Patrick Korner: Interview with Vlaada Chvatil

In recent years, European boardgame design has seen a distinct expansion beyond the traditional German nucleus. France, Italy and elsewhere are home to rapidly-growing design hubs, so it is only natural that this trend show up in the Eastern direction as well – witness the rise of Poland and the Czech Republic as countries home to game designers that any self-respecting gamer pays close attention to.

Mention the Czech Republic in a gaming sense, and you’ll usually find one designer at the top of everyone’s list: Vlaada Chvatil, whose far-ranging and unique designs typically share little in common except for excellence. Through The Ages: A Story Of Civilization, Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker, Prophecy and others: Chvatil’s designs refuse to be pigeonholed.

Vlaada was kind enough to take some time out of his incredibly hectic pre-Essen schedule to let me interview him – enjoy!

Patrick Korner: How did you get into boardgaming? I believe Petr Murmak of Czech Games Edition (CGE) had mentioned that you were originally in the computer game industry, correct?

Vlaada Chvatil: Yes, I was, but it was secondary. First, there was my passion for games. Back then, I considered computers a great platform for games. This is why I started my studies of informatics at University. Well, maybe I don’t remember the true reasons, but I remember what my studies looked like – I spent 95% of my school time on school computers, programming (or playing) games. Just to be clear, I am not speaking about the current mainstream action productions for bored teenagers. I am speaking about those great and epic strategic games, like Sid Meier’s Civilization or Heroes of Might and Magic series, for true gaming geeks :) The theme of my graduation thesis was “Tactical and Strategic Computer Games,” and I created a complex multiplayer turn-based strategy game as a part of it.

Later, I was working as a programmer, designer or project manager at Altar Interactive, working mainly on strategic or logical games. But the videogames industry changed as it started to be all about big companies and gigantic budgets. Not a good time for an independent studio trying to create something original. So the studio transformed, and I left. I was creating board games as my hobby all the time anyway, so I just slightly altered my preferences. Currently, I am cooperating on some smaller videogame projects, but I am spending more time working on board games.

PK: Do you own or play many other games? How many games do you own and which game (that you did not design) would you say is your favourite?

VC: I own a very small number of games personally because many years ago, we founded the Brno boardgames club. When I like some game, I buy it and give it to the club. We play regularly there, and when I want to play something at home, I can borrow it from the club. The exceptions are kids games – to be honest, my daughters of age 3 and 5 have probably more games in their room than me :)

I can’t say I have one favorite game; I like variety, and I rarely play the same game two times in a row. I don’t even have my favourite game type. I like Stephan Feld’s games (Year of the Dragon, Notre Dame) because of elegant yet thematic design, those of Reiner Knizia with stronger theme (for example, the cooperative Lord of the Rings, Amun-Re or Blue Moon City), Agricola because of theme and variety, Puerto Rico because of its great type of interaction, Battlestar Galactica because it is Battlestar Galactica, Dragon’s Gold because of positive negotiating (and because of “Invisible Hand,” the greatest card of all time), and many others. I like theme in games, but not necessarily. (Knizia’s Ingenious is a good example.) I like a reasonable amount of randomness, so you have to play intuitively rather than calculate. Some games, like Kingsburg, Stone Age or Small World, are tempting me because of the nice-looking board and components. Generally, I prefer games that excel in some aspect (even if they have some minor issues in others) before games that are just okay in all aspects – there are too many “generic Euros” I have played once, quite liked, and never played again.

There are also some games I am playing only online, mostly short ones that work best with two – for example, Dominion, Saint Petersburg, San Juan or Thurn & Taxis. They last about ten minutes, and if I need a break, they are better relaxation than Free Cell or Minesweeper :)

PK: The boardgaming industry in the Czech Republic has seemingly sprung out of thin air over the past few years, but this is probably just due to greater visibility. How big is the Czech gaming industry, and how well-established is it?

VC: This depends on what you include in the boardgaming industry: There are several game importers (most gaming hits get local publication), there are several children’s and family game publishers (some of them publishing also for other countries of Central and Eastern Europe). For almost twenty years, there is the strong hobby game publisher ALTAR.

The Czech production for the international market has its roots in a relatively strong Czech gamers community. There are dozens of gaming events each year, and while the Czech Republic is relatively small, the most active people got together soon. In 2006, the idea of Czech Board Games (and one year later Czech Games Edition) came about, to bring the most promising Czech designs to the international market.

PK: Is there any connection between CBG and CGE? Why the ‘split’? Does CBG have closer ties to ALTAR, as it seems several of their recent releases are also ALTAR publications?

VC: I can only describe it from my point of view. (I was cooperating with CBG when it split, but I was not part of it.) CBG is an association that helps new Czech authors. Over the year, they hold several workshops, where people present their prototypes. CBG picks the best and presents a limited edition in Essen. Then they try to find a publisher for the game. They also present ALTAR titles in Essen; before, ALTAR was publishing only here in Czech Republic, but they feel some ALTAR titles deserve more attention.

The CBG people were doing this as a hobby. However, it takes hundreds or even thousands of hours to go from a working prototype to a final tested and balanced game, with high quality components, art, rules etc. If you try to do this together with your fulltime job, you end up working overnight for months, spending your holidays on it or even taking an unpaid leave of absence – and there are still compromises in quality, as for the limited print runs the production costs are higher, you can’t hire professional artists, etc. So, some of the CBG people (mostly those who really worked on Through the Ages) wanted to transform CBG into a more regular publisher. Another group disagreed. So they split – CGE was founded as a publisher, while CBG remained as an association for Czech authors.

At that time, I was invited to enter CGE, and I accepted because I love to work on games (and not only on my own games – I am quite sure Shipyard, the new title from Vladimir Suchy will be one of the hits of this Essen). :)

PK: Was Arena your first design for Altar? Or have you designed other games that don’t have entries on BoardGameGeek yet? Similarly, there is a five-year gap between Arena (1997) and Prophecy (2002); was this gap due to other commitments, other games that we don’t know about, or something else?

VC: During my studies, I was creating board games for my friends, but with no intention of publishing them. I was working for ALTAR at that time, but mostly on their roleplaying systems. To be honest, the core ideas of Arena I designed for a roleplaying game combat system. Later, I created Arena as a standalone game from that, and it was my first published game.

Then, ALTAR Interactive (a different company than ALTAR publishing) was founded, and we started to work on computer games. It was the most enthusiastic – but also the most hectic – period of my life, and there was simply no time for anything else. When it kind of settled down, I returned to board games. (My main job was still taking more time than a regular job, but not all of it.)

PK: It seems that some of your earlier games (Grænaland, Prophecy) were inspired more by other board games (Settlers and Talisman), while some of your later efforts have their roots in computer games (Through the Ages, the upcoming Dungeon Lords). Where else do you draw inspiration from? For example, Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert are very original concepts; where did you get these ideas from?

VC: I don’t know :). The best ideas come to me when I see unused potential. Galaxy Trucker is probably based on all those “solve a puzzle faster than others” games. I liked the idea that players are combining tiles under time pressure, but I wanted them to create something rather than to find a solution for a problem someone designed before. The flight itself is then just a more interesting method of scoring (and destroying) their creations.

The original intention when designing Space Alert was to eliminate the “it can be played just as well by one player” aspect of cooperative games. And I didn’t want to have a traitor in the game; in many groups, there are persons (mostly girls) who are unhappy when they have to spoil the common effort of the group, especially in a cooperative game with strong atmosphere. And I wanted it to really be a team activity, where the group is improving when training together. The ideas of Space Alert then were more or less logical steps evolved from these requirements.

As for Grænaland, its similarity with Settlers is coincidence. The first version of Grænaland used different resources and buildings mechanics: the same cards were used both as buildings or armies and as a resource: you pick one you want to build and discard several others as its cost. (This was back in 2003, so at that moment, I didn’t know San Juan would use the same mechanics.) Anyway, for me, the most important mechanic that makes Settlers special is trading, which is not present in Grænaland. Grænaland‘s main mechanic is the resource distribution; if it is loosely inspired by another game, it is rather Dragon’s Gold by Bruno Faidutti which I like a lot.

As for Prophecy, it was no coincidence. I was asked to create a game for people who like Talisman, so I did.

As for Through the Ages, I just like a strong theme, and our world history is the most epic theme you can wish for. I was not trying to rework the computer game; I was just using the same theme. (By the way, Through the Ages was not my first attempt at that. I created one unpublished game with a civilization theme before.) However, if you spend as much time playing computer Civilization as me, you can’t stay unaffected; this experience influences your consciousness about what the important aspects of civilization development are that are worth mentioning. It is rather me who was influenced by the computer game than the game itself.

PK: Theme is clearly a very important aspect of your designs. Do you usually start with a thematic concept and then work out how to make the game mechanisms tie in, or do you sometimes also start with a unique mechanism?

VC: Neither of these. Or both of these, hard to tell :). The point is that I am thinking about, let’s say, a dozen or more games at once. Sometimes I have an interesting mechanism and I am trying to find the best theme for it, sometimes I have theme and I am considering different mechanics for it. However, this process takes usually months or years – I am not working on the games, just thinking about them from time to time, re-evaluating them, combining mechanics and themes from different such projects etc. And the moment I feel that all components of one of these latent projects perfectly fit, I start to actually work on it.

So it is hard to track the entire process. It can happen that I am thinking about a theme, then develop interesting mechanics for it, and then I see it fits better for another theme… and then combine it with mechanics I was intending for different game, and those mechanics became the main feature of the game in the end… etc.

However, once I really start to work on a game, the theme is a fixed element. I can switch the mechanics if testing proves they don’t work well, but as far as I can remember, I never switched the theme at this point. I have spent many hours thinking about the game from the point of view of the given theme, thus changing it is like moving back to square zero. There are many choices during development, and sometimes you can’t say at the moment which option will be better from the gameplay point of view. If I have a strong theme, it guides me – first, I try the options that fit better to the theme.

PK: Humour is also something that readily shows through in your designs, from the rulebooks to the way the games are designed to incorporate it (i.e. making sure to push the reset button in Space Alert, striving to be “less evil” in Dungeon Lords). Is this something you carried over to board games from your computing background? Or did you deliberately look around the gaming landscape, see a void and look to fill it?

VC: I don’t know, it kind of happened :). I consider humour to be part of life. And I like to entertain people. Imagine you have a prototype you are explaining to new people over and over, for several months. Over time, you are adding some funny stuff to the process, and you see people are having much more fun than when just listening to the rules. It would be shame to not include this even for people who buy the game later.

Also, funny themes are easier to incorporate. Sometimes, you need to add a mechanic or cards that are hard to explain within the theme. Generally, it is easier to work with fantasy and sci-fi themes as they allow you to incorporate a wider range of mechanics… and funny fantasy or sci-fi allows you to explain almost anything. (Well, that’s not the main reason, of course – I like witty sci-fi and fantasy. Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett belong to my favorite writers.)

The only problem here is, that for some reason, it is expected that funny theme = light family game. True gamers need serious themes. This is a cliché I want to break. Space Alert, Dungeon Lords, and to some extent even Galaxy Trucker are complex and unforgiving games for gamers – for gamers who like to have fun. I know there are enough of those. For example, me and many of my friends :)

PK: Can you describe Dungeon Lords a little? It seems fairly clear that the game owes its origins at least in part to the old PC game Dungeon Keeper, but there are several unique aspects to it. How did the design come about?

VC: This can be partly nostalgia. I don’t know, maybe when I moved from video games to board games (as an author, and also as a player), I didn’t leave some of the aspects I loved most about the good old computer games behind. This is probably why I created Dungeon Lords – to be honest, I created that game for myself. I was not thinking about target groups, releasing options, etc. when creating the first version. I just wanted to have all the stuff a good dungeon-building game should have there. And it worked; my gaming friends really enjoyed the game.

The game consists of two parts. In the building part, you build your dungeon, run some simple economics, hire creatures, buy traps, etc. Your actions influence other players. (If you buy all of the food in the village, players that come later have to threaten the villagers or even burn part of the village down to get the food they need.) If you are able to see the needs and problems of the other dungeons, you can guess what other players intend to do and you can optimize your moves then. (For example, visit the village after another player if you want to spare your gold and you don’t mind becoming more evil.) The concept of good and evil is another interesting interaction; adventurers decide which dungeon to visit according to the relative evil rating of the players, so experienced players can maneuver on the “Evilometer” to attract the adventurers they can most easily defeat.

The combat is kind of a small mini-game for each player: Adventurers are trying to conquer his dungeon, and he has to defeat them before they do too much damage. The rules are simple, but the variety of traps and monsters (acquired by the player during the building phase), as well as the levels and special skills of the heroes makes each situation unique.

PK: Can you talk about the upcoming Space Alert expansion? Will it be a “big” expansion like the one for Galaxy Trucker, or will it be something smaller?

VC: The expansion is in an advanced state of development, but unfortunately it will not be released at Essen this year. It will be a “not-as-big-as-the-big-one-yet-still-relatively-big expansion.” It will have the similar structure: several parts that can be freely combined to add variety and to adjust the game for your group. For a game like Space Alert, it is even more important.

There is a completely new set of Action Cards (the ones with arrows and actions) that allows an experienced crew to be much more efficient during a mission. And of course new missions that would be almost impossible to solve with the old set of cards.

There will be specializations (Medic, Analytic, Rocket Engineer, etc.) that allow players to perform specific powerful actions during the flight. For RPG fans, there will be an option to create a character, to gain experience and ranks, and to improve their specializations this way. Plus a small bonus for those who like to roleplay every session.

And, of course, there will be lots of new enemies; some will expand the decks already in the game, but there will also be a completely new level of enemies (red difficulty). They are not just stronger – they use new tricky mechanics (phasing so they can’t be hit in some rounds, switching from one trajectory to another, summoning other threats at certain moments, etc.). It requires much more skill and experience to hunt them down. Some enemies (especially the inner ones) are so mean that many testing groups just start to panic as soon as they appear. You will recall my words if one of those appears when your group plays the game :)

PK: What’s on the horizon that we can look forward to from you? Is there any truth to the rumour of a Through the Ages expansion?

VC: On the horizon of weeks, or on the horizon of years? :) Beside the games already announced, I can’t tell for sure. I have some ideas in an advanced state, but I am not sure which one will make it to a final game soon.

And as for Through the Ages, I am not considering an expansion… However, they say there is some truth in every rumor, right? :)

PK: Many thanks to Vlaada for his highly informative answers!

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