Andrea “Liga” Ligabue: Cosa Bolle in Pentola ? #38 - Guglielmo Duccoli

Dear gamers, here again with my interviews to Italian designers. This time I’m going to catch a new Italian designer that really hits hard with his first title: Gonzaga, from dV GIOCHI, is really a great game that perfectly fits in the borderline between gamers games and family games. Also the first title for the new dV GIOCHI (restyled daVinci Games).

Gugliemo was almost unknown also in Italy before Gonzaga but if these are the preambles I’m really hunging-up for the sequels ...

[Liga] Hi Guglielmo. Was nice to have you here on BGN. Please, tell us something about yourself

[Guglielmo] Well, I’m 46 yo, journalist specialized in history, particularly historic mysteries. Of course, Italian Renaissance offers a great variety of them, and Gonzaga (the family ruling over Mantua from XIV to XVIII century) doesn’t make an exception… My interests around board games developed very soon. When I was a child, some adult cousins of mine created a lot of clever games just to play them in family circle. By that time, Italian people knew just a limited number of games, like Monopoly or Risk, but my cousins were able to find smart and innovative mechanics I’ll meet again many years later in some classics. I was fascinated by that games, so I guess I created my very first board game (a rough land-sea war simulation on WWII) when I was 10 yo. I well remember my frustration dividing a large paper into odd squares, for I’m totally incompetent in manual labor…
My first professional experiences about games were on PC games. When the well known Italian scandal “Mani pulite” occurred, I thought it could be funny to arrange a simple like-arcade game in which judges hit politicians by loyal notifications before they eat public money (I drew politicians as kind of big chewing pac-mans). At that time it was possible just two persons (my friend Roberto Piazzolla, a very skilled programmer, and me) create a PC game. It was 1993, we found a brave publisher (Roberto Ferri of “Xenia”) and our “Videogioco di Tangentopoli” was a success. After which I created a new PC game as a gift for the “Il Sole 24 Ore” (the first financial newspaper in Italy) readers. It was a humoristic SF adventure, in the style of Douglas Adams’ novels, created with my friend Nicola Lepetit and Fabio Giuccioli, and amazing illustrated by Giuseppe Festino. You had to trade among planets avoiding absurd and paradoxical galactic tax assessors, like the dangerous “fisco volante / flying fisc” (well, not very far from Italian reality).

[Liga] That’s really a nice story. It is always astounding to discover how different roads can lead to designing games ... but now, Cosa Bolle in pentola ?

[Gugliemo] It was 2003 when Nicola Lepetit, with Roberto Piazzolla, created the site www.youplay.it. It was designed like a way to let us friends play board games by the Web, but in a few time it attracted hundreds of players from different countries around the world. It’s still working today and, beside classics as “Blue Max”, “Wooden Ships and Iron Men”, “Cartagena” and “King Me!”, you can find “VampiRing”, a combination game I designed expressly for the site.
The site activity gave us the opportunity to meet a lot of very interesting people. One of them was Domenico Di Giorgio, of “DV Games”. We showed him a strange game I created some months earlier, in which players must connect cities and harbors by fiefs shaped as hexes-chains… I designed it while I was piddling with iron nuts. I used a strong glue to create all possible shapes formed by 2, 3 and 4 elements. Next step was to use these iron made fiefs as casts to obtain resin feuds. It was the very first prototype of “Gonzaga” and Domenico immediately planned a possibility for it. Gonzaga development needed more than 2 years. A long time, with hundreds of tests to cut down rules to the bone. Hard job, but it was worthwhile. Now we are highly satisfied for the results and the fine tuning process around points, secret targets and planning cards mechanics. Andres Voicu, with Roberto Corbelli, Sergio Roscini and the testing teams of “DV Games” did a fantastic job to evolve and improve the game.

[Liga] So really a long design. Playing the game it is evident the attention and care in fine tuning and developing and, of course, play-testing ... something the frenetic game market seldom grant to publishers and designers. And projects for the future ?

[Gugliemo] As I said, “Gonzaga” is my first board game published in a solid box. I hope it will help me to submit other games I created during last years. I enjoy few rules, games easy to learn but with a lot of interaction among players. I like games in which you are not alone with your goal, but you must cooperate (or contrast) with your fellows. Now I’m focusing on four different projects, very different each others about the theme: pirates, science fiction, historic and mafia. About mechanics, I’m studying an innovative way to use dice and a new system to manage biddings.

[Liga] I’m sure a lot of gamers, like me, are looking forward to new design by you. And now the last question: please, tell me the 10 games you like to play most

[Guglielmo] The game I cannot stop to play are the old but evergreen “Diplomacy” and “El Grande” (the father of a lot of big classics), but there are some younger ones, as “Antike”, “Ticket to Ride”, “Imperial”, “Tikal”. There are also some funny and odd old ones I very appreciate: “Kremlin” and “Junta”, i.e.

[Liga] Really a nice selection that shows how you are a not only a designer bu a gamer too ... and IU think this is important for good designing! Thank you Guglielmo, nice to meet you and see you in the next fair, probably Gioca Torino 2009, 21-22 November in Turin

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