Wolfgang: D&D Next provides a lot of support for “theatre of the mind,” also known as running your game without minis. I’ve found this extremely enjoyable in online games using Google Hangouts. Is that form of online play a design goal?

Mike: I’m not sure if it started as a design goal, but since many of our playtests took place using Hangouts it helped evolve it that way. When you don’t have minis and grids to represent things, it forces you to make sure that your rules don’t require them. So I think a good way to think of it is that if playing via Hangout works, then the game should also work fine if you and your players want to sit on couches in your TV room without a table, or while driving to GenCon, or wherever.

Wolfgang: With D&D Next, the sense of D&D traditions does roll off the page, sometimes. For instance, the magic items include some clear throwbacks to 1st Edition AD&D—things like the scrolls of protection by creature type. Are you aiming at older gamers or Old School types with D&D Next?

Mike: There are definitely elements that we want to make sure are preserved in the game, like the scrolls you mentioned. In some cases, we’re simply using the text to describe magic items and such as it appeared in AD&D because there’s no good reason to change it. One of our goals is to make sure that regardless of where you started with D&D, you’ll recognize the game and feel welcome. I like to think that rather than pick one style over the other, we’re simply rolling out the welcome mat for a style of play and segment of D&D fans who haven’t been included in the past.

Wolfgang: This ruleset feels much more like it’s refining the D&D tradition rather than exploring new territory. Was that intentional, to create a sense of familiarity for long-time players? And will we see new mechanics in future playtests?

Mike: There will definitely be new mechanics, but to start with we’re trying to get the basics right. For instance, we’ve talked about some new approaches to classes and such, but we feel that innovation should start at the edge of the system and work its way to the middle as people accept it.

In my experience, the process should look similar to how things like githyanki and drow grew to become big parts of D&D. They weren’t in the original game, but after they were introduced they spread among gamers and became part of D&D. I think an organic approach like that is better for the game.

Wolfgang: The D&D Next themes feel a lot like 2E kits or 4E themes: thin layers of character elements with a small rules hook. They’re neat, but they’re fairly thin stuff — will themes grow into deeper sets of mechanics or bonuses at higher levels? Can you level up in a theme?

Mike: Yes, as you level up you gain more theme benefits. Originally they were fairly flat, but that proved unsatisfying at higher level play. In the playtest, people will see that their theme gives them a feat at 1st and 3rd level.

Wolfgang: The kobold playtesters found that D&D Next fighters kick a lot of ass. No, really, massive damage with that two-handed great flail, to the point where the 1st-level fighter is sort of scary on a charge, taking down minotaurs. Are you worried the fighter is (for once) overpowered?

Mike: That’s a great question, because it points to a big part of the playtest process. The fighter leans on the basic math of the game a fair bit—how hard should a strong guy with a big weapon hit, stuff like that. The math is still a bit up in the air, and I suspect that we’ll drop both hit point and damage numbers down to keep things easy to work with at the table.

With all that in mind, getting the feel right is a big part of the playtest. We want to see if a fighter unleashing big damage numbers feels right, or should fighters be more durable, and so on. With the fighter, we’re erring on the side of powerful out of the gate.

Wolfgang: Our wizard playtester loves always having an at-will spell no matter what, and he has been fairly effective with it. But it doesn’t feel like a fighter’s “at-will” sword. Have you gotten a lot of pushback on the fusion of Vancian casting with at-will casting?

Mike: It’s actually been really fascinating looking at the feedback. I know there are people out there who hate adding at-will spells to the game, and other people who hate spell slots and preparation. In the playtest surveys I’ve read through, people seem to like at-will spells regardless of edition. 4E fans generally say, “Thanks for keeping this,” while fans of older editions mostly like the idea that they don’t run out of spells.

This response goes back to what I said about githyanki and drow. It’s something that looks like it has made the rounds among gamers regardless of edition, and people like the idea of it remaining a core part of D&D.

Wolfgang: The playtest adventure in the Caves of Chaos has waves and waves of humanoids and monsters, but it doesn’t use anything like the 4E D&D minion rules. Will we see minions return, or is the D&D Next solution just to bring back monsters with pitiful hit points?

Mike: Rather than use an explicit minion rule, we’ll simply scale monsters by XP value so that they essentially become minions. For instance, to an AD&D fighter with gauntlets of ogre power, and a +1 sword, everything with 8 or fewer hit points is a minion. We’re consciously keeping that part of the game without adding the complexity of a specific rule.

Wolfgang: What is really unique about D&D Next that sets it apart from other RPGs? Where is the sizzle, so to speak? (Modularity is neat, but doesn’t count as sizzle in my book.)

Mike: I think the playtest is pretty interesting in that it gives people a chance to guide D&D to where they want it to be. The big idea, to me, is bringing RPGs back to their roots. If you look at card games, board games, even video games, the trend is to get people playing as quickly as possible. With our Lords of Waterdeep and Castle Ravenloft board games, we wanted people playing within 15 minutes of opening the box.

My attitude is the same toward D&D. Open the game, and start playing. I think that RPGs have grown more and more complex over the years, and we’ve lost sight that the real fun of RPGs lies in experiencing a make-believe world through the eyes of a character who isn’t you. The first RPGs fit into 64 pages or less of text, with tons of that space given over to monsters and spells.

I think for too long, people have sort of thrown their hands up and given in to the idea that RPGs are this niche thing that few people want to play. That’s crazy. Tons and tons of people want to play RPGs. It’s time we let them!

Wolfgang: I found it easy to convert my regular Midgard game to the D&D Next playtest rules, because they aren’t super complex—and because the group started over at 1st level. Do you have any advice for converting existing characters? Any advice for people converting their homebrew settings generally?

Mike: I actually converted a basic D&D game (1981 Moldvay set) to Next, and it went fairly smoothly. In most cases, you can keep all your stats the same unless any are above 18. After that, convert your race and class. The big setback right now is that we have a limited list of spells and themes.

Wolfgang: 4th Edition D&D didn’t require players to have a dedicated healer class to get at least some healing in. We’ve only seen the cleric so far—will D&D Next offer other types of healing, from other classes?

Mike: Yes, definitely. We’ve seen that people who don’t want to play clerics might still want to play other types of healers. Of course, that stuff is down the road, but it’s definitely on our radar.

Wolfgang: The core playtest races of human, dwarf, elf, and halfling are fine, but how many races will D&D Next have when it ships? Just those four to start?

Mike: Those four races are part of the playtest materials, but the total number we end up rolling out with is still up in the air.

Wolfgang: Why should a Pathfinder RPG player pick up the D&D Next playtest rules and give them a spin? What about them do you think will convince players who have moved on to return to the D&D well? And isn’t there some danger that D&D Next will fracture the gaming community further?

Mike: One of the advantages we’re facing with D&D Next is that we’re taking a very broad approach to the game. We’re looking at all of the editions at once so that we can take the best parts of each and work those elements into a solid system void of any of the excesses or difficulties that past editions may have brought to the table.

If people who enjoy 3E are looking for deeper solutions to some of the issues that crop up in their games and are looking for something that stays true to what makes D&D intrinsically D&D, then they should definitely take a look at D&D Next.

There’s always a danger of fracturing the audience, but the playtest, combined with our goal to bridge the gap between where D&D started and where it has gone, will help give everyone who likes D&D, and tabletop RPG play in general, something they can enjoy.

This week sees the launch of the Midgard Bestiary, which the talented and monster-savvy Adam Daigle has sweated blood and tears over for us! We took some more time out of Adam’s schedule to ask him some questions about monsters and more, and he was gracious enough to throw some very tasty bones our way in the form of answers. Come help us pick these particular bones clean by reading this interview with him!

So, monsters. All right-thinking people love them. Why do you love them?

I think I fell into loving them, actually. Designing monsters was one of the first freelance gigs I was given, so I ran with it. As you know, I pitched and got to write some monsters for a few Open Design projects and got a few into Monster Monday blog posts. I have always enjoyed monsters, both in real world folklore and in the game. Before I even played the game properly, my cousin and I would constantly look through the old Monster Manuals, and even before that, as a kid, I would always check out the big illustrated books about animals. I’ve always had a thing for critters—the creepier the better.

What’s your favorite creature type, and why?

I don’t think I have a favorite creature type, though I admit I favor the underdog. It seems, inevitably, depending on setting and system, you end up with a monster list aligned more to one type or subtype than others, and I’ve always tried to push those boundaries to include critters that are less represented. Some of those types, in my opinion, have historically been plants and oozes. But you have to be careful, because a lot of those creatures end up looking too much the same at the end of the day. As far as favorites to design for, sadly the best mechanical choices end up being creature types I don’t want to design too many of because of how it might affect a certain world or setting (such as humanoids and monstrous humanoids), but I seemed to find a fun niche for my mechanical explorations of the dragon type in the Book of Drakes.

Texas is big and badass, but you’ve recently taken a job with Paizo in Seattle. Just how much culture shock has there been?

It’s certainly been different. Austin is a laid-back city and has a lot in common with Seattle, but of course, the weather is a bit different. The first day I got into town it was rainy, cloudy, snowing, sunny, and hailing all changing hourly within a 7-hour window. I was assured that this was abnormal. There’re certainly things I miss about Texas, and certainly other things that I do not miss, but this is a great area and I’m sure I’ll fit in nicely. Texans (and Cajuns) are adaptable people. It’s one of our traits.

What’s your favorite game design trick?

My favorite game design trick is to do something that is perfectly intuitive, but different. The best way to achieve this is to mod something off existing design while not breaking the system. Monster design lends itself well to this while still keeping itself grounded, so I suppose me using it as a design safety net has served me well. It can be something simple that achieves this without creating too many new special abilities. For example, one of the first monster designs I did for Open Design was the crag drake for the Halls of the Mountain King project. Thinking of a Large dragon creature stalking through the halls, I gave it a squeeze special ability that let it be treated as a smaller creature when it came to moving through small spaces.

But honestly, the best game design trick is to let the players have fun and feel challenged while the GM is having fun and isn’t stressed trying to run the encounter. This is, after all, a hobby and a game. It’s the kinda thing we do to escape real world stress.

What’s your favorite monster in the Midgard Bestiary?

That’s a ridiculously hard question to answer. I really like SO many of them, and heaps of talented people worked on a number of these. I like a lot of the ones that I pulled from past projects because of the nostalgia, but I also like a bunch of the ones I added because they fit the theme and folklore for the place. Of all the Midgard and Zobeck patronage projects I’ve worked on, I loved Tales of the Margreve the best, I think. It seemed to really fit with Wolfgang’s vision the best and he seemed the most titillated by the design, so I really tried to channel that Slavic/Eastern Europe vibe in the Midgard Bestiary.

Right now I can think of the kikimora and the kot bayun and, not to toot my own horn, but I really enjoyed my take on the zmey—especially because that was probably the most critiqued and playtested creature I’ve ever designed. That said, I like monsters that not only have some sort of combat role, but also can fulfill some roleplay aspect. They need to matter and not necessarily need to fight.

You’ve contributed to all three of Paizo’s Bestiary projects and to the Midgard Bestiary. So naturally we want to know, what’s your Halloween costume going to be this year?

I haven’t figured out what Seattle area folks do for Halloween, so I’m unsure. I used to do Halloween up big time, but I admit the last couple of years I’ve gotten lazy and have been doing a Baron Samedi get-up. I’m sure that among this crew I can come up with something else.

However, one thing I’m sure will be different from Texas is the temperature during the Halloween season. Back home there were plenty of costumes that didn’t have much regard for the temperature, because in Austin, Halloween night could easily be 80+ degrees (or 40 degrees–you never knew). Now that I’m living in an apartment and not an old neighborhood, I’m certainly planning on going out because I can’t imagine handing out candy would be the same.

Have you got a monster combo/team-up you especially love?

I’ve been wanting to do this encounter for years, but now I realize it’s cheese. I’ve really wanted to do a medusa in a dungeon with a ravid she couldn’t quite control. The real plan was that the medusa was a ghost, so medusa-lady ends up turning a bunch of folks into stone and then the dumb ravid ends up animating the “statues” to make for a frustrating fight for the PCs.

In my home game I had a fun encounter in some Greyhawk town that was overtaken by some ghouls, and also by plants. Turns out the assassin vines and such don’t tend to notice the ghouls moving around town. When monster types don’t care or notice each other, it turns out PCs find out the negative aspects of that place real quick.

How awesome are dire weasels, anyway?

Turns out they’re pretty good looking, for a kobold.

Your design seems to lean on real-world mythology and also goes into flights of pure imagination. Which approach do you prefer in your home games?

Pure flights of imagination work nicely in the short term, but structure serves folks best for the long term. I enjoy my concepts more rooted in the real world. That tends to bring out the best in my players. If you stick to theme and pay attention to the parts that are emotionally important, you can do anything to a story and still be a winner. However, I put a ton of importance into designing toward folklore. We, in the modern age, think we are telling new stories, but in fact we’re simply rehashing old stories through a more modern lens.

What do you think of the 5th Edition D&D playtest? (Wait, wrong interview. Skip that.)

Shit, I’ve never even played 4th Edition, so I have NO idea.

When are you going to pitch an article on Pathfinder spells to KQ?

Spells? You know me well enough. Do you think that’s a good idea?

How close is your office to the Paizo soda machine? Also, is it true that the soda machine is an animated object?

I sit about 35 feet from the HR soda machine. It very may well be an animated object, but I haven’t seen it do anything special. I do think it’s evil, however. Before now, I had one sweet carbonated soda a week, and since I’ve been working here I’ve had about four a week. I have noted this increase and have since taken measures to reduce this number.

But yes. The soda machine is referred to as Paizo HR for a reason. It calms nerves and is an ever-present ear/shoulder to lean on. (Many who are not followers of the soda machine instead follow the downstairs break room coffee machine. [A splinter group, I’m sure, led by Stephen Radney-MacFarland.])

If you’re interested in seeing Adam’s work, check out the Midgard Bestiary, which is available now!

Kobold Quarterly #21 delves into the roles played by the divine in your campaign, featuring David “Zeb” Cook on using mystery cults in your game, Tim and Eileen Connors on soul-shredding clerical dilemmas, Marc Radle’s new shaman base class for Pathfinder RPG, and an ecology of the succubus with new feats, powers and traits for D&D.

KQ #21 also features official Pathfinder Society content, robber knights and vile wizards, new Zobeck and Midgard articles, and alchemists, druids, illusions, and seers for the AGE System – and a sultry pinup cover by Kieran Yanner!

The complete contents are after the jump:

• The Shaman by Marc Radle
• Daughters of Lilith by Sersa Victory
• It’s a Mystery by David “Zeb” Cook
• Clerical Conflicts by Tim & Eileen Connors
• Divine Archetypes by Stefen Styrsky
• A Background in Magic by Rodrigo Garcia Carmona
• Nine Treasures of Deep Midgard by Nicholas Milasich
• Saints of Mavros by Christina Stiles
• The Scriveners of Allain by Brian A. Liberge
• White Tongue, Black Heart by David Schwartz
• The Shadow Lodge Insurgency by Nicholas Gray
• Why No Monotheism? by Steve Winter
• Fun Happens Here: A Conversation with Bill Slavicsek by Jeremy L. C. Jones
• Ask the Kobold by Skip Williams
• Free City of Zobeck: Deadly Tolls and Honest Challenges by Wolfgang Baur
• d20 Monkey by Brian Patterson
• 10′x 10′ Toon by Stan!

Pick up Kobold Quarterly #21 in print or in PDF at the Kobold Store!

KQ #20 features Jeff Grubb on the lost elves of Midgard, a Q&A with Journeys to the West lead designer Christina Stiles and a new Zobeck adventure.

There’s also vile Derro ooze magic, new planar allies, AGE system specialties, 4e racial utility powers for gnomes, tieflings and minotaurs, and much more! Here’s the complete contents, after the jump:

• The Elven Archer Class
• Arrows of the Arbonesse
• Derro Ooze Magic
• Servants from Beyond
• Putting the Band Back Together: Veteran PCs
• AGE of Specialization
• The Bardic Arts
• Unearthed Ancestry
• Night Terrors by Jack Graham
• Captured in the Cartways
• Fey Hunters & Shadow Hounds
• Small Spirits
• Make Haste!

Plus our columnists and special guests:

• The Power of the Game Master by Monte Cook
• Ask the Kobold by Skip Williams
• Q&A with Christina Stiles
• The Ruins of Arbonesse by Jeff Grubb

Pick up Kobold Quarterly #20 in print or in PDF. Or hey, why not subscribe?
Twang!

The first board game I ever fell in love with was Sorry! I have fond memories of playing Sorry (and other board games) with my mom as she sorted laundry. For her, such distractions were a great way of keeping me busy while she also got a few chores done.

Much as I loved Sorry growing up, I hadn’t played it in such a long time that I wasn’t even clear on all the rules anymore. So, we dusted off my old copy, and I fell in love all over again.

It’s really quite fascinating to see how clearly I was influenced by this game. On the face of it, Sorry is just a simple race game, where you seek to move 4 tokens of your color from the Start space to the Home Space. What makes it different from Parcheesi and Trouble is the deck of cards that take the place of dice. The cards have numbers ranging from 1 to 12, but in addition to the movement points conveyed by these numbers, each card also features special action text! Each number has its own special power, and like my own Fluxx cards, the text on each card explains exactly what it does.

Pairing special actions with pseudo-dice results was a brilliant decision by designer William Henry Storey. This adds an always-different feeling to each turn, and allows for crappy movement results to be improved by giving them a particularly important power – only on a 1 or a 2 do you have the power to move one of your 4 dudes out of the start spot. My favorite is the power of the 4—you move backwards.

The other element that I think makes Sorry so special are the slide spaces. There’s a visceral joy one gets from hitting one of those slides and zooming your dude along it, knocking others aside in your wake and giggling “Sorry!” as you do. But this also provides a random, chaotic set-back element that helps level the playing field and keep everyone interested in the game right up to the end.

I really only found one thing about the game I wanted to change, which led to a fun variation we call “Sorry Dude!” Instead of just flipping the top card and taking that action, we play it like an Andy Looney game: Everyone starts with 3 cards, and then draws 1 and plays 1 during their turn. This adds a lot more strategy and makes a classic even better! To make it even more “Looney,” we replaced the standard pawns with 2 point pyramids, and added the word “dude” whenever saying “Sorry!”

Speaking of the pyramids, check out Martian Coasters to see the pyramid game I designed that reminds me the most of Sorry!

Andrew Looney is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of the College Park, MD-based game company Looney Labs. He’s best known for designing the many flavors of Fluxx, and for creating Looney Pyramids (a.k.a. Icehouse pieces). He is the designer of dozens of games for the pyramids, including Treehouse, IceTowers, Martian Chess, Martian Coasters, World War Five, IceDice, and Zark City. He’s a Trekkie, a hippie, an Eagle Scout, and a former NASA engineer who once wrote software that flew on the Hubble Telescope.

The first board game I really fell in love with was Dungeon, the classic game from TSR. I’d had my first encounters with Dungeons & Dragons already, but I didn’t have enough people my age to play with back in those days. I did, however, have a younger brother and two younger sisters. I tried to shanghai my brother into playing D&D with me, but it never stuck. Like most kids of that age, he just wanted to knock down doors, kill things, and take their stuff.

That’s where Dungeon came in. It gave me and my siblings the most intuitive and primal D&D experience without any of the baggage that came along with the actual roleplaying part of RPGs. We played that game until the cards gave out.

I played Dungeon recently with my kids, who are about as old as my siblings and I were back then. It’s not as wonderful as I remember it, but that’s only because there are so many better games out there now that scratch the same itch. D&D hasn’t gotten any less complicated—the opposite really—but there are some excellent board games that let you go clear the monsters out of a dungeon and march out with the loot.

Descent matches D&D the best, pitting a single player who controls the dungeon (like a Dungeon Master) against the other players. It take the implicit conflict between the players and the DM and makes it explicit, which is refreshing and fun. It can take forever to play, though, especially the first times through—which I suppose is also like D&D.

Despite that, these days I prefer the D&D board game series, especially Castle Ravenloft, the first in the lot. It does away with the DM role entirely and lets all of the players team up together against a pre-programmed system. That’s no mean feat to pull off as a board game design, and it makes for a more collegial experience because the players fail or triumph together.

Matt Forbeck has worked full-time on games and fiction since 1989. He has worked with many top companies, including Angry Robot, Atari, Ubisoft, DK Publishing, Avalanche Studios, High Voltage Software, WotC, Games Workshop, Playmates Toys, Mattel, Random House, Penguin, Paradox Entertainment, TSR, White Wolf, Pinnacle, Green Ronin, AEG, Reaper Miniatures, and Human Head. Matt has designed TCGs, RPGs, miniatures games, board games, and logic systems for toys and has directed voiceover work and written short fiction, comic books, novels, screenplays, and computer game scripts and stories. Matt has won five ENnies and been nominated for three Scribe Awards, and won the Special Gaming Scribe—Adapted for his novelization of The Mutant Chronicles film.

Get your copy of the Kobold Guide to Board Game Design at the Kobold Store!

My favorite board game today and as far back as I can remember is Parcheesi. Known as The Royal Game of India, Parcheesi is also called Pachisi.

I love the game for its fast-paced race and chase action combined with blockades, captures, and the sound of those dice on the board. Every round is different, emotional, and totally unpredictable. And I can teach it to people in two minutes or less.

So, you can imagine my excitement when on a trip to India a few years ago I found myself in the Old City of Delhi, inside The Red Fort, standing in the center of a life-sized Parcheesi board.

When the guide asked who among us knew where we were standing, I was the only person to guess correctly. Scanning the square, it was Pavlovian conditioning that kicked into gear and gave me the answer.

History records that Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) played the game on this scale, directing from a central dais the movements of 16 slave-girls from the harem dressed in the traditional four colors of the various pieces.

My parents introduced me to Parcheesi and I, in turn, introduced it to our daughter. It is the one game we both love to play when we get together.

Running a close second in our household is Sorry! It was first published in England in 1934. The
similarities to Parcheesi are no doubt why I enjoy it, too.

Richard C. Levy is a 35-year veteran game inventor with a flair for marketing. He co-authored The Toy & Game Inventor’s Handbook and authored The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cashing In on Your Inventions. His designs include the games Noteability, Adverteasing, Coffee Talk, Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Game, and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Game, as well as the co-development of the worldwide smash animatronic toy Furby, which has sold 60 million units to date.

Get your copy of the Kobold Guide to Board Game Design at the Kobold Store!

For me, that’s easy: Squad Leader. I learned to play the original purple-box edition at age ten in the back of a glassblowing shop in Seattle. It was my first exposure to a hobby game—not the simple roll-and-move games of my preteen years, but a new kind of move-and-roll game. It’s amazing how powerful the inversion of those two concepts was. Roll-and-move was predestination, the game playing itself for me. Move-and-roll was strategy, the game bending itself to my will.

Okay, yeah, I’m sure I played Risk before that. But it didn’t capture me. It took until Hasbro asked me to write my own Risk game for me to really appreciate it. But playing Risk to make Godstorm and playing Risk to play Risk were two different things. I wanted something meatier.

And I got it in Squad Leader. The game explored something I wanted to know more about—World War II battles—on a level that I could understand them. Each man, each tank, each leader mattered. If I lost even one guy, I might lose the game. The game brilliantly focused on one or two new concepts per scenario: first soldiers, then buildings, then sewer movement and armor support, and so on. Everything was bite-sized. I could play a scenario between school letting out and my mom noticing I hadn’t started my homework. We whipped through the 12 scenarios in the basic box, and waited breathlessly for Cross of Iron to come out and give us more.

As I look back on Squad Leader, though, I’m acutely aware of the one thing that was necessary to make me really enjoy the game: an adult to teach me the rules. With its “Rule 1.5.8” outlining, reading Squad Leader seems impossible now. Our brains rebel against this style of writing, as they are now used to more streamlined approaches. In The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, I relentlessly mock sentences like:

2.2401 GUN DUELS: Vs a non-concealed, non-Aerial DEFENDER’s declared Defensive First Fire attack on it, a vehicle may attempt to Bounding First Fire (D3.3) its MA (/other-FP, including Passenger FP/SW) at that DEFENDER first, provided the vehicle need not change CA, is not conducting OVR (D7.1), its total Gun Duel DRM (i.e., its total Firer-Based [5.] and Acquisition [6.5] TH DRM for its potential shot) is < that of the DEFENDER, and the DEFENDER’s attack is not Reaction Fire (D7.2).

That’s totally impenetrable stuff. You can’t just drop a copy of Squad Leader off at a gamer’s house and expect them to learn it. Games want to be simple to understand, and Squad Leader is most assuredly not that.

But it’s still one of the best wargames ever published, maybe the best ever. Squad Leader taught me the skill of making decisions tactically, something I’m pretty good at now. Maybe someone in the current generation will gain that skill from one of my games. If so, they have Squad Leader to thank.

Mike Selinker is president of the Seattle design studio Lone Shark Games. Among the games he has co-created are Pirates of the Spanish Main, Harrow, Lords of Vegas, Unspeakable Words, Yetisburg, Key Largo, and Gloria Mundi. Prior to forming Lone Shark, Mike was a creative director and inventor at Wizards of the Coast, where he helped launch games such as Axis & Allies Revised, D&D 3rd Edition, Risk Godstorm, AlphaBlitz, the Harry Potter Trading Card Game, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, and Betrayal at House on the Hill. His puzzles appear in The New York Times, Games, Wired, and other publications, plus in events and alternate reality games.