An Interview with Matt Leacock

Matt Leacock is arguably the closest member of the board game hobby to becoming a household name. He rocketed to success with the release of Pandemic in 2008, a brand that has gone from strength to strength, culminating in last years ground breaking release of Pandemic: Legacy, a game Matt co-designed with Rob Daviau that now sits at the coveted number 1 spot of the Board Game Geek rankings.

Yet he’s never actually played through it.

…not in it’s final form. In the early stages I went through a lot of the motions of some of the stuff.

I have a spoiler reference copy for rules questions so I can look at the stuff, but yeah, I don’t really have the experience that all the players have.

This comes down to Matt’s process for designing games.

I spend more time observing other people playing than testing myself. In the early stages I’ll be playing it myself, its hard, it’s easier doing a cooperative game because you can take on the role of multiple people, but doing a competitive game it’s really difficult to just play by myself! And then there’s the scheduling headache of getting people together to playtest things. I do spend a lot of time having other people play things and just observing.

[It’s] sort of like a cone, it starts with me solo testing it, and then I may bring in close friends and family, trusted associates and experienced play testers where I can, and then it goes out to friends of friends and then people I do not know, [that I] met through conventions or through social media, and by slowly removing myself I get slowly more objectively true and honest feedback.

This approach was one he developed… or perhaps had thrust upon him… when he worked as a User Experience Designer at Yahoo.

I was testing Pandemic at Yahoo during lunch time and I remember distinctly, at the time we only had one deck of cards and nobody was really getting it, so I had to correct people all the time when they were making mistakes. I thought this would be good because I would get better data back if people played the game correctly and after doing this a number of times one of my UX research colleagues just told me to shut up and sit in the corner and let us play the way the game the way we thought it was supposed to be played.

It was excruciating watching people playing it that way but I learnt a lot from that, you know. If you want to get good feedback from a design test it’s helpful to see if people screw up. You need to adjust your game or you need to adjust your rules. I learnt a lot both from my colleagues and from the process that I used designing and testing software.

Although none of this experience can necessarily prepare you for testing with your family.

My youngest daughter is still yet to play Pandemic and she’s 10 now!

She’s totally turned off by the theme, she loved Forbidden Island and she playtested that. She was so young when she playtested that, one game the tile underneath her disappeared and I told her she drowned, and that we’d lost… and she just burst into tears!

Never one to rest on his considerable laurels, Matt has a number of new games coming out over the next couple of weeks, starting with Knit Wit, probably the first game to combine Venn diagrams with needle work.

The material design is one thing [I love] I mean just playing with the spools and the strings and the clothes pins and all that and I love the way it looks but I [also] just love playing with Venn Diagrams…

This is a beautiful looking game (in my opinion) and I completely see what Matt is talking about! The idea is that each loop of string corresponds to a word, and where the loops overlap you place a spool (players will build up this construction as they like during setup). For each spool, each of you are challenged to find a word that makes sense in the context of the two or more words that have made up that overlap region, as in a Venn diagram. For example, for the overlap between ‘Rare’ and ‘Yellow’ you could say ‘Gold’. However, your answer must be unique!

When I first designed it I had more of a scientific mind about it, trying to come up with things for these categories like a scientist might. But when you play it you soon realise that no, no, no, you have to come up with ridiculous answers and that’s where the wit part came from. That really unlocked a lot of the fun, how are you going to come up with playful answers that people are going to go ‘oh, that’s such a great answer I’m going to vote that up’. That’s where the fun was unlocked and that was kind of a surprise, I think that’s what I like most about it.

There’s also Pandemic: Rein of Cthulhu, a reimplementation of the Pandemic mechanisms
with fewer diseases and more cultists, and The Great Chariot Race that currently has the world’s shortest description on Board Game Geek.

It [the Board Game Geek interview] was hilarious. I think the cameraman, in fact I’m certain of this, knew more than the person being interviewed about that game, he was one of the playtesters. I was laughing my ass off when I watched that.

Matt managed to fulfil a dream shared by a lot of board game enthusiasts in 2014 when he was able to become a full time board game designer… and still be able to afford to eat! He is characteristically modest when asked about this transition.

I don’t feel like I made that happen so much. It kind of feels like it happened to me. I mean, I didn’t anticipate the interest and growth in Pandemic for example, and I owe a lot of credit to Z-Man and what they’ve done building and growing and promoting the brand and really expanding it out. That allowed me to get a royalties treatment that allowed me to produce other products and have a larger product line. Ultimately I was able to make it work.

Unfortunately for those of us wishing to follow him in his footsteps, there is no magic bullet for success.

It’s a lot like becoming a musician or a writer, it’s difficult to jump in and do it full time from day 1.

I felt like I had to create 20 bad designs before I got a good one, maybe more. I heard a poet talking about how everyone has to write their first 200 hundred bad poems before you can create a good one. So you know, for me, it was a gradual thing, I worked at my craft, I began to understand how to do good iterative design and how to test them well, so it wasn’t an overnight thing, I’ve been designing them since I was a kid.

One thing is to kind of manage your expectations, another is to understand where your motivations are, you know, are you in it for the joy of creating games then that’s great! It’ll show in your work, but if you are in it to make a quick buck… then yeah its probably not great… see poetry!

 

I would like to say a big thank you to Matt for taking the time to speak with me, as well as Eclectic Games in Reading for hosting a great press day and Esdevium Games for inviting me along!

As an aside this is my first interview and if you have any feedback on this article it would be great to hear it! Drop me a note in the comments.