W. Eric Martin: Designer Profile—Kory Heath

Kory Heath’s list of published games is an eclectic one: the party game Why Did The Chicken...?, in which players create punchlines for randomly generated situations; the inductive logic game Zendo, in which players try to determine rules for constructing figures; the bluffing game Criminals (BGN first impression); and the abstract game Uptown (BGN preview).

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Heath’s gaming background is similarly spotty. “I almost don’t consider myself a boardgamer, in the past or now,” he says. “Of course, I played the standards as a kid: Monopoly, Battleship, Hungry Hungry Hippos—you know the drill.” His parents taught him various Rummy games, trick-taking games and push-your-luck dice games, while high school brought experience in chess.

“I’ve never played Risk or Axis and Allies (and probably never will). Somehow I even managed to miss D&D and Magic,” says Heath. “I did, however, play tons of computer games. One of my favorites was (and still is) M.U.L.E., a strategy game about settling a colony on a new planet. And one day I saw this game called Settlers of Catan on the shelf of a hobby store, and I thought to myself, ‘That looks like a boardgame version of M.U.L.E.!’ That’s how I discovered Eurogames.”

Heath remains a Eurogame fan, although he says that some of the games he likes are harder to categorize. “Mostly I’m looking for games that are easy to learn, don’t take too long to play, but present lots of juicy decisions,” he says.

Heath’s favorite game these days? “Although I know it’s trendy, I have to rank No Limit Texas Hold’em as my favorite game,” he says. “It has so many elements that I like: analysis, intrigue, excitement, and wild swings of fortune. But poker is kind of a world unto itself, and in some ways it’s difficult to compare it to other games. In the realm of ‘normal’ games, it’s hard to pick a favorite. For some reason, a game that’s coming to mind at the moment is Kramer’s Daytona 500. It has the perfect level of ‘juiciness’ for my taste. Every time I play it, I immediately want to play again.”

Hold on to that notion of juiciness because we’ll come back to it later…

Player to Creator
As with many gamers, Heath’s discovery soon led him down the path of creation: “Whenever I find something I like, I always have this urge to create more instances of it. When I read books as a kid, I wanted to write them. When I played computer games, I wanted to design them. When I heard music, I wanted to compose it. So when I got into boardgames in the late 1990s, I immediately wanted to design my own.”

As for his range in game design, Heath says that results from his attempts to work within a pre-existing genre. “For instance, Zendo was an attempt to create an induction game that was more to my taste than the classic Eleusis,” he says. “RAMBots was an attempt to create a robot-programming game for the Icehouse pieces which focuses more on player interaction than RoboRally does. Why Did the Chicken...? was an attempt to create a Balderdash-like game in which funny answers win. And Criminals was an attempt to create a Werewolf-style game which could be played with just a handful of people and no moderator.”

“Stylistically, they’re all over the map,” he acknowledges. “In hindsight, I find that pleasing, but it certainly wasn’t intentional.”

RAMBots is one of three games that Heath created using the Icehouse game system from Looney Labs; Zagami and Zendo are the other two titles. Says Heath, “Icehouse has the same appeal that a deck of playing cards has: a simple set of components with so many possibilities. It gives you a framework within which to design, which can be more inspiring than a blank canvas. And the Icehouse pieces are so pretty and tactile.”

A simple set of components with many possibilities—that’s a decent summary of game design a la Heath, who says that his style is influenced by “the simplicity and elegance I find in some of the games designed by Sid Sackson, Alex Randolph, Reiner Knizia, et. al. Of my own published designs, Zagami, RAMBots, and even Criminals turned out a bit too complex for my taste. Zendo, WDtC, and Uptown fully exemplify the kind of simplicity I’m shooting for.”

Mining for Gold
“I want to create a game that has roughly the same level of simplicity and elegance as Cartagena or TransAmerica, but also has that extra level of juiciness that makes it truly great,” Heath says. “That’s not easy to do when you’re working in such a rarefied domain.”

In a column about Heath, designer Andy Looney noted that “I’ve created many of my best games in very short order, overnight in some cases, in days or weeks in others. On the other hand, Kory designs games very slowly, like a slow methodical craftsman, tinkering away in his workshop for months or years before finishing something (an analogy Kory once used to describe himself, as I recall, describing me, by comparison, as a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ style inventor).”

As Heath elaborates, “Although some may view this as hubris, I actually do aim for a kind of ‘perfection’ in my designs. There’s probably no such thing as a truly perfect game, but I do have a strong internal sense of when a rule or a design-solution is deeply ‘right.’ Basically, I refuse to stop working on a game until there’s absolutely nothing about the ruleset that bugs me—and I’m very easily bugged!”

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