the mechanics that you have implemented within Softwar?!
Softwar came out of a bunch of ideas that I was playing with back in 2015. Let’s start with the most obvious, using dice as units. Way, way back around 2008 I read a blog by Eric Zimmerman about a project he was working on called D6 Armada (this was later released at Quantum) that used D6s as ships. My immediate thought after reading that was “why stop at D6s?!”. I went about my day and carried on working on the videogames degree that I was doing at the time. It was literally years later when I’d been asked to create an experience for the GameCity festival in Nottingham and the core mechanic of using different types of dice just fell out of my head and onto a page. The key idea from that time was that the value (which is used to represent an agent’s health) can go up as easily as it can go down. That mechanic and its consequences on the experience completely changed how people approach the game even now. It’s not just a simple war game, its a game that advantages you for waiting, planning and getting your timing right. You are benefited for giving your agents time to recover, exactly like you would if they were people. It makes it deeper and players often show some care towards agents that survive the whole game!
Another mechanic that I’d been working on (and that I’m really pleased with now) is the army building. I love playing Games Workshop games, but I’ve never really been into their points systems. Don’t get me wrong, in games like 40k, or even MTG making some metric of equivalence is a really important concept, but the implementation feels flat and really doesn’t make for a particularly fun experience. With the army building in Softwar (actually you build spy rings), I wanted to avoid that kind of abstraction of unit value or any kind of parallel system. The result is a system that separates the special action process from a unit’s potential with that power. Lets say an agent has a special ability that means they can move faster, I’ve linked the ability to move faster with the type of dice it is applied to. To put it another way, all the special abilities are built to be okay on a D4 and great on a D20, but the physics of the system limits you from having more than one type of D20 agent, so you at most get one epic powered skill. Moreover the system is designed to constrain you in other ways; want lots of active agents? Sure, but the number of active agents is linked to the average strength of your dice. If you have only D4s and D6s, you can have 8 on the table; only D12 and D20, you’ll be limited to 4. The result is that you end up starting to focus on what features you want in your spr ring rather than doing a budgeted shopping list. I’m not claiming to have “fixed” army building but I really like my system and I stand by it! Another army building system that I was really impressed with recently was that of GKR Heavy Hitters, that’s really worth a look, it’s a fantastic game and has some really clever mechanics.
Finally, I have to reference my love of the work of the now late, great David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré. His noveIs were really the original inspiration that took Softwar in the direction it did thematically. Spies and spycraft, as he described it, was so quiet and measured, I wanted to distill that, package it up and play it. I feel like that’s translated really well into the game, there are times in most games where you could hear a pin drop, the players become silent, wrapped in concentration, then there’ll be a moment when someone makes a mistake, or they have perfect timing and it all over, then the discussions don’t stop! I really love watching that happen.
“With this being your first project, how did you find the playtesting feedback/polishing experience, and what pearls of wisdom do you have for those who are looking to produce their own boardgame.”
Now that is a big question! Softwar has developed, almost from the very beginning, through getting it in front of and played by people. I have found over time that there were a bunch of things that I wish I’d known/or realised up front, but the one thing I did get from the start was to treat the project and ideas more like rubber than glass – take it out early and show it; believe in it, get a booth not a playtest table and try and get people to look at it as a game they’re considering buying rather than one they might want to fix. It’s a couple hundred pounds to do a show well, in the grand scheme that’s about 4-5 retail copies of your game. Compared that to the value of having dozens of concurrent plays by people that don’t know it and it’s a given that that is money well spent. One thing that showing does is it forces you to be really clear on ‘the teach’, what works and what doesn’t and it puts you bang in the middle ready to observe the bits that players do and don’t engage with.
Of course with that, it’s not the cakewalk of showing your mum, boyfriend or spouse your idea; they have to be kind to you. In the show environment there is no pretence, there are 1-3 days to try as much as possible, people may walk past you, ignore you or even be pretty negative, so be prepared to thank them for their attention no matter what. Remember you can’t (maybe you shouldn’t) make anything that appeals to that everyone, so people saying or showing signs that it isn’t their thing is a great bit of feedback. They’re spending time on your project, even negative words are a good trade for that. Now I have seen this go really badly so pay attention to the next bit… if someone doesn’t like your game, be as forgettable as possible. Don’t argue with them, don’t disagree with them, don’t tell them they don’t get it or misunderstood it. Be polite and thank them for their time and move them on, giving them no reason at all to remember you. Shows are often very big affairs, you will more than likely be forgotten. Being forgotten is actually brilliant, it gives you another shot later on, after you’ve made all the changes that you’ve just learnt from your playtesting. The player may even have a vague familiarity to the system that actually helps you. I once had a player at Airecon say, “I’ve just realised I’ve played this before sometime, and I don’t think I liked it then, but actually I quite like it this time… .
I have to mention polish… Making anything, be it a website or a game, the polishing stage, will take at least as long as the rest of the project. A game is a complex weaving of mechanics, dynamics and aesthetic components; I think of polish as the bringing of all three of these components into harmony. It can take a whole load of time to get that right, swapping a typeface here, streamlining a rule’s description there or adding/removing a whole mechanic. Any change you make to one will probably impact other aspects of that triad. For me, even changes on the website sometimes need to be reflected in the game or wider content. I’m the kind of designer that believes time spent on polish is time spent well, with the aim being to elevate a good game into an elegant one; something that can be appreciated rather than just liked. Something that really leaves an impression. Something that players want to play more than once, that occupies their minds between games. Something that they would want to give as a gift. I’d say be prepared for a long slog and never underestimate the power and cost of polish.
As you said there is an art to Boardgame Design, is there a particular designer whom you admire and keep your eye on?
I really love the work that come out of MindClash (Viktor Peter, Richard Amann and the rest of those guys). Their games have a really strong sense of what they are about and they use mechanics to really evoke the decision space of the context. I like that I get a really strong sense of the references that they have gone for; Inside Out with Ceribria, The Presige with Trickerion and I think Bill and Ted had a hand in the central mechanic of Anachrony! I always keep an eye on what these guys are doing, and have yet to find a game that hasn’t had some really lovely features. I’d love to play more games by Shem Phillips, I really enjoyed Raiders of the North Sea and you can see the same DNA in both the North Sea and West Kingdoms series. I look forward to getting more time on these and whatever else comes out of his studio! Eric Zimmerman (designer of Quantum) was one of the first designers that stuck out, it was nice to see someone from videogames make a success on the tabletop. I plan to follow up on Wingspan by going back and trying Tussie-Mussie and Mariposas all by Elizabeth Hargrave. And finally somewhat controversially I would hope to see another saga-style-legacy game like Seafall from Rob Daviau! I mean, I know a lot of people didn’t like it but I really enjoyed playing it. It was like a TV show, once a week with the same players with a what’s-gonna-happen-this-week vibe. It would be a real shame if that was the one and only game of that type, because I feel like it really suffered from some unlucky reviews from people who simply didn’t have the time to long play it, as it was intended.
“What do you feel are the key elements to a good boardgame?”
You know what, my first though was to say there aren’t any key elements to a good game. BUT honestly I think there are. I think the single most important element is soul. I think a game needs to have a bit of its makers in it. I’ve played a lot of games in my time and the ones I go back to are the ones that have a feeling to them. Games where you can see how difficult a design challenge it was to make. I think of games like Azul or Trickerion. They are lean, tight and spirited expressions and I can play them, enjoy them and appreciate their makers’ craft. Boardgames can be an expression just like any other art form. You can sense the sterility in games that are made purely commercial ventures, there’s some distance, a dryness, a feeling that is the evidence of the designers’ compromise to hit a deadline, price-point or publisher demand. It doesn’t make those games bad, it just makes them ordinary. As a player I want interesting, different, weird, something that you are proud to have made, regardless of what reviewers say.
As a general set of ideas, I really like to see lean games. Where the decision space is that Goldilocks portion of not too many, or too few decisions and a limitation on options so that every move or turn can have a huge impact on the outcome. Games where you needed one more turn or where the decision between one space to the left or to the right can be the difference between winning or losing. Teotihuacan is a great example of what I’m talking about, really tight and the last turn is as interesting as the first.
From a designers perspective, and I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH, it is essential to create an excellent (not just good) manual. I didn’t appreciate just how complicated a task it is to get the rulebook right. It is notoriously difficult to test as well. I think of it as the entrance hall to my home. It really doesn’t matter if I have an aviary with acrobatic guinea-pigs riding owls if the hallway is a dump, no one is staying in that mansion! First impressions matter and there is a set of rules to making a rulebook that makes it feel right and reduces the inertia to learning how to play your game. No one wants to learn rules, so you have to be nice to the one person in the gaming group* that will do that and then will teach the group. To make this even harder, you need to make it a great reference for looking up as well. I won’t call out games that are good or bad at this, everyone does their best I’m sure, but there some that do it well and others that could do better!
“what is the collective noun for boardgame players… a monopoly, a tic, or maybe a tabletop of players perhaps?”
“If you could make a boardgame with a theme different to that of Softwar regardless of production cost, what would you create?”
Right you know that bit in Ocean’s 11, where Danny (George Clooney) has laid out the idea and Rusty (Brad Pitt) turns and says “[we’ll need] a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever!”… I want to make a heist game where players make that decision. Probably an All-vs-One where a heist is planned off table by the players and the mark (or marks perhaps) don’t know if they’re being targeted or not. The design problem of this game is that it’s an informational challenge, you need a lot of noise to disguise the players actions, you also need just enough information on the players actions to make it possible for the mark to beat the team. Most games that I’ve seen try and cover this subject bake out to action programming games and while I really like that kind of game, that isn’t what I’m talking about. Sure there is the planning but there is too narrow of a focus on the actual robbery. There is no logistics, no strategies and the key beat of a heist experience are the twists and turns that really typify the genre. Wait, I bet I lost you at All-vs-One… Why not co-op? Because for a heist to feel good, it’s about coming out on top, outsmarting someone. I just don’t think it feels the same if it’s just an automaton or a puzzle. Man I really don’t know if that game could ever be made… but if it could, I really hope it’s me that figures it out 😛
After the Launch of Softwar what can we expect to see next from Republicof1?
Well in terms of new projects, there are a couple of things on the slate; ideas that I’ve been playing with but that really look don’t look like complete packages just yet. It’ll be really nice to get back into some really prototyping to see what comes out them. But to be honest, in the immediate future I’m not really looking much further than all of the little tasks to get Softwar wrapped and into the hands of players! I’ve been working really hard on the Softwar website (https://softwar.co.uk), to not only give an impression of what you can exact in the box, but also (this has not been announced yet, so consider this an exclusive!) connecting players with several print-and-play Prelude Editions. I want to give people something that they can play to really understand what the game is! I’ve always liked the way that Bond films start with a little prologue, so thought I’d do the same with a little taster of the game!
However, I’ve been a bit tricksy with where I’ve put them; sticking with the spy theme, I’ve whittled out some bonding spots on my website and hidden them as a little Easter Egg hunt; there’ll even be a chance to get hold of one of the extremely limited edition complete pre-release sets. There’s six Prelude Editions for people to find, and they’ll be getting uploaded live on the Softwar website some time in Feb! Anyhow, that’s enough of that for now, I’ll br popping the rules of the hunt up and some general info in the news section of the site when that’s available for people to have a try at!
There’ll also be a few hints posted out amongst my social channels after that.
That unfortunatley conclude our interview with Ben, If any of you have any questions for Benjamin please dont hesitate to contact him and follow him on Twitter @Republicof1 and check out the Republicof1 Website especially if you want to get any of those hints to get yourself a free copy of the game!
The Northern Meeples 