Shannon Appelcline: Small Press Interviews: Vainglorious Games

Vainglorious Games is one of the newest publishers out there (#8828 in the master BGG database).  It’s the smallest of small publishers, as it’s a one-man show run by Eric Vogel, which has just put out its first game, Cambria.

Eric Vogel also happens to be a friend of mine, someone who I game with on more Wednesdays than not. Though I can’t offer an unbiased review of his game as a result, I can offer up an interview that talks about his creative process. That’s what follows; it’s the second of my smal press interviews.

The Game

Vainglorious’ first game is Cambria. It’s a filler game involving dice and majority control that can be found online at Boulder Games, Boards & Bits, and Noble Knight Games.

The Vainglorious Q&A

Eric was kind enough to answer the following questions in an email interview conducted in early November:

Q: What got you into Euro-gaming in the first place?

A: As a child I used to buy the old Metagaming micro games, which I almost never actually played because the rules were too difficult for children.  I played a lot of American hobby games like Illuminati and Nuclear War back in high school.  I let that hobby go in college because it just wasn’t a chick magnet.

Much later, I became a child psychologist and I played a lot of games with children in therapy.  I started designing psychotherapeutic games for children, and eventually got Land of Psymon published.  So playing and designing games for therapy reminded me that gaming just for fun was something I really liked.  I found a weekly games meet-up in San Francisco with the internet, and the people there started introducing me to Euro Games.

That was it, I started buying loads of games and playing games every week.  It still isn’t a chick magnet though.

Q: Having played both, do you now prefer Euro Games to those older American games, or do you think they both have strengths?

A: For the most part I prefer Euro Games.  Certainly, all the games I design are in the Euro Game mold.  There are a few of the old American Games that I still like playing, and that bring an element of strong theme or direct interaction which is often missing in Euros.  I am big fan of Martin Wallace, and his games retain most of the qualities in the old American games that I sometimes miss.

Q: What can you tell us about the therapeutic game you designed several years ago?

A:Well, most of the published psychotherapy games were nothing terribly innovative.  Richard Gardner had the bright idea of making a simple Candy Land style board game with therapy content on cards back in the early 1970s.  Since then, all anyone else had done was to make the same sort of game with slightly varied psychotherapy content on the cards. I’m a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, so I spent quite a while musing over how to make an effective CBT game, with more of a theme-mechanic relationship than previous therapy games. I eventually lit on the idea of a Pokemon like game, with cognitive distortions as the monsters.  Then I did a lot of revision of it based on feedback from clients.

Eventually I pitched the game to Western Psychological Services, who publish most of the therapy games as well as many of the important psychological tests.  They asked for a few more revisions, including the addition of “good” monsters representing thinking skills.

Q: At this point you’ve developed both psychotherapy games and European-style games. How have you found the design process different?

A: They are almost totally dissimilar.  Originality and cleverness of mechanics is almost completely unimportant when designing a therapy game.  You just need to create a form of delivering psychoeducational content which is somewhat fun, and which ideally involves some kind of relationship between the activity of the game and the activity you want the child to learn from the game. Therapy games can’t be too difficult or have difficult to understand mechanics.  The kids could handle difficult mechanics, but the therapists would be totally confused.  So it’s all about how to game-ize the therapy content.  In that sense, I suppose they are more like American games; the theme is the raison d’etre for the game and the mechanics may all be familiar.

By contrast, the whole raison d’etre for creating a Euro game is that you have at least one original mechanic in mind, and you go looking for a theme to fit it.  For my current game, Cambria, the die rolls indicating a majority control region was the central mechanic.  Once the game took the form of surrounding VP tokens with player pieces, I knew the theme should be one of besieging strongholds.  At first I tried to have the players play into regions on the board, but visually that ended up being kind of muddled.  So that ended up turning into roads between the strongholds.  I tried a couple of different historical themes before I settled on Roman occupied Wales.  The Romans were known for building forts and roads in Britain, so I settled on that.  Then I started reviewing that history in detail, and came across a period when Irish warriors were invading Roman-era Wales.  Wales had a fairly extensive network of roads and forts, although not quite so extensive as in my game. 

Overall, it made for a reasonable theme-mechanic relationship in my mind, although the history in this case is so obscure that I am not sure it means much to most players.  In a review Matt Drake said I should have made it about surrounding drunken coeds with frat boys; a trifle creepy, but to each his own I say.

Q: What made you decide on dice and majority control as the mechanics for the game?

A: Of the different kinds of common Euro mechanics I like majority control games the best.  I love games like Web of Power/China, Gangster, and Mykerinos.  As you noted in your piece recently, there has been kind of a wave of dice games using novel dice mechanics.  I noticed that my favorite games had all been dice driven games lately: Ysphan, Kingsburg.

So I was wanting to create a dice driven game.  I created a couple of them actually.  Cambria started life as a card game, and morphed into a dice game.  That change encompassed a number of beneficial side effects, including making the game much faster.  The card game took about 45 minutes to play and the dice game only took 20 minutes.  I am not sure I would have self-published a game at all if I hadn’t happened to design a game as well-suited to self publication as Cambria.

Q: Was it just the playing time which made you decide to self-produce Cambria, or were there other facts that made it stand out among your designs for self publication?

A: The main factor was that the game used a small number of bits, and for the most part didn’t need any bits that would be too expensive or have to be manufactured.  I don’t think most people want to lay out $40+ for a self published game.  Too many of them turn out to be pretty poor.

So I wanted it to be cheap enough that people would feel ok about taking a chance on it.  The brevity of the game was also a factor.  Everybody needs 20-30 minute games for the start and the end of the night, lunch hour, etc.  Most 20-30 minute games are card games, so a 20 minute area-control board game is a bit of a novelty.  I wanted it to have a Euro look and feel about it too, because I think buyers are wary of independently produced American style games.

Q: Did you have any surprises when you went to actually produce your game?

A: The box turned out to be flimsier than I had expected. I thought I was getting the same type of box as a sample I had been sent, just in a different color. The flimsy box has turned out to be an almost universal complaint about the game by reviewers.  Aside from that, I went through a bunch of sample materials, considering different options about how to do the bits, so I got what I expected. 

I guess the other ‘surprise,’ or at least aspect I had underestimated, was the amount of time I spend assembling copies and going to the post office.  It’s like having some sweatshop job that I do after I get home from work.  In trying out different materials, I developed ways to do things like folding gameboards, wrap around box labels, etc., but I realized that these were pretty labor intensive and easy to mess up; it would have increased the assembly time per unit dramatically.

The point of doing Cambria for me was to let me discover the pitfalls and surprises involved in self-publishing without committing an uncomfortable amount of money or my time to the enterprise. Having done that, I could make up my mind whether I would want to put out a larger/more expensive edition of something. It wouldn’t be hard to make a nicer edition of Cambria at the same cost per unit, as long as I made 5000 units, but of course that increases the amount of money I’d have to spend up front dramatically.  It’s like a multiplier in a game; nobody likes to be up against the Virus in Cosmic Encounter.

Q: Thanks for the insight into the game! Is there anything else you’d like to say about Cambria or design in general before we finish up?

A: No, I think I’ve yakked enough.  Thanks for letting me talk about it.  This has been a particularly fun part of this process.

Around the Corner

If you’re a small press company who’s put out a mere handful of games, drop me a line and I’d be happy to consider talking about you in a future article.

As usual, I’ve been writing reviews over at RPGnet, with my most recent writings being about Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries and a role-playing game accessory called The Stone Bard Inn.

I’ll see you back here in two weeks when I talk about the five newest games that I’m most thankful for. Feel free to start making guesses about what they might be in the comments below. I’ll give you a hint: the ones I’ve already settled on are pretty vanilla, but still worth talking about. With that said, I’ll see you on Turkey Day.

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