Game Designer Interview: Jason Matthews

You may not have heard his name before, but if you’ve ever browsed through the rankings on BoardGameGeek, you’ve seen his work right there at the top. Jason co-designed not only the top-rated Twilight Struggle, but also 1960: The Making of the President, Campaign Manager 2008, and Founding Fathers. His penchant for political themes makes his games extremely unique, and the mechanics make them interesting and fun. I’d like to thank Jason for taking the time to let me find out more about his designs.

How does it feel to have (co-)designed the democratically-decreed “best board game in the history of the world”?

The response of the gaming community has been pretty amazing and incredibly gratifying.  Of course, like most game designers, I got into the field because of the stories of nubile young groupies and wild parties.  So, it has not been without its disappointments.

Twilight Struggle is an excellent, and now pretty famous, game. It’s a design that’s far off from the modern emphasis on elegance, with some rough edges and crazy possibilities (which, I think, is what makes it so exciting). Do you feel this is accurate? Do you feel like if you designed today it would look considerably different?

Twilight Struggle was designed with a specific audience in mind.  It was a game for GMT customers and enthusiasts for “card driven” wargamers.  It just happened that Ananda and I were both also very interested in Euro design.  So, we consciously brought elements of European design into what we were doing.  But, that is not to say we abandoned all classical wargame conventions.  So what you end up with is sort of a hybrid.  I think we have seen more and more of that recently.  At first, it was all in one direction — wargamers who wanted shorter playing times and more elegance and simplicity to mechanics.  Now, I think you can feel the push from the other direction, Eurogamers who are finding themeless 45 minute games to be forgettable.  They now want the sort of narrative and arch to a gaming experience that was always the hallmark of American hobby games.  The result is more games that borrow from both schools of design.  And for me, that’s a sweet spot.  As for whether I would change much if we designed Twilight Struggle today, I doubt it.  I learned alot about the wording of events from that experience, and 1960 and the subsequent games are much “cleaner” in that respect.  But there would still be dice, it would still be long by Euro standards.  That stuff was intentional and designed for the initial target audience.

Your games seem to share the same overarching systems, but Twilight Struggle is the only one deemed a “war game”. What does that word mean to you?

I think we get wrapped around that word mistakenly.  Back when the hobby definied itself as board games vs. RPGs vs. CCGs, no one worried about that word.  Was Advanced Civilization a wargame?  Was Pax Brittanica?  Who knew?  It did not matter, because at least you were not pretending to be an elf.  There was a term that was used, “Consim” or conflict simulation, that encapsulated all these things.  Twilight Struggle is a conflict simulation.  It is also more like a wargame than many Euro games, but whether or not it would meet some more narrow definition of wargame is kind of immaterial.  It is clearly NOT a traditional wargame, but many games that are not traditional wargames — games like Origins of WWII — were happily lumped in with the genre without notice or complaint for decades.

To me, Twilight Struggle, 1960: The Making of a President, and Campaign Manager 2008 are sort of a natural progression, starting with a grandiose, heavy, complex game and shrinking down to a simpler game with a less serious take on the theme. Do you view the games that way – and is that meant to be a bit of political commentary, especially Campaign Manager 2008’s tongue-in-cheek approach?

We like poking a little bit of fun at all of our subjects.  So, while all the games we have designed have covered significant historical events, I’m a bit of a smart ass, and can’t help myself.  The complexity of those three games is certainly a progression, but not deliberately in that sense.  Much of the length and complexity deals with what we were trying to portray in the game.  The Cold War is an epic game with a huge scale.  The two election games are much shorter periods of time.  It shouldn’t take you 3 hours to do the entire Cold War and the same amount of time to do one presidential election with a similar system — in my humble opinion, anyway.  With Campaign Manager, another control on time was the vantage point we were giving you (also part of the reason the game is so tongue-in-cheek).  You are managing a campaign, developing a strategy.  The cards have bit of a cynical edge, because once you have been involved in a major political campaign, you are likely to be a little cynical too.

Although I just described the games as a “natural progression”, 1960 has a striking difference: the cube bag. You found a way to do some more controlled randomization but then went back to the heavy randomness of dice and some powerful random events in Campaign Manager 2008. Was this a matter of convenience/simplicity, or do you feel that the 1960 system and its further emphasis on skill and minimal randomness didn’t give as many opportunities for extreme comebacks and blowouts?

Part of this was very conscious.  The election of 1960, until the 2000 elections was the closest modern presidential election in US history.  So we needed the experience to be tight at the end.  We want players sitting on the edge of their seats as those final cubes are pulled out of the bag.  That’s what the election was like.  That’s the experience we are trying to give.  As for the 2008 elections, well, it was not quite the same nail bitter.  But it did have some dramatic events, and had they been capitalized on differently, I think the outcome may have been changed.

How did you get involved with each of the publishers you’ve had – GMT, Z-Man, Jolly Roger Games?

With GMT, Ananada was a frequent playtester for their CDG’s and I was his playing partner, we decided, ”hey, we could do this” and so we did.  Thereafter, Twilight Struggle kind of took off, Zev and Z-MAN Games really enjoyed it, and approached me about doing another game.  Similarly, Jim at Jolly Roger approached Christian and me after having player 1960 about doing a game for him.

Some players complain about extreme events in your games, such as “Wargames” in Twilight Struggle. To me, these cards give a big sense of excitement like seeing a new over-the-top card in a Magic: the Gathering booster for the first time. With effects like this, how do you manage the “wow” factor of surprising and exciting players against fairness and game balance? Where do you want your games to land on the luck/skill continuum?

Cards like Wargames in Twilight Struggle may seem like luck to some, but they have a very conscious game function which has nothing to do with luck.  We do not want the Americans to feel comfortable — ever.  Wargames is one little way we accomplish that.  Wargames is a potentially big card, but it is counterbalanced by having several requirements, and is playable by either player.  The uncertainty and randomness of events should scale to actual events, while keeping an eye on playability.  Honestly though, Wargames is not a card that bothers very experienced players.  They take it into account in their planning.

Was the Constitution theme what inspired Founding Fathers first, or did you set out to apply your mechanics to a multiplayer game? Should we expect more multiplayer games from you in the future, or is it back to two-player games?

Always wanted to do a game on this subject after having had a great educational experience on the topic as an undergrad.  We were aiming to do a multiplayer CDG that addressed some of the classical issues with multiplayer CDGs — namely down time, and play balance.  We think we got at those problems reasonably well, and all within the context of a theme that many people cannot actually believe exists.

How did 1989: Dawn of Freedom first come into existence? What is your involvement with the project?

To be clear, Ted Torgeson designed an excellent free play game on this subject all by himself.  He was inspired by Twilight Struggle and the game borrows many of its mechanics from that game.  My role is to provide a little polish to its rough spots, add a few more twists to the Twilight Struggle system and get it into the hands of players.

When you publish a game, do you consider it “finished” or do you enjoy going back and revisiting them? Many players would love to see expansions for, well, all of your games. Any chance of that happening?

I am not terribly interested in republishing the same game.  This bothers people sometimes.  They are often looking for the same experience with a different theme.  But that’s not what I am up to.  We try to marry mechanics and cards to what is actually going on, so that means the games should feel and play quite differently.  Yes, you can feel the similarities in my work, but I do not think the experiences of any of the games are interchangeable, and that is why each has its fans and adherents.  That is not to say we will not do little “tweaks” but do not go looking for Twilight Struggle Two etc. etc.

Certainly your love of American history has inspired that common theme in these games, but it seems that the mechanics lend themselves to other settings – for example, influence points could represent a medieval court of nobles. I was going to ask if you’ve considered a new setting like that – but then I found in the forums that you and Ananda Gupta are working on a CDG of England vs. France. Any news on that front – or any news at all?

My work with Ananda had been frozen for some time because of some complications he had with his previous employment.  Happily for everyone, he has a great new job, and we have begun work again in earnest.  So stay tuned, but England vs. France is back on.

Have you played many new games in the recent past – say, five years? What newer designs have impressed you?

I tend to be a sucker for everything that Martin Wallace does.  He comes close to the Euro vs. Wargame hybrid line himself some days.  I loved his last several economic simulations, including Automobile, Brass and Tinner’s Trail.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, I love what Michael Schact does to instill so much angst into binary decisions.  Zooloretto is a family favorite and I think Shanghai is a fantastic and under-appreciated gem.  Ultimately, I became an Agricola convert, and while I am not a cultist, I very much admire what Donald Vaccarino did with Dominion.  On the wargame front, have to give a shout-out to my friend Volko Ruhke for his very clever design of a very ambitious topic — Labyrinth, and the global war on terror.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Thanks for the chance to prattle on about myself.  My kids really want me to do a kids game sometime, so that may also happen.