Interviews by an Optimist #97 - Jeff Siadek

Interviewed by Tom Vasel
Edited by Tom Vasel and Laura Vasel
March 27, 2006

Jeff says this about himself…

In 2005 Gorilla Games released “Galactic Civil War”, and we should have a few more exciting releases in 2006.”

Tom Vasel: Tell us how you came up with the idea for Battlestations…

Jeff Siadek: Like every gamer and sci-fi fan, I’ve always wanted to be aboard a starship. Previous games worked great in the scale they were designed for (character level or ship level), but it was to the exclusion of working at the other zoom level. I loved Star Fleet Battles but wanted to be on board the ship. I loved an RPG called Space Quest, but the ship to ship rules were unsatisfying. When I first saw Space Hulk, I was excited that I’d finally get to be aboard a starship only to find out that the ship couldn’t maneuver and fire on other ships. I’d also home-brewed a RPG that foundered when the party got a ship, and I realized I had no way of effectively dealing with ship to ship action.

It’s not something I was working on continuously, but this problem nagged at me.

Eventually, I started playing around with the modular starship idea and a hit allocation grid, and the pieces started falling into place for Battlestations.

Tom Vasel: What current science fiction books/TV/movies affected your design of the Battlestations universe?

Jeff Siadek: Star Trek and Star Wars are responsible for much of the mind space that is modern space opera. I love them both, but my personal tastes run more toward Robert Heinlein, David Brin’s Uplift saga and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series. My chief goal was to put together a game in a way that doesn’t ask the player to learn a whole new universe, so the Battlestations universe is intentionally as middle of the road and inclusive as possible. One of the problems sci-fi has as compared to fantasy is that the fantasy assumptions remain relatively consistent with each other while even minor sci-fi changes have profound differences. A sword, an orc and a fireball are all very simple and powerful touchstones for the imagination, but there are dozens of ways to do Faster Than Light travel in sci-fi. Science demands thought while magic reassures you that thinking too hard is wrong. This makes fantasy easier to swallow and requires less investment on the player/reader/viewer’s part to get into the world. One concession I did make to my own vision was to populate the universe with aliens that don’t just look like humans with facial appliances. That’s always been a pet peeve of mine.

I didn’t see the series “Firefly” until after we’d gone to press, but I’ve had a lot of people assume that it was a big influence. I subsequently have watched the series and loved it. I can’t hardly watch or read any sci-fi these days without seeing it in terms of Battlestations with people trying to squeeze extra power out of an engine or the crew taking personal damage, when the module they’re standing in gets rocked by weapons fire.

Tom Vasel: What RPGs influenced you, as Battlestations has a lot of roleplaying elements in it?

Jeff Siadek: The “AD&D Player’s Handbookâ€? was probably the most influential book in my life. When you judge it by today’s standards, though it pales the way a model T does when compared to a Ferrari. In terms of direct influences: I took a form of the Fame points from the James Bond RPG for luck. Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk skill system was my first exposure to target numbers. Space Quest was my group’s game of choice for a few months in the early 80’s. 3rd Edition D&D’s feats became the special abilities in BS. Of course Car Wars has the 2d6’s. I had the honor of having Steve Jackson play the nearly completed version at
the GAMA Trade Show in 2004. He advised me to make it simpler, so I did.

The best thing I’ve learned in the last few years of my career is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If I had designed Battlestations earlier, I’d have been too concerned that I was “ripping off” the influences I just mentioned instead of just using the bits that worked best.

Tom Vasel: Why did you start Gorilla Games rather than present your idea to another game company?
Jeff Siadek: Giving up control and ownership is a huge issue for me. I keep feeling like the next thing I do might be the breakout project that puts me on the map, and I hate the idea that I’d sell myself short on it. I didn’t shop “Battlestations”, but I suspect that most game companies would have passed on it anyway, and I hate rejection.

It’s extremely hard to sell something to a game company because they are either tiny penniless “visionaries” uninterested in any ideas but their own or monolithic money-grubbing suits uninterested in anything that isn’t a licensed property.

It is hard to say what kind of success Battlestations would have had if it had been released by a bigger company with more marketing muscle. We’ve certainly got some traction now, so it’s going to be interesting to see where we go from here.

Tom Vasel: Tell us about the future of Gorilla Games…

Jeff Siadek: As far as “Battlestations” is concerned, “Pax Galacticum” is in the last stages of playtest before we publish this spring. I keep reworking “Pirates of Trundlia”, and it keeps getting better. “How Much for your Planet?” is little more than a distant dream right now. We’ve also got a super secret project in the works right now for “Battlestations” in addition to the planned supplements.

Aside from the “Battlestations” stuff, I’ve been designing some lighter, German-style games, and I’m going to reprint “Lifeboat”. I’ve got a couple of games that are targeted more to the mass market that I hope to make a go of. I find that working on lighter games is a great counterpoint to “serious” “Battlestations”. (Can I call “Battlestations” serious?). In a beer and pretzel game, you can do more fun/wacky/sloppy things that you can’t do in a game where people have a greater time commitment. I agonize over whether each special ability in “Battlestations” is balanced; but a light card game can have a slightly unbalanced card, because anybody could draw it.

I’m really excited about the game industry right now. I know there is a lot of flux at every level of the gaming food chain, but I’ve always believed that there will be room at the top for superior products.

Tom Vasel: How can a small company like yours compete in such a crowded market?

Jeff Siadek: There is a pretty sharp dividing line between the professional companies who have to turn out product regularly to cover their overhead and hobbyists who supply elbow grease instead of cash. The trick is to operate like a hobbyist while producing games that are professional quality.

My production plan calls for investment on the part of the creatives. I don’t pay up-front costs for design, art, editing and layout but figure it into a percentage of gross. This means my cost to put out a book is exactly what it costs to print. I shudder to think what a big company would have had to pay to develop “Battlestations”.

Our marketing strategy is focused on getting people to play “Battlestations”. We go to conventions all over the country and run the game. People buy it there and/or go home and talk it up. Every retailer I talk to says it turns in their store. I also use the resources of the Game Publishers Alliance (thegpa.org) to best leverage my efforts gaining access to a lot more venues at discounted prices as well as advice about stuff like ISBN numbers and discounts.

There are a lot of products in the market place, but there is only one “Battlestations”. We pretty much are the niche for character based modular starship adventure. Our main product has been out for over a year, and the momentum keeps growing. It was hard for us to get noticed initially; but once people catch on, they really dig it.

The best thing we have going for us is a broad base of fans, who really support us. It has been awesome to get the help we’ve gotten with places to stay, proofreading, demo-teams and just all around good vibes. I’m really stoked that our product has been an inspiration to so many.

Tom Vasel: Will we see spinoff games using the same universe?

Jeff Siadek: Each supplement we do for Battlestations is backwards compatible. Eventually, we’ll tackle miniatures rules and fleet action and make them at least quasi-compatible with the core rules. As for entirely different games set in the “Battlestations” universe, I think that is unlikely. If I do a product that looks like it expands the Battlestations line but doesn’t, I’ll anger the fans while giving the non-fans the excuse to reject it, because they’ll assume it is part of something they’ve not bought into. I’d be better off setting a new game in a generic universe (with maybe passing references as Easter eggs for the hardcore fans), so people wouldn’t pre-judge it.

Tom Vasel: Do you think there’s a dearth of science fiction board games? If so, why?

Jeff Siadek: Sci-fi, whether in gaming or fiction requires more effort for the player/reader/viewer to get their head around the strange new science. When you approach a new game, you’ve got to learn how it works. If the game is based on something mundane such as trading goods or building railroads, you’ve already got some space in your head that can relate. With a sci-fi game you are also being asked to learn which sci-fi assumptions are in play and how they are interpreted. That’s one of the reasons the more popular games tend to be quasi-historical German-style abstractions.

Fantasy games have an easier time than sci-fi because the fantasy milieu has become mostly standardized. The variations are quick and easy to assimilate. It also helps that “magic” can smooth the rough edges. As the population matures and gets more comfortable with science, we’ll see more mainstream sci-fi success in all media.

Tom Vasel: Tell us about the importance of conventions to a publisher such as yourself…

Jeff Siadek: There is something of a catch-22 in that most gamers tend to only play what they like, but they don’t like a new game until they’ve played it. Getting people to play your game is key, and conventions provide the biggest exposure to potential new players. At a convention, I try to set up even scheduled events in or near open gaming where passers-by can find out what the commotion is about. From a purely selfish point of view, I love the conventions, because it’s a chance to share my game with people who get it.

We also get to sell at full retail at the convention, so it usually turns a profit for us depending on how much we had to shell out for airfare, hotel and booth fees but the most important part is getting the word out.
Tom Vasel: From playing Battlestations, I know that it’s not a simple game. Tell us some of your teaching techniques to teach a more involved game like yours.

Jeff Siadek: “Teaching a new game” can have widely different meanings even when you are teaching people at the same table the same game. When I was teaching my core playtesters “Battlestations”, I knew the guys, had their trust and needed them to be able to completely embrace and disassemble the game. This meant going into a lot more detail than when I now explain the 5 minute demo at a convention table to a guy with a wife and kid in tow. The best thing you can do as a teacher is to gauge how much the pupil needs to know at a given time and assign an appropriate workload to match their aptitudes and interest level. In a game with more than a few pages of rules, it is impractical to learn them all before you begin playing, so you need to start with what is most fundamental to the game and expound on the tactics of the situation as you go along.

Everybody’s gaming type morphs based on any number of factors varying from decades in gaming to days spent awake since the convention began or hours since the last slice of pizza was consumed.

Alpha gamers are the guys who start pre-guessing the rules they haven’t seen yet like knowing that since they rolled 2 dice for their piloting check and 2 dice for their engineering check; when it is time for combat, they pick up 2 dice. These guys are always sharp and a little ahead of the learning curve. They will want to move quickly but will also be likely to be disappointed by a detail they rush past. Give these guys all the detail you’d need in a given situation and hand them the rulebook while you’re talking to the others. I let guys like this build their own characters while I’m handing out the pre-generated characters to the Newbies and the Dragalongs.

Newbies don’t know what they’re doing. They want to, but it’s just too much to absorb all at once. Try to term the game in realistic terms to them rather than the kinds of numbers and ratios an alpha gamer can handle. I’ll tell the newbies that a certain gun does more damage where I’d tell an alpha gamer how many points and the minimum or maximum rules for attaining it. Give the newbies a few easy options each turn. As they get more comfortable with the rules, they’ll start asking you about options you haven’t delineated. That’s when they’re moving into alpha gamer mode.

Dragalongs are there because their friend is there or (worse) when you asked if they would like to learn a new game, they were too tired to say, “no”. Keep the game moving for them. Graciously accept everything they give, and don’t expect it to be very much. When their energy level rises (which may not be during this session), you’ll be happy that they didn’t have a bad experience with you.

Give everbody an overview of the game including the victory conditions. Go back over the broad strokes adding in finer layers of detail until you’ve reached the optimal moment to begin the game. Some players will never “get it”. When a majority does “get it”, launch the game. During the game, provide options and clues to those who want or need them. Keep the game moving at a comfortable pace. By the time you are done, the players will not be able to set up and run it again just as fast as you did; but if they can run the game at all, you’ve done your job.

Tom Vasel: You mentioned playtesters - how exactly do you playtest your games?

Jeff Siadek: Playtesting is a complex equation involving roping in reluctant players and fending off the overzealous re-designers in my group. I tend to take criticism too personally, which also doesn’t help.

A friend of mine, Steve Ratter, hosts a game day every once in a while, and I’ll try to trot out something new for those. It is a great bunch of gamers, many of whom are employed in the electronic gaming industry. There is usually a mix of serious gamers in with some guys who are just along for the ride, so I can get some different perspectives on my designs.

The tough part is separating the wheat from the chaff. To create anything, you need a profound confidence that you’ve got something amazing happening. This momentum carries you through the parts that just don’t yet work. If the environment is too supportive, you’ll miss errors; but if the environment is too critical, the overly sensitive (like me) are likely to give up on what could be a promising design.

I always think my first draft is practically the end product, and I’m always wrong. If I ever really knew how much work even a simple game was going to take, I couldn’t muster the energy.

A massive undertaking like Battlestations multiples the effort exponentially. More stuff means there are more interactions, so we couldn’t possibly playtest all of it completely.

It bothers me a bit that my ego is such a big player in the playtest game. In a perfect world, I’d work something up, have a balanced group on hand to playtest it and then get honest feedback and fix it or shelve it. In the real world, it is tough to find honest playtesters who don’t want to be doing something else or want to be redesigning my game. And the playtesting process happens in a context where I’m looking at deadlines for new releases and pressing family concerns, as my “day job” is raising my two little girls.
So I have to coordinate my playtests around playdates and playmates, and it just isn’t easy. Of course, having a life provides the context to make gaming worthwhile anyway.

Tom Vasel: What games, other than the ones you’ve designed, are your favorites?

Jeff Siadek: Titan is probably my all time favorite, but I find that in the time it takes to enjoy one good game of Titan, I could play some great German games like San Juan, Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan a couple of times each. I have a similar fondness for Civilization, but the time commitment there would allow me to instead play Chinatown, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne and Bang!

In Roleplaying, D&D is a terrible abomination with millions of pages of mismatched material building on an antiquated system. I happen to love it, though.

The only CCG I ever got into was Magic: The Gathering, but I really got into it. Selling off my Magic collection is how I started the seed money for Gorilla Games. We used to wind our roleplaying evenings up by playing Wiz War into the wee hours.

Growing up, my brother and I would set up every game in the house in a line across the dining room and coffee tables and play them in a line taking one turn each. Of course every game in the house was, Sorry, Monopoly, Chess, Checkers and the like, but we had fun. My family has also always been big on Scrabble.

These days, I’m playing a lot of crazy eights and Battlestations with my 4 year old daughter who said to me last month, “I’m glad you’re a game assembler, so we can play Battlestations together every day.” I almost cried.

Tom Vasel: What is your opinion of the current state of the board game industry?

Jeff Siadek: The industry is in a fantastic state. The German games have brought a design sensibility that has much more mass market appeal. There is a maturity to the industry that there is a status quo and every few years something to challenge it.

There are those who bemoan the encroachment of electronic games and other media competing for our market share. I say bring it on! I look forward to the day when the cards in a face to face game will be electronic paper computers. I know that if I’m alive 30 years from now, I’ll be designing games that take advantage of new tools, and I also know I’ll still make some games the way I make them now. The fun of rattling the dice in your hand or throwing down a card will never go away.

The great games will continue to be great. It gets harder to find new ground to till, but there are more and more designers and publishers that are committed to creating great works.

Tom Vasel: What parts of Battlestations can be attributed to the “German” games?

Jeff Siadek: I can’t sort out specific bits that came from the “German” games, but my design sensibilities in general have been profoundly influenced by them.

Simplicity is the most important lesson I’ve taken from the “German” games. Almost everything in Battlestations uses the 2d6 mechanic. I get tempted to follow a whim and create new fiddly mechanics that might be cute, but they aren’t worth making the players learn something new.

German game component quality was also a profound influence. My brother Jason (producer of Battlestations) wanted to make the box a treasure chest that when you open it, you are blown away by a ton of cool stuff.

Game length in general has shortened because of the German influence. The epic games that I grew up with have become dinosaurs. A new game today has a much better chance of success if it can be played in as short a time as possible. Battlestations still weighs in heavier than most modern games at 2-3 hours, but if I had designed it 20 years ago (and a wife and 2 kids ago), it would have taken all night to play.

The bottom line of the message I get from the German games is “make it fun to play”. That means making the rules quick and easy and the components appealing. The session should take long enough to relax in it but short enough that players will glance at their watches afterward and say, “Do we have time for another?”

Tom Vasel: A game like Battlestations has a rather large rulebook. What was it like putting that together?

Jeff Siadek: It was HECK only with a lot more “L"s.

Seriously, I had a 32 page rulebook finished about 2 years before we went to press and kept rewriting, adding and subtracting. Much of Galactic Civil War and part of Pax Galacticum was in the rulebook a year before we went to press but got pulled to make the rulebook smaller.

I used to think that companies put stuff in supplements, so they could space it out and sell more stuff. Now I realize that a 200 page rulebook no matter how well indexed and organized would have just been too much material. As I was writing it, I could add more and more because my playtesters and myself were already up to speed. When it came time to try to put the book into a format that somebody could come into cold and run a game it quickly became obvious that we needed to simplify, so I took out the campaign system and the navigation hazards and reserved them for later projects.

Another part of the process was the conflict between my brother and myself. He was a great force in pushing to make the game better, and I was tired and anxious just to be done. A great example of this is the ship naming schema. When I was writing scenarios, I’d just pull a name out of a hat. The week before we went to press at about 1:30 in the morning Jason asked me to go through the book and make the ship names conform to my naming schema. So I spent an hour adding that detail. At the time, it was hard. I can’t say I’ve had a single additional sale because of it, but there are many stories like that where we went the extra mile to make it that much better. In some ways, that came back to haunt us, as we’d make a late change in one part of the book but miss a reference to the same rule in another part. Every time we looked at the book we’d find something that could be better. I was exhausted.

We also had a ton of technical problems with the program we used for layout. When we were putting together the book there would be these massive crashes, and Jason had to retype the book at least 3 times. We were using unregistered software which I felt bad about, but I also knew I couldn’t afford the full ticket price alongside printing, diecutting, laminating etc.

I did buy the software before we published GCW, and it has worked perfectly ever since. The moral of this story is that if you don’t think you have the money to buy something legally and use it properly, you shouldn’t be using it illegally. I’d have been better off going into debt to buy the good stuff or using inferior public domain free stuff.

As far as the layout and the art, that part was super easy (for me). Jason would work on layout and editing all day and go to Dan Hamilton’s house at night to work on the art. I just got to say, “Wow! this is beautiful”.

Tom Vasel: What kind of feedback did you get? Did you incorporate any of it into your expansions?

Jeff Siadek: I’ve gotten a ton of feedback. Almost everybody has something to say. The trick is in sorting through the feedback and figuring how it can make the game better. Even bad advice is helpful if it points you in a good direction, and good advice takes a long time for me to accept sometimes.

Originally, my skill system was based on rolling a number of dice and counting only the highest two. Various penalties would add dice, and you’d take away the highest of them (similar to how the guns/shields work now). I invented this mechanic, and I was proud of it. Somebody else somewhere may have also invented it, but as far as I was concerned, it was mine. Robert Posada (of Chimera Magazine fame) suggested I consider making Battlestations use a D20. Since he’s a math whiz, I set about working my thoughts out on paper, so I could prove my system was better. It didn’t take long for me to realize that my system was a pile. I ended up going with 2d6 instead of d20, because it works better for the range of numbers I want to generate and the luck system in Battlestations.

Getting the same message from several sources has also helped to change my mind about some things. Up until a few months before we went to press, the engine power dropped to zero. At DunDraCon and the GAMA Trade Show, I had to explain to people over and over that the unused energy dissipated at the end of the round. At first, I thought people were just dense. Eventually, I realized that the only way to not have to keep explaining the energy drop to zero was to make the universe conform to what everybody was expecting and now the energy system works much better. There are many smaller changes that many people told me about that I would resist at first, and then by the time I accepted them I’d actually believe the changes sprung whole from my head.

As the game is unfolding in the expansions, we’re shoring up some of the rules in some areas. I’m saving some changes for a second edition but other more pressing changes are coming out as the expansions get released. In Pax, the systems for Stun and Plasma fires are getting overhauled. We’re also adding some “rock the boat” rules so your ship can get rocked by missiles and cannon fire. Almost every time I explain O.O.C. (out of control), people intuitively say, “Oh, so when the ship gets hit it gets rocked”. Now I’ll be able to say, “Yes!” instead of the sputtering, backpedaling I had been giving.

Tom Vasel: Jeff, thanks for the great game, and this interview! Do you have any final thoughts for our readers?

Jeff Siadek: Thank you for the opportunity to be heard. I also want to thank my brother Jason for his work in making Battlestations as cool as it is. Finally, I want to encourage anybody with questions about Battlestations to check out our yahoo message group or email me directly: questions@battlestations.info

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