Responses to Dave Shapiro's Questions for a Risk Book, Part 1

In December 2012, Dave Shapiro contacted me to contribute to a book about Risk he was co-authoring.This took the form of answers to a series of questions. And it turned out to be about 5,000 words, 5% or more of the length of the average novel (must have been good questions!).

Dave’s co-author later suffered ill health, and the book was ultimately published in Kindle form (Risk: The Book: A Compendium by Dave Shapiro), without my contribution. So here are my answers, slightly edited, eight years later. (This will be in five parts.)

Dave’s questions are in bold.

When and how did you become interested in playing games?

I can’t recall a time when I didn’t like to play games. Growing up in the 50s and 60s there were many fewer distractions and entertainment opportunities than now - for example I was lucky to get three (black and white) TV stations instead of two, and there were no computer games. (I say computer games because the first computer game I saw, when I was 18, had no video, each turn it printed out a simple “map” of a part of Federation space for a game called “Star Trek”.) So boardgames were very much an outlet for activity and creativity. (I also played sports.) And I started to design games as soon as I was old enough to understand what that meant, for example writing rules for our battles with plastic tanks and soldiers.

You have had some very successful designs (Britannia), do you still play games?

I have a friend who is an excellent game designer but he doesn’t design many games because he likes to play games too much. I don’t have that problem, although there was a 20 year period from about 1984 to 2004 when the only designing I did was modifications to Dungeons & Dragons and the only game I played was Dungeons & Dragons.

My favorite “game” is the game of designing games, really.

In aid of designing games I’ll play a lot. Iplayed Britannia solo more than two dozen times in the six months, testing a new edition. Every new design I get to prototype stage, I play solo several times. But I try not to play my prototypes when other people are playing, it skews the results (I call it the “Designer Effect”). I don’t play the published versions of my games - I made them for other people, not for me - and I almost never play a tabletop game designed by someone else, though I’ll play the occasional simple video game. I don’t want to spend the time to play the more time-consuming video games.

Yet there’s one old video game, Empire Deluxe Enhanced Edition, that I play many hours a month, and have for more than eight years.

If you have a game with more than two players, where you cannot gain an advantage (or disadvantage) from talking with the other players, you may as well call it a puzzle, not a game. I don’t like puzzles, if I succeed, that’s what I should have done, if I don’t, I feel stupid. Why bother?

I’m a people-watcher when it comes to games, trying to figure out why someone likes to play. So I enjoy watching as much as playing, and watching takes a lot less concentration and can be easily interrupted.

Do you prefer playing board games, card games or video games?

If I play a game just for pleasure it’s probably first edition Dungeons & Dragons. Games with cards, though not with a standard deck, can be pretty relaxing because they rarely need to be taken seriously. But I am much more a boardgamer than a card game player, and more of either than a video game player. Most video games don’t have much staying power, and the ones that do can take up so much time that I have to stop and say “I don’t have time for this because I need to design my own games”.

I’m much more interested in strategic games than tactical games. Though much of D&D is tactical, isn’t it?

What is your favorite board game?

It would have to be Britannia. I’d better like it! It’s a good “what happens next?” game, which really helps make solo play more enjoyable. But I wouldn’t play it if I wasn’t playtesting a new version. I go to WBC every year to watch the Britannia tournament, but I never play. Gets funny reactions from the guys, though they’re used to it now. I did play once in the tournament recently, so that two friends could also play. Managed to win, and retired undefeated!

What is your favorite card game?

Probably my as yet unpublished pirates game. It’s a “screwage” game that no one takes real seriously, and serendipitously has the desirable characteristic that players make up their own objectives, such as getting the biggest pirate fleet, or taking a ship of the line or the Spanish treasure fleet. They can enjoy playing even if they don’t “win” according to the game rules. Everything’s better with Pirates!

What is your favorite video game?

For many years, Civilization in several incarnations. Turn-based strategy games in general. I don’t have the quickness (6'7" people rarely do) or dexterity, especially at my age and with arthritis in my hands and wrists, to play real-time strategy anymore, and even when I did play a lot when I was younger (Total Annihilation!) I had to slow it way down to enjoy it!

But for the past several years I’ve played (far too much) one old (2004) wargame, Empire Deluxe Enhanced Edition.

END PART 1