Alan wrote some very interesting articles for The Color of the Wind newsletter on his design philosophy... and even snuck in some previews of prototypes. Read on and enjoy!

last update: October 30, 2004

Designer's Desk - Design Philosophy (Fall 1994)

Peter Gehrmann tells me that people sometimes ask him questions about me that he doesn't know the answers to. I'm not going to go into any detail about my life beyond the world of games, because that would bore me even more than it would bore you, but I'll try to explain a little more about my design background and philosophy. Of course, if you want to talk about non-game stuff, just stop by the stand at Essen and I'll be glad to talk your ears off about anything and everything.

Here is a list of my published designs.

This a complete list, so if anyone tells you there are other games, they don't know what they are talking about. KENTUCKY, which is listed in Taschenbuch Spiel 95, was a possible title for PONY EXPRESS: it does not exist as a separate game.

One other game of mine that quite a few people know about is 1869. There are a nunmber of homemade copies in Germany. Mayfair Games have had my prototype for several years and may eventually publish it now that they have begun publishing 18XX games. However, they have made lots of changes so the published version will almost be a completely different game from my prototype. I hope the result will be a better game.

I have an incredible number of prototypes. Many are complete games while others are in various stages of preparation. I haven't ever counted them, but I'd say there are well over 100. I can remember far too many times when I thought I had a great idea for a game and spent two weeks making an attractive prototype. I thought it was important to make the prototype look as good as possible so the quality of the components wouldn't effect the playtester's initial reactions to the way the game played. But many times, after playing it for just ten minutes, I knew it was a horrible game and I had wasted all the time spent making the prototype.

When I lived in Lancaster, New Hampshire, the failed prototypes were kept in boxes in the far corner of the basement. Once in a while, I'd go down and dig through a box or two looking for old ideas I could use. Since I now live in a small apartment, the prototypes are being stored at my mother's house in New Jersey (with most of my game collection) and I only get to see them a couple of times a year. It's possible a few of the prototypes may someday be brought back up into the light, but unfortunately, most have been sentenced to the dungeon for life. I have learned something though, because I make much simpler prototypes now which saves me a lot of wasted time.

People sometimes ask me if I have a design philosophy. Or sometimes people say my games have a distinctive style. I'm not sure about the distinctive style part, but I do have a design philosophy now. Actually, I suppose I always had a design philosophy but I never really thought about it before.

Basically, I want to create tension (that's tension, not stress) by giving the player several choices each turn. Several usually means two or three, since allowing more choices slows down play too much, and choosing between just two choices can still be agonizingly difficult. The basic mechanic in SANTA FE is a good example. Each turn, a player must choose between playing a City Card or a Double Turn Card. Usually, the player wants to do both.

Since the choices have to be balanced, in effect there really are no bad choices. There are one or two good choices and then there is the best choice. However, despite there being no bad choices, it is amazing how soon you realize you haven't made the best choice, and how bad your seemingly good choice turned out to be. This is the other thing I like, because it adds to the tension when making the decison. You are trying to select the best choice knowing full well that it will shortly be obvious what the best choice was. So not only is the play of your opponents putting pressure on you, you are also putting pressure on yourself.

Put more simply, I want choices to be simple in concept but difficult in execution. And I want the player to be able to see the results of his decison fairly quickly.

I have also bought into the German philosophy (or trend) in games which lean towards lots of simultaneous play in which no one has to sit around for very long without taking some part in the game. It is now hard to believe that I enjoyed playing wargames where I often had to sit around for 10-20 minutes between turns.

Beyond these two things, I guess all I want is for people to have fun playing my games, but since gaming is not an exact science, there is no real way to guarantee people playing my games will have fun. Playtesting is the key to improving the odds, though, and in this I think White Wind has a distinct advantage since White Wind games are playtested in both the United States and Germany by groups of players with very different styles of play. If a game appeals to all of these players, it will usually appeal to many others as well.

But enough of that. Talking about design philosophies should really be done with friends after a good night of gaming.

So to finish on a lighter note, I have something for the crazy collectors among us. The first time I came to Essen, I was surprised at how many people wanted me to autograph their games. I began signing the games with my name, "Essen", and the date. The next year I signed the new games the same way but signed the games from the first year with just my name. I have continued to sign this way each year since. So, if you have a complete set of White Wind limited editions with Alan R. Moon, "Essen", and the date on each game, you have what I will call a complete Essen set.

I'll try to talk about how I designed ELFENROADS, FREIGHT TRAIN, and MUSH next time.

Introduction to Issue #3 - Sneak Peeks (Fall 1994)

First of all, let me apologize for not writing a newsletter in over a year. There are many reasons but suffice it to say that the last year has not been my most creative. I will not try to let another year go by before I write #4, but I won't blame you for not believeing me.

As you know by now, MUSH and PHANTOMS OF THE ICE were the new games released at Spiel 94. I feel confident in saying that both games were very well received. Included in this newsletter are two extra characters for PHANTOMS OF THE ICE. These characters will never be available anywhere else (although the newsletter with the characters will be available as long as there is a demand for it.) I hope to have additional characters in the next newsletter as well.

While I have not been very creative for about two years, I seem to have finally turned the corner in the last month. All of a sudden, I have four new prototypes, all of which appear at first glance to merit publication. Too early to make a final decision about the White Wind line for 1995, but one or more of the following are likely.

STATION TO STATION - Yes, another railroad game. This one combines aspects of AIRLINES and SANTA FE and adds financial management into the mix. A big helping hand from Mike Schloth on this one, who during a playtest of a prototype called UNITED STATES RAILROADS (which was okay but nothing great), gave me the basic idea for STATION TO STATION.

THUNDER ON THE TRACKS - This is more of the traditional type of railroad game about delivering freight from city to city. It has elements found in many other games like RAILWAY RIVALS, EMPIRE BUILDER, and RAIL BARON. What makes it different is a unique movement system and the specific interaction between the players. In development for several years, it still seems like there is something missing or something that needs to be changed. I keep hoping to wake up and find the missing piece in my head, but I may give up soon and hand it over to Peter for development.

ELFENXX - I won't spoil the surprise by telling you what the next game in the Elfen series will be. I will only say that there is finally a candidate worthy of being the successor to ELFENROADS. Actually, if the truth be known, ELFENROADS has turned out to be somewhat of a curse. I have put together over half a dozen Elfen games in the last two years, and while the playtesters have liked several of them, they just didn't seem good enough to me.

OTHERS - Since I want to publish at least one small-box, unlimited edition game each year, the other games I'm working on are all card games. The latest is perhaps the best game I've ever designed. The only problem may be the subject which could be a little too heavy for the mass market. There is also the possibility White Wind will publish a game by another designer in 1995, especially since reissuing PHANTOMS OF THE ICE now seems like such a good idea.

Sorry to be so vague about all of this. Things should be clearer in a few months.

Note in Issue #3 - Sneak Peek (Spring 1993)

For those of you interested in looking farther into the future, one of the game for 1994 will almost certainly be another railroad game tenatively titled THUNDER ON THE TRACKS. The map for this game covers most of the Eastern USA. Players compete to deliver freight similar to other games like EMPIRE BUILDER and RAIL BARON, but a unique movement system and the unusual system of payoffs gives the game a feel all its own.

Designer's Desk - Santa Fe (Spring 1993)

When non-gamers learn that I design games, invariably the first question they ask me is, "Where do you get your ideas from?" I used to have trouble answering because I didn't think I really knew where my ideas came from. These days, most of the time it's very clear to me where I get my inspiration. What I'm not sure about now is whether that means I've gotten smarter or dumber. But I thought I'd try to share some of my thoughts on the how and why of game design, and then you can decide for yourself which way I'm going.

One of the best sources for ideas is simply other games. To illustrate this point, let me describe how I designed SANTA FE. One of my two all-time favorite games is WILDLIFE ADVENTURE. There are many aspects of the system that appeal to me, but the most appealing of all is the mechanic that allows any player to move any of the available pieces in the game. If you've ever played WILDLIFE ADVENTURE, you can easily see how this same basic mechanism became the starting point in the design of SANTA FE.

I decided to use a map of the Western USA because I thought I needed a large area.With that and the basic mechanism set, the first decison to be made was how many railroads to include. For no particular reason, I chose five. Amazingly enough, while I briefly considered expanding this to six during the first few playtest games, five turned out to be exactly the right number.

So, at this point, what I had was a map, five railroads, and the basic mechanism. Almost too easy this far. It was then time to face the difficult decisions of how many cities to put on the map which would also determine how many cards would be in the game, and how many pieces of track to assign to each railroad. Originally, there were fewer than 25 cities and the values only ranged from 2-5. I'm not sure exactly how many different versions of the map I went through during playtesting, as sometimes only one or two small things changed between games. However, the routes, cities, and number of cards in the final version are much different from the original. The number of pieces of track changed from game to game. Originally, each railroad had a lot more pieces of track, but this made the game much too long, and made it almost inevitable that each city on the map would be connected to one or two railroads every game. The final number of pieces for each railroad puts the game solidly in the 45-75 minutes gamelength and makes it possible to connect every city on the map in some games while connecting only about half of the cities in others.

I usually conduct the first playtest of any of my designs solitaire. Many games don't survive past this point. Five minutes into the first game of SANTA FE, I knew something was missing. Playing the track pieces and building the lines was okay, but there was no tension or excitement.

Voila, the Double Turn Card. Now the player had a clear choice between two very different courses of play. He could either play a City Card which would produce points at the end of the game or he could play a Double Turn Card in an attempt to exert more control over the final configuration of the lines.

In the first game using the Double Turn Cards, I knew they were a trap. While the player who played a Double Turn Card got to build more track and got to take a more active role than the player who played a City Card, this never made up for the points he lost. I tried to convince myself this wasn't a problem, as many players would probably fall into "the trap" on a consistent basis. But it bothered me that I was counting on people's poor play to make the game mechanic work, so eventually I knew I had to fix it. I just couldn't figure out how.

I figured I'd just dive right into a real playtest with my friends and see what happened. Not surprisingly, the game was not much of a success. While the game system worked fine, it was quite dull. In fact, if now for a comment by playtester and friend Bob Scherer-Hoock, SANTA FE might have gone down into the basement. The basement, otherwise known as the dungeon, being where all the failed ideas go, usually never to be seen again. What Bob (hereafter known as Mr. Wisdom) said was, "The problem is there are no intermediate goals." Immediately, I had the suspicion he might be right (a shocking revelation in itself) . That night, after a respite of several hours away from games, I not only knew he was right, I thought I knew how to correct the problem.

The inspiration was once again provided by another of my favorite games, RAILWAY RIVALS. Incorporating the bonus points system, I played a solitaire game the next day. The improvement was dramatic. A dull game had been transformed into an exciting one. As the next playtest clearly showed.

Another problem cropped up almost immediately though. The problem had actually been there all along in the back of my head, but now with other things working, it took center stage for the first time. If you wound up with a horrible hand of City Cards, you were at a significant disadvantage and there was really no way to improve your situation. I fooled around with different ways of draw selection and with different options for discarding and drawing replacements, but none of these seemed to present an easy solution. It also seemed like playing a Double Turn Card was still not quite as good as playing a City Card most of the time, and I began to wonder if I could solve both problems together.

Adding the extra advantages of the Double Turn Card evened out the possibilities, and turned out to be the final piece of the design puzzle. Now players were faced with a tough decision each turn. They could chooose to play a City Card which would produce points at the end of the game, but had the disadvantage of not being able to lay much track. Or they could play a Double Turn Card in an attempt to gain points right away and influence the lines more, but thereby give up points at the end of the game. Since it was apparent that it was almost impossible to win by just playing one or the other, the tension had been significantly increased. The problem of having a poor hand of City Cards was also no longer a problem as the player could discard some or all of his hand while still trying to gain points when playing a Double Turn Card.

The result is, I hope, a game that combines some features of several fine games with some new ideas of my own, thereby creating a whole that is at least as good as its parts.

One final, small point that seems worth mentioning concerns the title of the game. Since there have been so many railroad games over the years, good titles are getting harder and harder to find. My original title was THE RAILROAD'S COMING TO TOWN. I sort of liked it at the time, but now I cringe just looking at it. So please thank Peter when you see him for his suggestion of SANTA FE.

Departures

Want to learn more Alan and games & such?

Boardgame Geek did an interview with Alan VERY recently (October 2004) on their GeekSpeak Internet radio show

The Game Cabinet did an interview with Alan back in 1997(?) that has some interesting stuff in it

About Boardgames did an interview with Alan in 2001

The Games Journal posted a great article on the Evolution of German Games (written by Bob Scherer-Hoock, who Alan renamed Mr. Wisdom in the article posted above) that's pretty much required reading for those who want to know a little more about the history of the hobby.

There used to be a great interview with Alan on the Funagain website... but I can't find it now.