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The cathouse parlour then lights up the like the Fourth of July. Next to you, "Spider" pulls his pistol and works his way from one target to the next, holding down the trigger and slapping the hammer. "Bobtail" Harris falls. A young drover drops. A bottle of the finest Tennesse "oh-be-joyful" explodes. Below it, a gnarled cowpoke leaps up and runs for the door.
Unheeled, YOU hide behind the piano.
Another gunshot. You hear groaning.
A mirror shatters behind Spider who shouts, "Show yourself, Jed Munch, you son-of-a-bitch!"
More gunfire.
As the gunsmoke begins to clear, you hear a gurgle. Spider checks his 45 long Colt. "Jed's gang's fit for the bone orchard, and nothing much besides."
You hear a spluttering cough.
Spider calls to the wounded man – "I'll deal with you directly" – as he calmly reloads his revolver.
More coughing. "Don't shoot! I'm throwin' up the sponge, ya hard case!" Shortly, a green tin is pushed out from behind the bar. Spider looks at you and nods. Obediently, you crawl over to the tin, lifting it, blowing off the dust, admiring the craftsmanship. This is what you see:
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Another year, and another Wild West Revolver game gallops into your gunsights. That also means another designer "diary" by this here curly wolf, and a friend from the Old States. Here is the very start of another monolithic slab of text, punctuated with pretty pictures.
Doubtless, the burning question you have about the game is "How does this differ from Revolver?"
Well, I might just answer that for you, pilgrim – if you don't give me any sass and shut your big bazoo:
Revolver 2: Last Stand at Malpaso is a standalone game set in the same fictionalised West with a different set of characters, cards, and locations. There is some cross-pollination, if you look for it, but there's also a ton of new pistons added to the Revolver game machinery.
In Revolver, expansions notwithstanding, each of the cards has a primary and secondary function. In Revolver 2, a majority of the cards also have a tertiary function – most feature a gunpowder barrel or an ammo icon – gifting the player with another way to use each card. They may very well sit facing their opponent, thinking, "I could play the prospector card at a battlefield now or later, or use it to fuel the cost of my artillery cannon, or use it to dynamite the abandoned silver mine, or I could save it to blow up the Los Quantos bridge."
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Tricky decisions, made quickly, make for interesting card game sessions, and this game has a cartload of these for your delectation. Hopefully you'll find the game gives you a large horse-injection-sized dose of Old West theme set in Mexico, and entrusts you with a fast-playing enjoyable experience that is easily taught.
Revolver 2 starts with a faux, stud poker tourney – in which the players will have to bluff their opponent – that determines the game's battlefield set-up. You heard that right! The first three battlefields (which construct a town) are determined, from a choice of two towns, by your skill at the poker table. If you lose, you may very well end up tossed off the paddlesteamer and in the midst of a tough cowtown, bristling with desperadoes who want to pepper you with lead.
The poker game also affects your starting hand size, how close the Mexican Army is from arriving and saving the day, and how well the town of Malpaso is defended from bloodthirsty ratbags.
Moving on from the town initially chosen, both players race to cross the aforementioned dynamite-rigged bridge, and then it's on to a very bloodthirsty, apocalyptic conflict in an abandoned silver mine.
The *good* guys here start with only seven (magnificent) gunfighters – as opposed to Revolver's sixteen desperadoes – and must "recruit" the rest of their posse as the game progresses. Each turn space on the town battlefields indicates how many extra gunfighters the good Padre recruits to increase the size of his valiant posse; these are drawn from a separate Malpaso guardian deck.
So while Revolver 2 shares the core mechanisms – battlefields, asymmetric sides, etc. – the whole game tells a different story, both in theme and in how the play flows from beginning to end.
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In a break from convention hereabouts, the rest of the content of this diary takes the form of the two game co-authors having a real conversation regarding the game's design and manufacture. It's not an interview as it wasn't formal, and neither of us were the interviewee; after the opening question we just chatted.
In your mind's eye, picture the two of us in hat, waistcoat, and boots, leaning against the bar in the Black Dog saloon at Rattlesnake Creek, throwing back shot glasses of Tarantula juice intermittently, and both full as a tick – if that helps.
L = Leigh Caple
M = Mark Chaplin
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L – So how did the sequel come about?
M – Urm... [looks at recording device with suspicion]
L - Well, essentially White Goblin Games wanted to know if you could come up with a sequel or an expansion to Revolver. That was the case, wasn't it?
M – Yes, a standalone game. They were pretty free and loose – they didn't come back with a distinct brief, they didn't say they wanted it to do "this". No, and at that point, neither of us had met any individuals from that company; it was all done by email. The first one we met was when we pitched it, pretty much.
L – Yes, I guess you hadn't met them before.
M – No, the fantastically glamorous world of board games! Not flown to the Netherlands in a Learjet, no shaking of hands, no five-course meals in the Grand Amsterdam hotel – no, none of that happened.
L – Essentially they wanted a sequel to Revolver, but as you say, there was no brief and that meant that there was more or less a blank page. So how did you decide then that you didn't want to do it on your own?
M – That's an interesting question. I'm glad you asked it! I think that because I realized that, as clever as I think I might be, my key thing is collaboration. I don't mean specifically in the playtesting stage, but more in the inception and crafting of a project.
L – For the purposes of the "tape" – Mark didn't just pluck me from random, from the street. I had worked with Mark on...
M – Everything else!
L – No, when Mark and I met he'd already done The Twelve Doctors: Dr Who game, but certainly with Aliens: This Time it's War I had played a lot – and lost a lot! – and helped with the balancing, and coming up with some ideas and things. Clearly that game has got Mark's stamp on it, but when the idea for a sequel came up, my understanding was that you didn't feel that you wanted to do a sequel on your own, but also that – well, not that the well was dry – but you found it easier to get inspiration by talking things through and bouncing ideas off someone else in a more kind of formal arrangement, rather than taking advantage of my hospitality in my kitchen, which is what you'd been doing before! [both laugh] Bastard! So that was how we came about it. Mark and I had worked on another massive board game together that sits in a box unfinished because it doesn't quite work smoothly enough (yet), and I guess we saw this as an opportunity to do something new from scratch together, albeit with the Revolver engine. Because for me, when we looked at doing Revolver 2, it was important to both of us to not produce a carbon copy of Revolver. It would have been incredibly easy to make the goodies the baddies and the baddies the goodies and just set it somewhere else, and republish with different bandits and different gangs, and that's potentially what we could have done.
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M – Yeah.
L – But again, we didn't know whether that was what White Goblin Games wanted. We assumed that was what they didn't want, so we set about looking at what we could change and came up with a very long list! Things we could have done differently.
M – Yes, there was a treasure chest of ideas. Like you, I didn't want to make a lazy game.
L – Would you like to expand on that?
M – Well, I'm still fascinated with your question as to why I didn't want to do it on my own. I think the thing of sole authorship of a game can be a greedy thing; I don't mean from a royalties point of view but "the ideas were all mine, I want my name on the box". All of that's very enticing, but I'm also smart enough to realize that you cannot possibly come up with every great idea on your own, no matter how...
L – Yes, and it's interesting because actually the relationship's a bit different. Because, as a playtester, I've got no expectations that the ideas or suggestions I make to you will actually result in any changes to the game. Obviously you're intelligent enough to notice when I or another playtester suggests something that makes the game better, but I think with knowing that both names will be on the box, I'm more able to argue for some of the ideas I want to see included. And you're right, it's almost like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so...
M – Plus, I realized that I like co-authoring things.
L – It's someone to share the load and stress with...
M – Yes, but also double the brains! It is. The old saying "two minds are better than one" is true. So while it would be great to be the sole name, creator of everything like Knizia, I think it's a smarter move on my part to collaborate. I have a cobweb mind, and you're laser focused. I think a smarter term for game design would be directors. We guide the experience to a point, presenting a sandbox enviroment for players to muck about in, creating their own emergent narrative. We also have to "manage" the studio, WGG and that tyrant Bart Nijssen, especially, to an extent [chuckles]. So it's more like the movies than it's like writing books. I'd like to believe that we're co-directors, rather than co-authors working together.
L – I guess it does have its down sides, though. We have had some quite, I wouldn't say "tense" conversations, but conversations where we've both had a point of view and neither of us has wanted to be persuaded out of that point of view. So I guess when you're designing on your own, you don't have those kind of arguments.
M – Yes, and sometimes I do feel, especially with Revolver, now in hindsight, and having done a few more expansions and a load of promotional cards, I sort of feel like guardian of the universe, but again there's got to be compromise and also battling for your ideas...
L – Yes, and I think it's good as well because that kind of fighting for ideas means you really have to be able to distill down why the idea is good, and why it should be included. You have to justify your ideas.
M – You don't have to do that so much if you're on your own, although some playtesting can descend into groupthink ridiculousness, like with Dracula Must Die!, with six people playtesting and all of them thinking the game should be played in a different way. This is an excellent game which has not yet been published at the time of this interview. Yes, it's just ridiculous when everyone just thinks they're brilliant. Some are, obviously, but not quite all at this particular table!
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L – I would state that I was not at that particular playtesting session!
M – But that's the important thing, where when does a playtester become a designer? That particular session and others could have created a six-authored game, and some games do turn out like that and some playtesters are extremely passionate that the game should do "this."
L – It's a bit odd, isn't it, because there's a fine line between designing by committee and being the sole author? And I guess we're on that continuum somewhere, being closer to the sole author because we agree on the vision of the game at the start. And we did talk about that because we wanted to make sure that we were both making a game we wanted to make, so it wasn't one person's idea and the other was just along for the piggyback ride. To be honest, I can't think of any situations where we fought about it, where it hadn't worked out for the right. There are no burning things I wish had made it to the final game which didn't.
M – No, there's nothing.
L – Our previous unpublished one that sits in a box probably caused more arguments.
M – The game's stronger for the discussions.
L – So how would you say that Revolver 2 is different? We've talked about how we didn't just want to do a re-theme or just a re-tweaking of card names, so how did you approach trying to make a game that was different, but that felt familiar?
M – Well, you've described it best, previously when you mentioned that the pitch was kind of like Ticket to Ride: Switzerland, as compared to the vanilla TTR, so that's basically how Revolver 2 is, but I approach the whole thought process of games different than you in that I had to have a story to hang the ideas from. I can't work in abstract. Kind of like some writers have to have the name of the book to start writing, even if that isn't the name the book ends up with. Though I have read books about writing books and some do say "don't get hung up on the name, just write, whatever comes out, and the name will come out in the course of it". But I've written two books and it's impossible... you've got to have a name or something, and that was kind of what we were trying to do with Revolver 2. I need a guiding light.
L – I must admit I remember when we were first talking about it, and I guess that was pretty much the first thing we did. Thinking of Wild West clichés and things that hadn't made it into the first game, or that you had to one side to dip into, but think, yes, that was... Because we had the mechanic – mechanically it's very similar to Revolver, so we didn't have to rebuild how the game would work from scratch – so that probably was the first thing we did. Talk about what we could do to give it a story that feels different, and how can we change the game so that the game feels different and flows to a different story. And I think we have achieved that because it certainly plays quite differently than Revolver, despite the fact that it's battlefields and...
M – Yes it's still some of that goodness. You could say the story isn't really about a chase. The first Revolver, the story is about a chase. This, you're still moving but it's more about...
L – Building.
M – Yes, you're recruiting.
L – Recruiting and building your forces. And both players get to do that because there's a new mechanism around gearing up to use a special weapon in the final location, and you have to manage your hand more so than in the first game because there are extra things you can do depending on the cards you have and the cards you discard. So it's more about building that...
M – The structure of the game mirrors the film The Magnificent Seven where in fact Revolver mirrors Aliens.
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L – Interestingly I haven't seen that Western, so I'll take your word for it on that.
M – [shocked expression] Yes, it's a lot grittier film than people think. They think, "Oh, it's always on at bank holiday" and things, but it deals with some strong subjects. It's a classic for a reason, but it does touch on issues like rape, so it's a stronger, tougher movie than people remember. So that's the basic game-story, although there are some elements of the Wild Bunch, as that film also ends with a massacre in Mexico [laughs].
L – So you've just spoiled the ending there! To Revolver 2!!
M – Oh yes, and if you haven't seen the Wild Bunch, they don't all die! [laughs harder] I won't tell you who does. So I suppose in some ways it's a more brutal game.
L – So do you think we made a conscious decision to set it somewhere else? You said, it's set in Mexico.
M – Yes, I think one of the first things you suggested was to call it "South of the Border", or at least that was a scrappy working title, and Mexico is a fascinating place anyway.
L – And I'd been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption, so my brain was full of...
M – The thing is the games, Revolver and Revolver 2, and the expansions are all very much influenced by Peckinpah westerns and Leone westerns, so even if you've not seen them but have played that video game – Red Dead Redemption was influenced by the same kinds of things I am. It wears it very much on its sleeve.
L – And I've watched very few Westerns.
M – But you've played Red Dead Redemption, so you know all the set pieces from them because they're in that game. One of the other things we wanted to do was not...
L – We wanted to turn it on its head.
M – Yes, and locate it in a different geography of the fictionalized West.
L – Give it a different feel, and make it so that the perceived good guys are the ones with the gang so they get the chance to use that mechanism. Although with this game, as with Revolver, it's not as black and white as it might seem.
M – Although in my mind the Mapache player...
L – Yes, it is more black and white than Revolver. But then the Padre, a supposedly holy man, is corrupted through gambling.
M – That took some persuading of Jonny de Vries at WGG: "Are you sure about these cards? I think you've got these cards in the wrong deck!" That was another thing I was adamant should be in Revolver 2 – this is going off the path – was a mini-game in the middle somewhere that involved the...
L – Although we weren't allowed to call it a "mini-game" during the pitch.
M – Yes, Jonny had already sent me messages saying he didn't want any mini-games! He thought they were no good. But I was passionate that there should be somewhere in the game a poker tournament.
L – And to be honest I wasn't keen on the idea either.
M – So while I was on the Isle of Wight I came up with how the mini-game would work, and as it turned out we had quite a lot of fun playing it when I got back. But Leigh came up with a clever addition to it which I probably wouldn't have thought of – in my mind it was basically a mini-game which had binary outcomes – but Leigh suggested this was fixed to the beginning of the game and was a form of set-up. That's something I've never actually seen. I thought we could pull off a mini-game as Mansions of Madness has done it so well, and it was an unusual thing to include in the game. Also highly cool. So I thought if they can do it, we could do it as well. But by calling it a set-up part of the game, that's how we sold it to Jonny and the company, and they really liked it. I think it's an amazing addition to the game.
L – And actually we've managed to fit it into the story.
M – Shoehorned it in!
L – Yes, so it's reflected in the backstory and how the game plays out.
M – It's also short; it doesn't take too long, or detract from the "gunplay". And also the game's been slightly shortened, compared to Revolver, to fit in the extra 3 or 4 minutes you need for the mini-game.
L – Yes, so that was another thing we were keen to do.
M – We didn't want it to be over-complicated or longer than Revolver.
L – We added new mechanisms and different ways of doing things, but equally we didn't want it to become more of a game than it already was. Because one of the best things I like about Revolver is the fact that you can play terribly, have a duff card draw, but it's over quickly, you can have a good time, tell a good story and have another game. And what we didn't want to do is make Revolver 2 double the length for not much more game.
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M – We know what Revolver does best, and Leigh and I are adamant that with nearly everything we play that simpler is nearly always better than more complicated, and streamlined is always the way to go.
L – Yes, it's weird isn't it, despite the fact that we've got some very thematic things in there, it always – yes, simpler is always better.
M – Usually our fights end up with going with something simpler because you can sniff it as you're creating it. You know it's an FAQ card, don't you? You can tell there's going to be a problem with it down the line, and people who play the game, that'll be the first thing they say – "I don't understand this" – and you'll be like, "Sigh, that's what Leigh talked about three weeks ago!" Somettimes, where no matter how you word it, it's always confusing, then in the end it gets dropped, or...
L – That's what's been good about this process, actually; Mark's been very good at inventing stuff and things he wants to include and I'm a bit more impartial/ambivalent to the theme.
M – Yes, you don't really care about the theme – it could be about...growing cabbages!
L – Yes, I guess what I bring to the table is wheedling down to "in game terms what does this mean", and "what will this bring to the game" and how can we simplify that so it gets to be something that's fun, and represents the thing it's supposed to represent – without having to remember that you've shot six bullets and you can't shoot the seventh until you've reloaded, and that kind of stuff.
M – That's one thing I don't like – when you have to remember a megaton of rules and you're forever flicking through the rulebook. Guilty as charged, Horus Heresy. So if you've got icons, there should be a minimal number and they should be obvious what they do. Or if there is something to be remembered, like in Revolver 2, there was a stipulation early on that there would be a memory jogger card for each player of the one or two wrinkles that do crop up the first couple of times, but it's hardly anything compared to most games.
L – I think as a partnership, we work well because I find it difficult to come up with ideas unless I've got a situation where there's a problem that needs to be solved, so often Mark will come up with an idea where he wants to do "this" in a game, but doesn't know how to execute it. I then reel off some mechanism I've discovered in another game and say, "Well, I've played a game where 'this' happened. Perhaps we could do something similar and would that work".
M – Yes! [laughs like a drain] Strip-mine your collection! You've got a great memory, and I think that virtually every time you manage to come back with one more weird way of doing it that I would never have come up with. So there's always another way.
L – But then Mark is very good with names... what was it? South of the Border – that was my best idea for the game name and some of the interesting card names we've come up with, Mark is better at that. And yes, the lovely character histories and biographies, I've very little... apart from ideas and inputs framing what the character is about, I cannot write artistically to save my life, so it's worked well. I think we do both bring unique skills to the table, which is good.
M – Yes, I don't know whether we want to talk about the character histories. Most players don't even read them. That's not something I've talked about very much at any other...
L – Well, do you want to pick out one of the characters? One of your favourites from Revolver 2?
M – I like things that...
L – I will answer on behalf of Mark here: Esmenia Jones.
M – That was another thing. I also had a secret list of things Leigh doesn't know about of things I wanted the game to do, and some of this is not always guaranteed, if the game is re-skinned. The amount of games that start out about the Roman Empire, but end up being about laying mosaics in cathedrals – unbelievable. Virtually every game seems to be about the Roman Empire! That's a good thing, so you never know. We might come up with an idea for a character or whatever, but in terms of what they do, it might be very minimal. And I don't really have any say in what the graphic design could be. But I really wanted …you see a lot of the great Westerns have a lot of strong women characters, and that was important. I think we got that in Revolver although you might not agree with the "posse". But going back to Esmenia, so one of the starting posse of the good guys is a strong black woman, and not a dolly bird or porn star – though you can be a strong, pretty woman, of course. We also have a gunfighter with the dwarfism condition – and is totally not played for laughs. I've never seen that before in a game. So that kind of thing is very important to me. We did provide a lot of direction to Chechu Nieto and hoped that White Goblin Games would go for the ideas.
L – I guess what was interesting about Revolver 2 was that you could be guaranteed that it wouldn't be re-themed because the point of it was a Wild West game.
M – Yes, but I didn't know whether Esmenia Jones and others would come out as I hoped – they could have painted it any way. In my mind, the cathouse card was going to show the interior, but Chechu painted a dirty shack! But you're right. But also another thing that we wanted to do: Even though the villain is Mexican, we wanted to equalize it and not have every Mexican in the game as a thieving, back-stabbing blowhard.
L – I think there's a good mix.
M – There's a good mix. Some of the Mexicans are on the bad side who have got interesting motivations, but none of that matters if you don't read the background anyway, but at least it's there if someone wanted to explore it, and hopefully before they've knocked it.
L – It's not white guys against brown guys, is it, with the brown guys painted as villains? Because, actually, the hero is Mexican as well. You said that was one of your motivations, but we've not really, yeah, we didn't go into it saying we need five white people, etc. – it's just kind of naturally happened.
M –But I didn't want it just to be, and I know this initially happened with Revolver, where the good guys were basically all just a bunch of white guys because where they gave us more reign with Revolver 2. For Revolver I was provided with a suggested list of names for the bandits, and there wasn't any women amongst them to start with, which I said would have to be changed.
L – It's interesting though, isn't it, because you could argue that historically there wouldn't have been any women, but it's odd because we're making a game for 2012, so you have to be mindful of those sensibilities as well.
M – Yes, it's a fictional West and it just doesn't stand up as a modern entertainment product if it's all white men. And some of the reviews have been from women and quite a few people's comments, if you read them on the internet, there seem to be an awful lot of women who like playing the game so...
L – Although we have lost fans through the killing of animals! A trend which does continue unfortunately in Revolver 2!
M – The animals seem to be fighting back, though – there seem to be so many alligator attacks, I'm quite pleased with that. Although you do get people who say, "This is a Wild West game about gun fighting. Why are there so many animal cards?'
L – That's a good question, but I guess for us there's nothing more hilarious than having a gunfight at the church and an alligator coming up and eating one of the gunfighters. It tells a good story. It might not be realistic and it might not have actually happened, but I guess that with games like this, it gives you a chance to tell stories that are memorable. How memorable would it be – a gunfight at the church and an alligator comes in and eats one of the gunmen!?
M – The purists would like it all to be about different types of weapons, which can be particularly boring.
L – Well, Revolver did go through more or less every type of weapon.
M – Andrew Davis, one of the best playtesters we have from Revolver, pointed out that he liked that even with four expansions for Revolver, there's not a single new gun card. So while I'm not saying we've exhausted the well of guns, they just don't interest me as a new card, though that might change in the future. Basically all the specialist guns, like the harmonica gun in the game, all the ones no one ever uses in the movies – they did exist. There were some spectacular guns – we got a load of books from the library, bought some, and all of the other fascinating guns are in Revolver 2. Basically we've covered virtually all the guns, aside from one-off specialized unique weapons.
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L – What's your favourite card/gun? I was thinking of gun then, but what's your favorite for Revolver 2?
M – I suppose it would be the harmonica gun. It doesn't play like a harmonica, and then fire bullets – that would be a funny thing.
L – I still think my favorite, just because it's so absurd, is the Gatling gun on a minecart. The set-piece at the end.
M – That was your idea to put it on a minecart.
L – I know, it's just a shame that the card name is no longer "Gatling Gun on a Mine Cart", but I can understand why.
M – It's slightly more verbose than needed...
L – I know, but "Gatling Gun on a Mine Cart", it does exactly what it says on the tin!
M – It's a more powerful Gatling gun than in the first game, but obviously it's got yards of ammunition. I quite like "Beecher's Bible" – not because the card's powerful, but because of the history and the story behind it. They used to pack the rifles in boxes of Bibles, if I remember rightly.
L – So we touched there upon the fact that the Gatling gun card had its name changed. Are there any things which were left out as part of the design process, or any things which have had to change through working with a publisher?
M – Well, as some folks must know, some things have to be dropped due to the economics of publishing because each piece of art costs money and time. There is also a deadline. These things are not created in a vacuum, an empty field of potentiality; there are strict deadlines as to when these things have got to be done by, so some cards got dropped. The one you're probably thinking of is the same as me – a quote from Young Guns II which was "I'll make you famous!" I was bitterly disappointed that that got dropped, but that's probably our fault because we didn't put a wrinkle on the card to make it worth including as it was, so I think probably that card will end up coming along somewhere else. White Goblin haven't seen the last of it!
L – Although it was an interesting process because at one point in the game's evolution we did have a lot more rattlesnakes in it that we do now, and again that was to do with the economics. And clearly we want to get the game published, we will work with the publisher to get the game published, but at one point it was, I think the padre had a cart full of rattlesnakes which he would just throw!
M – It's another imaginary situation. You can just imagine them before it begins, going 'round with a cart and a spade, just picking up as many rattlesnakes as they could find. Yeah, there were an awful lot of rattlesnake cards!
L – But generally, working with WGG has been really good. I mean they've been very supportive, and there's really been nothing they've said no to, and in fact they've contributed themselves – they're always coming up with ideas.
M – Yes, some of their suggestions have improved the game.
L – So looking back on it as we approach printing and things, is there anything you wish you had done differently on it? Anything you would want to change – would you have spent more time working on it if you'd had the choice?
M – Well, we've said before, or it's been said, that the amount of time spent on something doesn't always equal quality at the end of it. People can spend years on something that can still turn out to be pants. I don't mean the subjective views of thousands of people who play the game; I mean just generally, a game can come out faulty, you know. How long it's spent in the cooker – you can cook it for too long, and also because we were on a deadline, the game had to be shown behind closed doors, as it were, at Spiel 2011, we didn't have quite as long as some designers would like to come up with it and finish it. Actually, I mostly find that beneficial.
L – Well, it's like necessity is the mother of invention, I find that I work better within those constraints and you find room within the constraints to come up with something. And I don't think, looking back on it that we could have made a better game. We could have made a different game...
M – Yes, a different game. I'm all for barriers, I think they help. Yes, if White Goblin had said, you don't need to stick to two decks of about 65 cards, you can have as many cards as you want and spend three years on it, I don't think the game would be any better for it and it might even be worse.
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L – Yes, I think that would be difficult – being given a blank piece of paper, where do you start?
M – Yes, that's the great thing about the expansions. They said, "There's got to be thirty cards. No more. You can have a punch board with six tokens on it, nothing else." That really sharpens up the mind. But when I was doing these things as print-and-play, you had the limitations of how many cards on each design plate – you could have only 54 designs, and the game couldn't really go beyond three folders, or nobody would bother to print them off. So I was already used to constraint that way, and I found that good, and it's the same here really. I wouldn't say I would have done anything else – in the end the game's come out better than I thought it might actually, not because of your involvement, but because WGG went above and beyond with the production: the new tokenry, the flip side to the bridge card, the memory jogger cards, and the continuous flow of the art on town battlefield cards. Great showmanship.
L –And they're already talking about Revolver 2.1, 2.2, and we'll see.
M – Yes, you've got to take them one at a time because I don't know how well really these things are selling on a shop-by-shop basis; again it goes back to economics. There's no point continually cranking out a product if people don't want it. So where WGG has an overview and a definite idea (probably) or a semi-definite idea of how many products they want to back it up with. Initially I regarded each one as a separate entity which might be the last, but dearly hoped that the first three expansions would be made. A trilogy, if you will.
L – But it's interesting because a growing portfolio gives you a different type of freedom doesn't it? You're not constrained with the ideas you feel you have to get in – you can start to push the boundaries a bit more.
M – Yes, well I'd be fully open for doing something like Red Dead Redemption did, which is have one expansion pack exclusively to do with zombies…
L – Or have Will Smith there on a massive mechanical spider!
M – Well, I love steampunk and spiders. I'd make either of those genres, for sure. I just don't know what the appetite is like for something like that. There'd probably be no point in putting a question on the Internet because you'd get all sorts of strange answers from the vocal minority, not necessarily speaking for the majority of buying customers. There might well be a market for it, which no one else seems to have done – well, very rarely as Ticket to Ride did do a Godzilla-like monster thing.
L – Yeah, not played that and not sure whether I have the desire to.
M – But then I don't know…and also with any of these things, I wouldn't want to put something up that I didn't want to buy. And I probably wouldn't…well, if there was a zombie expansion for a game which wasn't to do with zombies, I'd probably buy it, but just as a novelty and maybe play it once and maybe never. But certainly it's not always appropriate. But Wild West, you can sometimes get away with it – there's quite a history of genre cross-overs with Western films anyway.
L – What with the voodoo?
M – Yes, and other horror elements. The ones that stick most in my mind are the ones I watched as a child that suddenly lurched into horror and I was shocked. I mean you're shocked enough as a child with the violence, but when you're watching a Western and suddenly there's some spooky elements, that really does have an impact. The Shadow of Chikara springs to mind. But I don't know about this – that's something that's still to be discussed. The thing is I suppose, if it will sell, then they will want to do it, but what type of form it would take – I would like to explore those options, I suppose. But the main thing because these things are so time consuming, you need to have a passion for them and all of this takes away from…there's not a bank-safe of dollars in it, and every evening taken up with this is another evening whereby we haven't played someone else's game that we probably really want to play.
L – Yes, I've had Mage Knight since Spiel 2011 and we've yet to play it!
M – I don't know many other game designers, but I picture in my mind's eye Martin Wallace never playing anyone else's game – just forever playing his own, and what a dreadful dull thing that would be.
L – I think that's the case, as otherwise how do they manage it? Perhaps they don't have children or jobs, I don't know, but the very limited social time we get anyway...
M – That's another huge element to it, that's why you've got to have a passion, and the minute – Leigh's said this previously – it starts to be churning out for a job, then unless it is your job, it becomes boring, so you never know... I want to leave behind a legacy or portfolio of things I was proud of and that people had fun playing; it would be nice to think that rather than that the game was churned out on a commercial basis. And also the mindset I have, of each one potentially being the last, means I'm quite willing to cut the severance and not do any more because I've done as much as I can do and can be good. You know, a lot can be learned from, for example, Fawlty Towers and The Office, where they say, we could do more but the quality will go down a mineshaft. Just take a look at Prometheus.
L – But then the American The Office carried on and that's become a better thing.
M –Even so, I still think there's some lesson there...
L – Yes, you're better to leave people wanting more.
M – Or continue with a different showrunner.
L – Someone else's take on it.
M – Because unless you're a genius with infinite time, the river is bound to run low from time to time. That's one of the many reasons I collaborate. My philosophy is, if co-authoring makes for a better game, then go for it. It works for Tom Cruise on the Mission Impossible films, and it can work for me, too. Sometimes it's a good thing to change the showrunners.
L – Look out for Revolver 3 – just by me! [both laugh like hyenas]
I hope y'all liked our designer "diary". Hopefully there'll be a hangman's tree-sized stack of Revolver 2: Last Stand at Malpaso at this year's Spiel in Essen...
Mark Chaplin
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