Larry Levy:  All in the Family

Last week, I looked at some SdJ issues with respect to one of this year’s losing designers.  This week, I think I’ll spend some time talking about the winners.

First, a question some of you may be wondering about:  is Karen Seyfarth the first woman to win an SdJ for best game of the year?  The answer is no, but I’ll wager you can win a few bar bets if you know the only other woman to do so.  Scotland Yard, 1983’s winner, was credited to the “Ravensburger Project Teamâ€? and one of the half dozen designers on that team was Dorothy Garrels.

I’m sure some have wondered about Karen’s role in the design and if perhaps Thurn und Taxis is much more the result of Andreas’ efforts than that of his wife’s.  No one but the award-winning couple knows for sure, but I’m inclined to think that Mrs. Seyfarth contributed her fair share to the design.  Design credits aren’t usually handed out willy-nilly.  I also seem to recall an earlier interview with Andreas in which he said his wife (who came from much more of a game playing family than he did) helped him out on some of his early designs.  So, without any other evidence, I see no reason not to assume this is a shared win like any other.

Speaking of shared wins, it’s been a while since we’ve seen one of those.  The last one came when Kramer and Kiesling won with Torres in 2000 and was one of three Kramer shared victories in a five year period.  Other than those, the only award winners with multiple designers were the aforementioned Scotland Yard and ‘82’s Enchanted Forest, designed by Alex Randolph and Michel Matschoss.

So, is Thurn und Taxis the most notable game ever to be created by a husband and wife team?  I guess the award ensures that.  But there have been quite a few other fine ones.

Of course, you can’t talk broach this subject without talking about Doris & Frank.  Frank Nestel and Doris Matthäus share design credit on a dozen different games, including Ursuppe, Mü & Mehr, and Frank’s Zoo.  To be honest, I’ve always assumed that Frank did most or all of the design work, while Doris’ main contribution was her marvelous illustrations.  But there are two recent designs (Au Backe and Ark) which only include Frank’s name, despite the usual Doris artwork.  So this may be a very similar situation to the Seyfarths.

One early example of a married couples’ design is 1985’s Wildlife Adventure, which is credited to Wolfgang and Ursula Kramer.  Again, there’s no reason not to assume that Frau Kramer didn’t have a significant hand in this particular design, since she is never credited again, not even for any of the many spinoffs of the game (such as Terra X and Expedition).  Ursula holds the distinction for being Wolfgang’s first design partner, anticipating a trend that would not become significant for another decade.

Rüdiger Dorn’s latest game Los Mampfos (which was one of this year’s nominees for SdJ Children’s Game of the Year) is a joint effort with his wife Maja.  Santiago, one of the better games from 2003, was designed by Claudia Hely and Roman Pelek and I believe I read somewhere that they’re romantically involved.  The same two designers also created Die Weinhändler the next year.

Dirk Henn (the designer of 2003’s SdJ winner Alhambra) got his start by partnering with Barbara Weber to form the tiny publishing company db-Spiele (“dâ€? for Dirk and “bâ€? for Barbara).  The two created handmade versions of Henn’s designs and sold them at Essen during the early nineties—not from a stand, but Henn would roam the halls and sell them out of a backpack!  I’m not completely certain of the relationship between the two, but my understanding is that they’re married and were romantically involved at the time db-Spiele was formed.  I’m also not sure of Weber’s role in the creative process; Luding lists her as a co-designer of Henn’s first three games (Al Capone—which was reissued as Stimmt So, which became the basis for Alhambra—Spekulation, and Hopfen und Malz), while the Geek shows those as solo Henn designs.  At the very least, I believe she did the artwork on the early db-Spiele games.  So here’s a pair who might be married and who might have worked together on some games.  Don’t say you don’t get hard data on Boardgame News!

Of course, there are other familial relationships in gaming besides husband and wife.  In fact, the winner of this year’s SdJ Children’s Game of the Year (beating out the Dorns’ effort) was Der Schwarze Pirat, by Guido Hoffman, son of designing great Rudi Hoffman.  Guido also designed Akaba (last year’s DSP Children’s Game of the Year) and Siesta, a superior abstract.

If you’re a designer and you want your son to follow in your footsteps, you might want to call him “Guidoâ€?.  Guido Teuber, son of Klaus, has no designs to his credit, but he worked extensively with his father to produce online versions of his dad’s designs, consulted with Uberplay for a while, and is currently VP of marketing at Mayfair.

Sibling relations can also extend to gaming.  Kaivai, a highlight from last year, is the creation of the Ostertag brothers (Anselm and Helge) and is produced by their own game company, Pfifficus Spiele.  The two also have two new games coming out this Essen, along with an expansion for Kaivai.

The Ragnar Brothers aren’t related, of course—that’s just the whimsical name Gary Dicken and Steve Kendall chose for their publishing company.  But Steve’s brother Phil Kendall does have designer credit on several of the Ragnars’ most recent designs, including Kings and Castles, Viking Fury, and Canal Mania.  And Richard Breese’s sister Juliet is a talented artist who illustrated all of the early versions of his games (including all the “Keyâ€? games).

There’s probably more family relationships in gaming that I’m either unaware of or have just forgotten.  But as you can see, it isn’t an isolated instance.  We all know that the family that plays together, stays together, but the Seyfarths may have just shown us that the family that designs together, wines and dines together (maybe with a celebratory lager).

More on the Knizia SdJ Shutout
There was something else I wanted to mention in last week’s article about Reiner Knizia’s continued failure to capture an SdJ award, but the piece was long enough already.  One interesting thing about Knizia is that he’s one of the very few game designers in the world who doesn’t need to win an SdJ.  Obviously, it would be a tremendous honor and would add to his bank account, but he already makes an extremely good living as one of the few full-time designers.  This may be no small consideration.  An SdJ award can have a tremendous effect on a designer’s life.  Alan Moon has publicly stated that his first award got him out of debt and his second ensured that he’d be able to maintain his full-time designer status indefinitely.  In both instances, he was on the verge of having to find steadier employment had the award not turned up with his name on it.  So the possibility of winning an SdJ has to be in the back of the mind of most of today’s designers.  They may consciously or unconsciously alter their design style to help achieve this goal.  However, Knizia is doing just fine with no SdJ trophies on his mantelpiece.  If his games don’t fit the SdJ mold (and based on the record, they don’t appear to), he is free to continue designing games like that and still make a very nice living.  This may actually make him less likely to create designs that appeal to the SdJ Jury.

It’s just a theory of mine, but I have a little bit of supporting evidence.  Two other designers whose livelihoods are quite secure regardless of the awards they win are Wolfgang Kramer and Klaus Teuber.  Between them, they’ve won nine SdJ’s, but their recent games, which have followed the successes that gave them financial independence, have not done well with the Jury.  Since Kramer’s back-to-back awards in ’99 and ’00, which really put him in a class by himself, he has had only two games nominated for an award (and one, Maharaja, is a pure gamer’s game that had no realistic chance of winning).  And Teuber hasn’t received a nomination since 1997—in other words, since the worldwide success of Settlers allowed him to be able to design as he pleased.  The fact that the three most renowned designers in the world have been almost invisible with respect to this century’s SdJ awards may not entirely be a coincidence.

Games Played
I got in a couple of games of Roma last week.  It’s the first time I’ve had the chance to play it since my initial plays a few months ago.  The additional games confirmed to me that this is indeed a very good two-player design.  There’s lots of different strategies that can be pursued and it seems that every combination of opponent’s cards and/or run of fate can be handled in some way.  It really does seem as if 20 minutes is the more likely duration rather than the 45 minutes listed by the publisher, but that only adds to the game’s appeal, as it has one of the most concentrated ratios of meaningful decisions per minute played of any game in my collection.  This is definitely now part of my regular two-player game rotation.

We played with the designer’s suggested errata for the Mercator card.  This is the card that allows you to buy as many VPs from your opponent as you wish for 2 sesterii apiece.  Designer Stefan Feld acknowledges that this card is wildly unbalanced, as a player who draws it can wait until he builds up his bank account enough to buy the game away from his opponent.  The problem is that there were originally a couple of cards in the game that served to counteract the Mercator, but they were removed and Queen neglected to consider how this would affect the Mercator.  Feld’s current suggestion is that you limit the Mercator’s power to no more than three VPs per die allocated to the card.  This worked very well for us, but I’m wondering if anyone has seen an official change concerning the card.

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