Hi everybody,
thanks for welcome us here on bordspelmania and also thanks for your interest in our work.
We are very excited about your questions in the following seven days. Let´s start with the first ten answers!
Citaat:
1) The Village (in Dutch "Het Dorp") won the "Kennerspiel des Jahres 2012". Can you tell us something about the developement of this game? And what was the part from both of you in the making of this game?
1.
Inka had the first idea for the game. She thought about a little village, where each player controls a little family of meeples. It should be possible to choose different paths of live for each habitant and there should be multiple generations. When Markus heard about the first ideas, he was very excited about it. So we started developing the game. At least it took about 6 months to finish the game.
Citaat:
2) Can we expect a new game from you at SPIEL 2013?
2.
We hope you meant „SPIEL 2012“, we don´t know much about the Spiel 2013, yet.
In autumn 2012 we´ll publish „Star Wars, Angriff der Klonkrieger“ with Kosmos, a new children game with Dreimagier (but at the moment it is still a secret, so we can´t let the cat out of the bag
), Saint Malo with Alea and three more children games with Schmidt and Haba. And if everything goes well, you can get a first look to the village expansion at the booth of eggertspiele.
Citaat:
3) Played the Village one time and was pleasantly surprised by it. How did you get the idea of working with people dying in this way in the game?
3.
This game has a "real life theme". Time goes by what ever you´re doing. It takes time to travel around, to learn how to built a plow or to make a career in the city hall. So it was obvious to find a way to manage the timeline. And nobody can live for ever, so we let the meeples die at the end of their time.
Citaat:
4) Can we expect any expansions for the Village?
4.
We´ll show an expansion for Village in Essen 2012. It won´t be produced then, but you can play it at the booth of eggertspiele.
Citaat:
5) Can you tell us a bit more about Star Wars: Angriff der Klonkrieger? Not a theme I expected, but curious how the game will work.
5.
It´s a light cooperative family game. You fight as one of the jedi knights against an army of droids in the star wars arena. It works with dices, you can place in different areas of the gameboard. After every roll the players have to decide in common, where to act and what to do. You can fight against droids or other strong creatures in different ways.
Citaat:
6) I'm looking forward to your upcoming release Saint Malo - How did the idea originate to incorporate free hand drawing? Perhaps a fondness for Pictionary?
6.
Saint Malo isn´t a „drawing game“ like Pictionary. Actually it´s a dice-game. We tried to combine luck and strategy. In the game we have a few washable boards, dices and soluble pens. Every player has his own board and draws everything he gets on it. The dices decide what the players get. In Saint Malo players build their own city with different buildings and a big city wall. They have to place different persons in it, for example a soldier, a trader, a juggler or a builder. The players have to watch out for pirates and defend their cities. It´s a nice game for up to 5 players and it takes about 60 minutes.
Citaat:
7) Which of your own games are your favorites?
7.
The favorite game of our own developments is every time our current project. When we have to decide between our releases, we would answer "Het Dorp".
Mostly we invest so much time in our prototypes by developing, taring and testing them, that we don´t feel like playing them after their releases. We often made more than 200 tests in a very short time. Then we need an alternation and often play the games of our colleagues.
In case of "Het dorp" we felt different. There are so many ways to get points, so many different strategies and so many things to discover that it feels everytime new. "Het Dorp" is one of the few, we love to play after its publication.
Citaat:
8) And what do you look for in new games? As designers, do you look for new games with clever mechanisms, or do you gravitate towards designs that are unlike your own?
8.
We both love games with interesting themes. Inka especially likes the medieval setting, she read many novels from this era. This has a big influence on our game-development. You can find it in "De Koningsburcht" and "Het Dorp". Markus favoured theme is the Golden Age, but there´s still no game in our repertoire, which discuss this historical chapter.
We´re also interested in games with new mechanisms, of course. For our work it is very important to know which new games come out and which mechanisms were used, so that we can decide, if it is worthwhile to pursue our new ideas or if it is advisable to give this
thoughts up.
Citaat:
9) Which other (game) designers would you consider your role-models?
9.
We don´t want to point somebody out. We met so many different designers and we played so many really good games. At the end, we couldn´t list so many names here, like we would do. The very best thing in playing and designing boardgames is: You meet so many nice, friendly and creative people all over the world!
Citaat:
10) How does your design process work? Do you both work on ideas seperately, or is it a continuous collaboration? Do you work at a game in small increments (like, every morning for half an hour) or do you work in sprints (like, an entire day once a month)?
10.
We always develop our games together - we just can´t see any advantages to do it alone. Sure, sometimes the first idea is by Markus, sometimes it´s Inkas. We talk about a new game as early as possible. So we get a first feedback from our partner in a time, when there is not even a board, cards or anything else. That´s very advantageously and saves a lot of time. We love the development process, eminently if our idea reaches an advanced stage, so that we can create the prototype and start the first testplaying rounds. At that time we have many discussions and we often realize that we have to change parts of the game or if the worst comes to the worst, we have to quit the project. If you work as a couple you can exchange opinions during the whole process - that´s the biggest advantage you can get. We don´t have a „special time“ every day or week to do our work, but mostly we work at the weekend and in the evening, because of Markus´ „real“ job.