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Matthias Cramer: I started in the early 1990s, mostly with old Avalon Hill games. Later there came El Grande and the Euro Games, so there was plenty to be played. I had one or two gaming groups through all of the years, but right now, I am spending much more time with playtesting than with gaming myself. So I think that I've played most of my games, but there are still some sealed ones on my shelf.
PS: Which games have made a big impression on you lately? And now that you are designing games, do you still have time for playing the new ones?
MC: With around 1,000 new games each year, I have no chance to play them all, so I pick a few that look interesting and I try to pick the ones that promise to have some new mechanisms or the ones that are really telling a story.
PS: How did you start designing games, and how do you manage this with your job as an IT project manager? Most of all, what does your wife say about this when instead of spending time with her, you play with cards, chips, and meeples...
MC: The secret is to have a good life-work balance. I work to live and do not live to work, so there is a place for other passions like making games or going diving. My wife also likes board games and she joins most of the gaming events anywhere, so she knows the guy in her living room quite well ;-)
PS: Okay, on the subject of your first game Glen More, which was welcomed by players in Poland, you mentioned that the circular layout and the tiles were in place from the beginning. I understand that you then started to look for a theme which would be right for tiles? What main changes occurred during the development phase? Is this one of your first designs and how much time did it take you to get from idea to a design ready to be presented to alea?
MC: Glen More had a very short development process as the path was quite clear from the beginning. I tried to maximize the effect of the circular layout and movement mechanism. Everything had to be built around the dilemma of "Which tile should I take?" I started with many resources and a lot of rivers and streets. All of this was reduced at a middle stage, because less is more. It also became clear quickly that the tiles should have large differences in their power. Therefore, I created the special places like Loch Ness and the Castles. After nearly a year, I presented the game to Stefan Brück from alea and he liked it from the beginning.
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MC: Developing a game based on a book takes a special approach because you have to follow the book. For Mieses Karma it was clear that the players "travel" through different animal incarnations, and I wanted to have a kind of life line as a representation of life itself, so I played around with a bunch of mechanisms and went for an easy and interactive one in the end.
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You mentioned also that inspiration came from The Republic of Rome, and I understand that it applies to the voting procedure. But from where came the idea of laws and different conditions to get victory points?
MC: In the first version of Lancaster, players were setting their knights from the victory point track into the different counties. To make it short: It didn't work at all, so I went for something else.
To be honest, I don't remember at which stage the bidding came into the game. (It was quite early.) Maybe I didn't recognize it. The knights and the counties were there from the beginning; even the distribution of the knights – 4-3-2-2-1-1-1 – never changed through all of the years. In the beginning, there was a big tournament at the end of each round during which players fought each other. This mechanism disappeared and was replaced by the conflicts in France.
The laws are also an old mechanism because I wanted to have a game in which laws can change rules. These rule-changing laws didn't make it to the basic version, but you'll see some of them appear in the New Laws expansion.
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MC: The meeples just show heads and shoulders, but there are women and men. They have three positions: as a baby (lying on the side), awake (standing) and sleeping (lying). There are 16 resources in the games, but no counters or cubes to represent them, so you have to use directly what you produce – there is no storage at all.
The basic idea is that you have to produce so many different things that you have no chance to do it all on your own, so you marry, say, your neighbor's butcher in order to get some nice steaks out of your cow. He will be quite happy about this marriage as he can then get children to work in his butchery. It's a strategy game, but most family game players have a lot of fun with all of these marriages.
PS: Can you tell a little bit about the games you are designing now?
MC: I do not talk much about ongoing projects. In my ongoing games, I am caring more and more for a density of the game and its suspense arc – and I believe that storytelling will become much more important for me in the future.
PS: Do you want game designing to be your full-time job, or would you rather keep the situation like it is now?
MC: Never ever :-) Making games is one of my hobbies and I don't want to have a feeling of work when designing new games. I am testing a lot with friends and with people who I like. That is leisure time for me and them, and it should stay that way.
PS: Thank you very much.
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Editor's note: This interview originally appeared in Polish on GamesFanatic.pl.
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