Designer Diary: Kaiju Incorporated, or A Kaiju By Any Other Name Would Be a Cable Car

The Thing I Miss Most Is My Memory...I Think

Fair warning that this designer diary may be a little vague in spots. Once in a while, a game of mine has such a long and convoluted path to publication that I have forgotten the beginning of the story by the end of it.

According to my files, I started prototyping the game that eventually became Kaiju Incorporated back in September 2011. That would have been about the time that Cambria and Hibernia hit the market, and I was seeing early indicators that the company that published them was having difficulties, so I was mostly trying to design games I could potentially self-publish in the pre-Kickstarter era.

This game began as most of my games do, with an idea for the core mechanism. Players would draft a card from a random row, then either pay to add it to their tableau or discard it to trigger income in the suit of the discarded card. This is the kind of mechanism I like to build a game around: a simple choice but with a lot of factors that influence a player's thinking about which choice to make. I think I fiddled around with the number of suits before settling on three as the most functional. The game was initially just vaguely themed around city construction.

Because I was thinking in terms of self-publishing, I wanted to create something like my previous game at the time, Armorica, that is, something card-based without the need for bits to represent resources. Because of this, the first iterations of this game tried to use unconstructed game cards as money, similar to Race for the Galaxy. However, I recognized at a certain point that this limitation was holding me back, so I decided to let myself include game money and VP tokens as components. This let me breakthrough to the early stages of this design, with its biggest early influences being London, Citadels, Saint Petersburg and Phoenicia. I admire those designs for how much mileage they get out of an economy based solely on money and victory points (VP). It was probably London that had me thinking about making an economic game about city building.

In the early versions of the game, all cards provided money or VP or both to players on their own turns, and these versions of the game were pretty dull because the game wasn't interactive enough and other player's turns were just downtime. By October 2011, I had come up with the "Your Turn/Rivals Turn" mechanism, and this brought the game much closer to its final form. Now some building cards paid off when you chose to discard for income, and some paid off when other players discarded for income. This made other player's turns more exciting because you were waiting to see whether they would give you income. It also added more decision points because you wanted to force later players into situations where they had to give you income. Thematically, too, this change better represented the action of an interactive economy. Rivals Turn buildings were initially themed as the suppliers to retail businesses, so when the retailers sell, they buy from the suppliers. I don't recall whether the idea for this mechanism grew out of the thematic desire to model economics more closely, or the mechanical need to get the players interacting more.

I Left My Hat in San Francisco

At this point I was playtesting with Chris Ruggiero, who later became the co-designer of [company=9656]Race to Adventure[/company], Evil Hat Productions' first board game. Chris proposed making the game about rebuilding post-earthquake San Francisco, which I thought was a great idea. He had a lot of specific ideas about how to implement this theming, and I immediately brought him on board as a co-designer.

Let me say at this point that I am not a natural collaborator. All my other designs are sole authorship for a reason, and that reason is that I am a control freak. I have tried and failed to co-design with others on other occasions, and it has been mostly my fault. Collaborating with Chris worked because he is an exceptionally easy-going guy, and he was happy to let me be senior partner and have final say about everything. Generally if I am going to be involved in a design process with others, I would rather be a developer than a co-author because it is easier emotionally for me to take a backseat in that situation.

The game went through a bunch of changes that ultimately did not work out, and I don't recall which ideas were Chris' and which were mine. At one juncture in October 2011, the game had a majority control map that interacted with card placement. I believe this is when we instituted the cards having neighborhoods on them as a way to get a little more San Francisco into the game. The map went away, but the majority control neighborhoods stayed. At one stage, building cards had hit points that could get eroded, but that did not work very well either.

Sample new product cards

Then in December 2011, I think it was Chris who introduced the general idea of a newspaper-themed mechanism (which eventually became new product cards and Kaiju cards). I wanted to introduce a penalty points system, similar to poverty points in London, and Chris had the idea that instead of scoring VP and PP (penalty points), players would collect good and bad newspaper stories about their companies. This was a big thing in early San Francisco, where corruption was rife and labor disputes were frequent, so I replaced the game money and VP with advancing tracks that eventually allowed you to collect a good headline from the San Francisco Chronicle or a bad headline from the San Francisco Examiner. (If you lived in the Bay Area back when newspapers were a thing, then you know why we themed them that way.) Eventually we arrived at the bad headlines destroying your building cards (by ruining the businesses) and good headlines awarding VP based on the building cards in your tableau at the end of the game. This helped with a mechanical issue that most tableau-building games have, that is, the tableau growing too large to manage.

Over the next 2 years the game got playtested and refined a lot, but with no major mechanical changes. Mercifully, my friends liked it and did not object to all the playtesting. At some point between 2012 and 2014, my longtime friend and playtester Jon Spinner suggested that I should convert the tracks into wheel shapes, to make clearer what happened whenever a track wrapped back to the beginning. It was a great idea, one that really improved the flow of gameplay.

In this period I took the game with me anytime I might have a chance to pitch games to a publisher (which was infrequent), but it did not get any traction. In this period I worked on Zeppelin Attack! and Don't Turn Your Back for Evil Hat Productions, as well as doing game development for them on a cooperative game by Chris Ruggiero and Eric Lytle. It did not occur to me to pitch them this game, however, because an economic game didn't seem to fit their oeuvre.

Stop...Kaiju Time!

Meanwhile, president of Evil Hat Productions Fred Hicks had given me a quasi-commission to create a card game around a time travel/paradox theme he had in mind. I designed a game that I wasn't entirely happy with, but that did give me a chance to create some cool alternate history gags, like: "1500: Philippine Empire colonizes Spain", "1965: Malcom X survives assassination attempt, made bionic", and "1980: Jerry Falwell elected President, bans synthesizer music and coin operated video games, American Dark Ages begin". It was a majority control game about trying to take over different centuries with your version of history. It worked mechanically, but the game feel was off; too many players found the game frustrating because their actions were constantly being undone by other players.

My first game with Evil Hat, Zeppelin Attack!, debuted at Gen Con 2014, and the English second edition of my game Romans Go Home was being demoed by Asmodee at the same show, so I returned to Gen Con for the first time since Cambria and Hibernia had debuted there in 2011. I was hobnobbing with the big-time designers at the Asmodee booth (finally got to meet Bruno Faidutti face-to-face), taking a variety of meetings with Evil Hat, and generally feeling like a real game designer again.

I demoed the time travel game for Fred Hicks, Chris Hanrahan, and Ron Donoghue, and they came to the same conclusion I had about the problematic feel of the game. I think time travel is a tough theme for a game because it presents a very narrow range of options for representing the theme mechanically. While they were there, I showed them the other prototypes in my portfolio. To my surprise, they wanted to do the San Francsico game! Fred came up with the idea of re-theming it around kaiju (Japanese giant movie monsters), and instantly both Rob and Fred started riffing ideas for re-theming the game. The bad headlines became the kaiju, which made the destruction of player tableaus make a lot more sense. The players became megacorporations, looking to profit from rebuilding the world after kaiju attacks.

Aside from that, I don't remember how much of the broad kaiju theming was spawned at that meeting and how much we did later. My meetings with EHP at conventions tend to be fast (between other meetings), chaotic (with conventioneers constantly stopping to talk to Fred), and conducted when I have had too little sleep. I do remember walking to dinner with the EHP crew afterward, with Fred occasionally turning to me to utter a kaiju roar and make a building squashing gesture; he was very enthused about the game.

The new theme was always intended to be humorous, a parody of kaiju films rather than just a homage to them. I don't think we ever explicitly discussed that; it just unfolded naturally, perhaps a holdover from the humor of the time travel prototype. It eventually became clear that Fred and I were fans of different kaiju properties. He was mostly a fan of Pacific Rim, whereas I was mostly a fan of classic Godzilla movies from the 1960s and '70s. This turned out to be a good mix of influences because it made the game a broad parody of the genre as a whole instead of being a tight parody of a particular series.

Once we set down to work on the re-theming, it became clear that the kaiju theme was a better fit with the game mechanisms in every way. Chris Ruggiero and I had a field day re-theming the cards, both getting to indulge our senses of humor. The neighborhoods became cities in different nations, so we needed Russian, Chinese, Japanese, American, and Australian themed gag companies. Chris created hilarious card names like "Tchaikovsky Piano Cannon Factory" and "Easily Panicked Masses Stadium". I had the idea to make all of the Australian cards acronyms, like "War Office Mobile Battle Attack Tech" (WOMBAT). EHP likes to keep the humor in their games pretty clean, so some of my gags got toned down slightly, thus "Kaijumojo Male Enhancement Cream" became "Kaijumojo Male Enhancement Pills", and "The Emperor Norton Baby Kaiju Vivisection Hospital" became a "research hospital" instead. By making the U.S. city San Francisco, we were able to keep a little connection to the original theme of the game. Believe it or not, since then I have created another prototype set in the early 1900s Bay Area that also got re-themed as something else. One day I will get to make a game about my hometown…one day…

I also added new material to the game after the introduction of the new theme in the form of the special action cards. These were created to be a KS bonus item, but also to increase player interactivity by letting them buy actions that impacted each other. I experimented with some other add-ons, like a Giant Robot, which did not work. (Giant Robots never work right.) All the add ons that did work are in the published game now. I also made changes that sped up the game so that it would run a little under an hour most of the time.

Fred hired Brian Patterson of d20 Monkey fame to do the art, and he really brought the humor to life. Often the sight gags were very different from what I had envisioned and much funnier. The "Banned-Die Toy Company", with its conveyer belt full of "fun hugs bear" teddy bears with razor arms sent me into hysterics when I first saw it. Sometimes he cleaned up my gags by adding a counter-intuitive sight gag, such as the "Hot Robot Maid Research Foundation" that features a very un-sexy masculine robot in a French maid costume...on fire. The art also did a great job of evoking the kaiju world in general, without mimicking anything specific. I had a little input on the art, which didn't need much because it all turned out so well. I remember for BRUCE, a card that was essentially a big public bomb shelter in Australia, the art didn't evoke Australia in any way, so I asked Brian to go back and put really big beer cans in everyone's hands. (No offense, Australians; I am sure you throw down responsibly.)

Brian works quickly, and the game and all its artwork were pretty much done by late 2015. By that time, The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game was also pretty far along, and EHP decided to bump that up ahead of Kaiju Incorporated on the production schedule. EHP decided to help promote the card game by commissioning a Kaiju Incorporated RPG. Rob Wieland created the RPG about the lives of post-kaiju attack clean-up crews, and I had very little to do with the RPG. I made up some additional background material about the world of the card game when Rob first started work, but I don't think he ended up needing to use that material very much. The RPG is entirely his work, and I think it's a cool RPG and am happy to have it out there. However, I must admit it bugs me when people assume that the RPG came first and I designed the card game around it; for once, it was the other way around.

Eric Vogel