Interview with Seth Jaffee, board game designer & developer
Posted by Michael Mindes on September 25, 2011
Welcome, to another a long series of interviews with successful and creative people. There will be interviews with board game designers, game artists, game publishers, and successful entrepreneurs. I hope you enjoy it.
Seth Jaffee is a board game designer and developer that works very closely with me at Tasty Minstrel Games. I have know Seth for most of my life, and I do not know where to start for introducing him. Therefore, lets just get into the interview.
What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
As a board game designer, I am most proud of Eminent Domain. It has turned out exactly the way I imagined, has been very well received thus far, and remains fun and exciting for me to play even after 100+ games.
How did you become a published game designer? Please tell us about your first time.
I had been designing games for 5 or 6 years, and had three solid designs - one of my own, one I co-designed, and one by a friend that I helped develop a little bit - and many promising ideas. My longtime friend Michael decided to start a publishing company, and he looked to me to provide his launch titles. He didn’t care as much for one of the 3, but he liked the other two very much and decided to use them as the first two games from Tasty Minstrel.
Those two games were Homesteaders, by Alex Rockwell, and Terra Prime, by Seth Jaffee - that’s me! I had not gotten Terra Prime picked up by any publishers yet, and so having it published by my friend felt a little bit like cheating… but then again, the game is out there, legitimately published, and it has a fan base. Every once in a while I see a post online about how someone happened upon this “undiscovered gem,” and I get a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
What do you think it takes to be creative? Where do you get flashes of brilliance from?
I think creativity is an aspect of imagination. Everybody’s got an imagination, but just like some people are natural athletes, and some people are naturally good at math, I think some people are naturally better able to focus their imagination in useful ways – where here I take “useful” to mean “useful in creating things.” And by “things” I mean pieces of art, board games, prose, dialog, jokes, architecture, etc… Being “creative”.
I’m not sure there’s any science behind this answer, and frankly I hadn’t given any thought to it until right now, but I think my answer fairly reflects my feeling on the subject.
What is the future of the board game industry?
I think that nowadays more creative people are taking up the mantle of game design. With resources like BGG, Artscow, Decktet, TheGameCrafter, Kickstarter, and the internet in general it’s easier than ever for game players to try their hand at being a game creator. Not all of them will succeed, but I think this is leading to a much larger pool of games to play, and that will allow players to find exactly the type of games they are most interested in.
I think this is both a good thing and a bad thing. On one hand, it means players won’t have to settle for games they don’t care for as much, but on the other, it could lead to people self limiting their horizons – playing only their favorite subset of games, and becoming very picky.
Of course, the opposite is also true, there will be a large variety of games with which to broaden ones’ horizons as well.
Do you think anything particular about your past helps you as a game designer?
I’ve always been interested in systems behind things – the reason things work the way they do. I firmly believe that people learn things better when told the reason why it’s true, rather than simply being told a fact. Also, for about 10 years I played a lot of Magic: the Gathering – an ingenious, genre defining game in which you construct your deck out of a pool of cards, and then you play a game with that deck against an opponent.
My favorite part of Magic was always the deck building part – I enjoyed putting together combinations of cards which, I hoped, would perform a certain way during a game… providing useful hands to achieve whatever goal or strategy it was supposed to. The way I see it, designing board games is not much different than designing Magic decks.
I’m no longer limited to the rules of Magic, or the components of a limited pool of cards, now I have a pool of mechanisms to work with (and I can create my own as well) in order to create a system that provides players with interesting decisions, with strategic choices and ways to pursue them.
What are your greatest strengths?
I think my greatest strength as a designer is being able to identify an idea (game dynamic, mechanism, or combination) that has the potential to be really good – that is to say “will provide interesting decisions and/or fun” – and identify what needs to happen in order for that idea to realize its potential. As such, I think I make a strong Game Developer.
I’ve also played a lot of games, giving me a firm background in game mechanics, how they feel in play, and how they play out. I find that very useful when I’m working on a game. Finally, I see myself as being fairly creative – as described above. This creativity helps to solve problems, to identify potentially great ideas, and to find the best version of whatever it is I’m working on.
What is the best advice that you apply to your life? Please share some of the positive results of following that advice.
I have a tendency to be something of a perfectionist, and at times that’s really a bad thing. It can keep me from moving forward on a project, because something about it isn’t perfect, or because I can’t see how to make it “just right.” It can also make me just generally unhappy because at any given moment, well – nothing is perfect! A friend in college used to say (in a comical Chinese accent like you’d hear in a movie)
“Be happy with what you got!”
Whenever I am feeling like things aren’t going right, I try to remember him saying that (in that ridiculous yet awesome accent), and I try to think about the things that ARE going right. For example, my new game Eminent Domain is currently on a boat on its way from the printer in China.
Due to various delays it has been very easy to be disappointed that the game hasn’t arrived yet, and all the trouble and anxiety that has stemmed from that. But if I take a moment to just “be happy with what I got” I can see that people who have played the game have overwhelmingly had positive things to say about it, and enough copies have pre-sold that a 2nd run has already been ordered. That’s all pretty good news!
One of the biggest problems for creative people is spreading too thin working on too many projects. How do you prioritize projects?
I try to spread myself as thin as possible, and the priority project is usually the one I can find somebody to talk about it with.
Seriously – I’m notoriously bad at focusing on one creative project at a time. I just heard an ad yesterday saying something like “nobody said to Beethoven ‘it’s just a symphony, c’mon, the deadline is approaching’” and “An anxious editor didn’t tell Tolstoy ‘This war part is great – we don’t need Peace’.” It’s really difficult to put a creative process on a schedule, because the inspiration on which it’s based is not a schedulable quantity.
For me it helps to make lists – lists of games I’m working on, and things that need to be done on each. Then, when I’m outside of a creative mode, I can look objectively at those lists and try to decide what needs to be focused on and prioritized. Then hopefully when I am feeling creative I can drive that creativity toward the appropriate project.
What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
I have a lot of projects at various stages, and lately I’ve been jumping around a bit from one to another. Here’s the stuff at the top of the list:
Kings of Air and Steam: A pickup/deliver route planning game by Scott Almes that I am developing for TMG. We are trying to finalize a few rules details (such as costs) and simplify any unnecessary rules complexity that remains in the game, while simultaneously getting the artist moving on all the components.
Eminent Domain Expansion: An expansion to Eminent Domain for which I have several aspects laid out, but they’re not all tied together yet.
Alter Ego: A cooperative deck building card game, which took a hit to impetus when I heard about Midnight Men, and then another when I heard about Sentinels of the Multiverse, though I do think Alter Ego is different than either of those, so I still plan on working on it (it’s almost ready for some testing, actually).
Dice Works: A real time dice drafting game. I’ve got some ideas about changing the theme and making it a game you can play with Martian Dice.
Exhibit: A set collection game with an unusual, unique auction inspired by Liar’s Dice. This game is really just about finished, I’d just like to have more people play it before I call it “done”.
I’ll also be working with another developer on 2 submissions for TMG, and if we can get them to the point we’re happy with them then they’ll be part of TMG’s lineup in 2012. One is a dice drafting game with a wine theme, and the other is a deck building game that uses dice.
On the side I have another couple of designs floating around, some old and some new. One of them is another deck building game that’s basically focused on the research mechanism from Eminent Domain – it’s called Skyline and it’s about building tall buildings to make the most impressive skyline. I’m not sure how well I’ll like it given that I already did Eminent Domain, but I enjoy the idea of it for now anyway.
What excites you about these new projects?
I still enjoy exploring the strategic space made available by the Deck Building mechanism. Dominion was ingenious and defined a genre, but I think a lot more can be done with that mechanism. I’m really happy with how Eminent Domain turned out, and I’m still experimenting with deck building in Alter Ego, Skyline, and also with the Dice Building submission I mentioned.
What blogs, podcasts, or other sites that you still find yourself consuming religiously?
I really don’t follow a lot of blogs or podcasts. I read them when I see links that I think sound interesting, and I read a lot on BGG about upcoming games I might be interested in, or TMG games. I’ve enjoyed Jay Cormier’s From Inspiration to Publication as it’s a detailed account of how Jay and Sen have gone about designing games and getting them published, and it’s all empirical – no theory or B.S., just what has worked for them.
Do you have a Twitter account, Blog, or Facebook “Like” page?
I am @sedjtroll on Twitter, I do have a FaceBook page, and I post thoughts sporadically in my game design blog.
