W. Eric Martin: Dear Reiner Knizia

One of my frequent regrets is that I rarely tell people how much I enjoy their creative work. The first time this realization hit me was in 2000 after the death of Carl Barks, creator of Uncle Scrooge and writer and artist of hundreds of inventive stories that appeal to both kids and adults. I had read Barks’ work since being knee-high to a grasshopper, and although I knew during my teens and twenties that he was still alive, I demurred on doing the detective work needed to send him a fan letter. I kept thinking that I would do it at some point, but I never did, despite Barks living to age 99 and giving me plenty of time to make good on my promise.

Kurt Vonnegut is another artist who has shaped my approach to thinking and to life in general. I think Cat’s Cradle was the first book of his that I read, and the oddity of his characters - not to mention the destruction of the world, something that other SF books had always veered away from at the last moment - really struck me. One of my college professors used Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five as part of his modern literature course, and the simplicity and strength of that book still blow me away, as does Vonnegut’s quiet acceptance of death as just another part of life. We’re here for some length of time, then we disappear. As with Barks, Vonnegut lived longer than I thought he would, despite his addiction to cancer sticks (as he fondly called his ever-present Pall Malls), yet I never wrote to say thanks.

Which brings me to this moment and this letter of appreciation. On a long car ride recently, my wife and I filled the time by asking each other various questions, including “Whom do you admire?” Your name came to mind, Mr. Knizia, because you have done precisely what you set out to do: create a career for yourself as a game designer. Few people have been able to make a full-time living designing board and card games, especially on a freelance basis and not as an employee of Hasbro or another large company, yet you’ve been doing just that for more than a decade.

Your games vary widely in theme and style and level of complexity, and although some people lament your shift away from complex strategy games, with 2003’s Amun-Re being the last such title by the reckoning of most people, I still appreciate your approach to game design. Ingenious, Blue Moon City, Palazzo, Tower of Babel and Times Square are all excellent games that you’ve seen published in the past five years.

With the pace of new games these days, few people stick around the explore all the depth present in your designs, but it’s there for those who want to look. Tower of Babel is almost three games in one, for example, because it plays so differently with three, four and five players. The pace of the game varies widely, so you need to think and rethink each time you play in order to adjust to the choices that other players make. Beowulf: The Legend is another one in which the collected actions of the players moves the game in different directions. Not everyone has gone ga-ga over these games, lamenting the lack of a new Taj Mahal, a new Ra, a new Tigris & Euphrates, but those games have already been designed and continue to attract new players.

Your goal, after all, isn’t to make the best complex strategy game on the market; your goal is to make a living as a game designer, and delivering engaging – yet simpler – games is a way to put your name in front of a larger audience. You’ve also looked to the broader game market to see what opportunities exist for you to create games in media outside plain old cardboard. Thus, we now see the Knizia name on games for the Nintendo DS and a PC version of Ingenious, along with the electronics-laden Wer war’s? from Ravensburger. On top of all that, dozens of traditional game publishers have unleashed a steady stream of Knizia both old and new.

Your ability to repurpose and repackage games has proved to be a big strength, both in terms of furthering your career and spreading games to new markets. Baker’s Dozen from Playroom Entertainment is one example of this, with the dark ambience of Poison being replaced with the more American-friendly look of a donut box. The new theme - useless as it may be for some gamers - will get people to pick up and buy the game. I approach mainstream magazines with the idea of covering modern games, and those thematic hooks are important in getting the attention of editors and readers. The point of any game design, after all, is to get people to play - to bring enjoyment to the people, as your website states - and to do that you first have to encourage them to buy and play the games.

My wife is a huge fan of Out of the Box’s Easy Come, Easy Go, for example, and people are familiar enough with dice games in general that it doesn’t take much to get them playing ECEG, thereby learning something new and expanding their gaming repertoire. The next time I meet with those people, I’ll undoubtedly have Pickomino or something similar in my bag to show them another take on dice games. I like to show people that the vocabulary of games is far larger than what they’ve experienced, and your creations help make that possible.

Even your most basic games, such as Cocktail Games’ forthcoming Robot Master are surprisingly well-designed. Their simplicity is part of their strength as I can explain a game to a first-timer in a minute or two, yet it provides a challenge that takes that person a bit of puzzling to figure out how best to play. Robot Master introduces an element of gaming vocabulary to those who know only a few games - and for those who are immersed in gaming, it provides a simple challenge that relies more on thought than the playing out of random factors.

Not incidentally, Robot Master is a perfect title for Cocktail Games, just as Baker’s Dozen is ideal for Playroom and Sushizock im Gockelwok is ideal for Zoch and Castellers is ideal for Devir, and so on. You understand the needs of game publishers and present them with creations that are ideal for their potential customers. What’s more, you clearly have a thorough understanding of contracts and business dealings, which is essential for someone who has made game designing a career and not a secondary activity. To be a full-time designer, you need multiple sales to multiple markets, with each publisher as eager to share in your success as you are to make that success possible.

Even if you never publish another game – a possibility I find unlikely – the breadth and volume of your existing ludography will keep your name on gamers’ lips for decades to come. And given that you undoubtedly do have new games in the works, I look forward to exploring your new creations in the years to come. Thanks for all you’ve done, and best of luck in the future.

Yours in gaming,
Eric

Posted by W. Eric Martin on Aug 25, 2008 at 01:00 AM

Article reprinted by kind permission of BoardgameNews.com