Interview: David J. Mortimer

Today we have an interview of UK based game designer David J. Mortimer who spared 20 mins to chat to me at the UK Games Expo. David is the designer of Twilight Squabble, Pocket Imperium and most recently, The Cousin’s War, amongst several others published and upcoming.

Matt: How did you get into designing games?

David: I’ve always tinkered, I designed a Blood Bowl-esque game before Blood Bowl was around when I was 12 years old, on the back of some wallpaper and using Warhammer mechanics. But I only seriously got into it around 2012, when I met up with the Playtest group in London.

M: So was it meeting Playtest UK that got you into design, or did you go looking for them?

D: No, I’d been tinkering and I had a game at that time, but I didn’t know what to do with it, where to go next. At the 2012 UK Games Expo I met with Playtest, got to know Rob [Harris, Playtest UK organiser], that’s when I started structuring what I was doing.

M: Did they train you up?

D: The brilliant thing about Playtest is that everyone helps everyone. In this industry, everything is networking at the end of the day. You can have as good a game as any but if you don’t know the right people or where to go, to pitch it, or you don’t get lucky, then you get stuck in a rut. Certainly I learnt a lot about how to develop a game, playtesting with people like Matt [Dunston] and Brett [Gilbert] who’ll rip your game to shreds, but give you solid, structured feedback. Games will get torn apart, put back together again and you learn through that process.

I think I’ve done about 35 games since then that are all either canned because they were no good or are in various states of progress, so it’s been a long learning process!

M: How long was it then from there to your first title?

D: Now I’m going to contradict myself. While I was there at the 2nd meet up I had taken along this push your luck dice game about dragons and I was chatting to a couple of guys and they’d both sent dice games into Travis [Worthington] at Indie Boards and Cards, because he’d put a call out on Board Game Geek, that I hadn’t seen, saying he was looking for a push your luck dice game.

They were both telling me their feedback, basically he wanted a true push your luck, but we were all designing games with a little more strategy to it. He was looking for something more akin to Zombie Dice, or Martians, and I knew mine was similar, but I took both their feedback, applied it to my game, and then contacted Travis who was quite keen! So Essen 2013 I met with Travis, 2014 Dragon Slayer was on Kickstarter and by the end of that year it was published!

I would never have known Travis was looking for a game if I hadn’t have gone to that Playtest meet up, so as I say, you have to get lucky. I just sat down at the right table, the right conversation, had a chat thought ok, I think I can do something here, had what travis was looking for, and so Dragon Slayer was born.

M: That made it a lot easier going forward?

D: Well this is all how it works, I’d met Brett Gilbert that year and back then he was running the Good Little Games site with free print and plays, and again I had something I thought would be alright and that was Pocket Imperium. An 18 card game with cubes. Brett liked it, helped me develop it a bit, did all the graphics, and published it on the site. Then just before Essen, LudiCreations had contacted me: “I’ve seen your game on Good Little Games, do you want to pitch it to us?” I was like, ok! So I’ve gone to Essen for the first time with 2 games and I’m meeting 2 publishers, and they both signed up, so I say you gotta get lucky! If I hadn’t gone to Playtest, none of this would have happened. Those two opened doors because once you have games published and on the shelves, people listen to what you’ve got.

M: What’s your advice for new designers?

D: Certainly join a group, like Playtest or Unpub in the States. Try to get a regular group of designers together to help each other develop games, find out who they know, who they work with. Get contacts and find out what publishers want before you pitch to them. When you have a game, get it finished by getting them torn down and rebuilt, and then target it. Don’t go with everything to everyone.

M: Is that how you’ve done it every time since?

D: I’ll normally go to Essen with 5 or 6 games and I’ll send an email out to each publisher that I’m meeting. I’ll have 15 or 20 meetings each year, and I’ll send them an email with a list of what I’m bringing pointing out the ones on that list that I think they might be interested in, but I will tag on the other games I’ll have with me. Sometimes you don’t know what they’re after and they’ll latch on to one of the others! These are like 3-4 liners, number of players, the hook. Then they’ll tell me what they’d like to see!

On the Design Process

M: How do you get started with a new design?

D: It’s usually a spark of something, two things usually, I’ve got lots of mechanics written down that might work with certain themes, lots of themes written down that might be quite hot for games. Then two of those will usually collide. I mean Flock was a great example. I had a mechanic, I tried it with another designer on another game which just didn’t work out in the end.

It was a worker placement mechanic, where anyone can use any action space, but if you want to activate it, instead of placing you bring one away and they all come, yours and your opponents, and you all have to take the action at the same time. The more you have on there, the more powerful the action. But it was looking for a theme and one day, out walking the dog, I came across a flock of birds, one flew away, all the birds flew away. That was my game!

M: What’s the process, once you’ve got your initial idea

D: I build a prototype quickly, could be handwritten, if I do anything on the computer it’s white with black writing on it, it’s nothing complicated because it’s going to be torn up and thrown away so I don’t throw any time at it. I will use free use stock images to give it an idea but I tend to find with prototypes, if you over complicate it graphically, then the game may be misunderstood.

I don’t need to do solo testing, I’m very lucky to have two teenage boys, Adam and Jacob, and they are my alpha testers. So instead of doing a solo playtest, I will sit down with them, they’ll laugh at it when it falls apart, we’ll rebuild it, get it working, and do all that testing before I go to a playtest group. When I go there I’ll have a workable model, might not be fun, but it works! That’s where you get the designer tear downs. Rip each others game apart for fun.

You can’t have pride when you’re doing this

That’s something I’ve had to learn, you can’t have pride when you’re doing this, you can’t hang on to anything. You get games where you’ve built it around a mechanic and by the end that mechanic will be ripped out. I mean the big example of that is not me, it’s Brett and Matt’s Elysium, that all started because of a dice mechanic. And obviously there are no dice in there anymore! It even had dice in it when it went to Space Cowboys, the columns replace the dice. That can happen. You can’t hold on to anything.

M: Is there any disadvantage to playing with designers all time?

D: You do need to, before you get it in front of publishers, to have been playing with general people. So I do go along to normal play groups as well as to Playtest. Designers are very good at seeing the faults, breaking it down, helping rebuild it, but sometimes they know too much and you need somebody who’s going to approach a game completely blank. Don’t do a blind playtest with designers, because they’ll be able to work out what they should be doing anyway. Turn up to gaming groups and play a game and then ask if they’d mind playing one of your own. But make sure it works before you do that. If it crashes and burns, that’s the last time they’ll every play a game with you.

Future Plans

M: You’ve made your name designing small box games. Is that something you want to continue doing?

D: I don’t want to get pigeon holed as a micro games designer! It worked out that way A) because the boys were younger when I was doing those, that’s what they could play, and B) I wanted to learn the industry in the process, and those let me do that. When I first started, I was starting big heavy games and I realised I didn’t have the the time or the resources to playtest and develop them so that’s why I went down to the little games with the plan to build back up. Im working on some heavy games now. I’m working on one with David Turczi, which we are pitching around at the moment.

M: Can you tell us anything about that?

D: It’s an area control, supply line building game called Planetary Pioneers. Worker placement, but when you place a worker you place a card with it, and that card either enhances the action or allows you to do another action. So you place and then resolve in order but you don’t necessarily know what your opponents can do. Akin to Dominant Species, but plays 30-60 mins. We are pitching it around at the moment.

Working on another called Chief Dungeon Officer, which is a thematic euro, with Tomas Roldan, who’s never designed before, but he’s so heavily into the theme, he’s a World of Warcraft fan, so he came up with the concept, and came to me with it. I think he thought I was going to make a small card game and came round and I had this two hour behemoth on the table, worker placement, economy, all of that kind of stuff. That’s coming together nicely, we’ll be pitching that at Essen. Hopefully one of those will take and people will realise I can do other things other than micro games!

M: Does it help that your kids are older now?

D: Exactly! They are mid-late teens now, so they love it! They prefer the heavier games now.

New Releases

M: So, you’ve got a couple of games at the show today! Can you tell us about those?

D: The Cousin’s War is the one that’s on sale. I’ve been trying to get a War of the Roses game done for a little while, and a couple of prototypes just haven’t made it. I’ve had one that’s been published but got re-themed (Microfilms) and my wife was starting to get a little bit frustrated, because she’s the Wars of the Roses fan. So I was determined to get a War of the Roses game published!

The Cousin’s War is a card driven area control game. In fact, it’s probably closer to what people were expecting from Twilight Squabble. I was working on both around the same time. Tony [Boydell] calls it a meaty micro, and I think that’s a good description of it. You do have to think, you do have to be watching the board. You will learn the cards and you’ll learn what your opponent’s possibly holding and start working around that, which is when the meta starts building around it. It’s not a lot different from how it came out my head and landed on the table but Alan Paull helped me refine it and clean it up.

Then the other one is Ironclads: Space battles in the Victorian Aether. This is a tabletop minis, space combat game set in a Victorian steampunk setting. It’s a fairly simple game, the depth comes from the fact you can customise all of your ships, so you can add certain weapons, silly things like giant chainsaws on front of a ship for close combat, nets to protect each other. But the real nice thing about the game, when it is Kickstarted later this year with Triple Ace Games, it will be 100% 3D printable, so all the minis, all the movement templates, all the range markers, command tokens, you can print in 3D, and all you have to add is some dice. You get a pdf of the rules, so there’s no physical delivery.

M: That’s a unique approach to distribution!

D: There’s been a couple of 3D print games but nothing that has taken off recently. A lot of people have printers, or friends who have them, and you are going to pay for one file for a ship and you can print as many as you want. So your battles can be enormous. You can probably buy a 3D printer and the files for the game and still pay less than you would for X-Wing, on a big scale.

You alternate placing command tokens on the table, they are numbered, but you place them face down. So your opponent knows where you are placing but not which one it is. Then you have to flip over the lowest numbered token, and any of your ships within 3 inches are activated. So you’re trying to create chains of actions around the table. And there are 2 wilds that can be activated at any time. Kind of, not Robo Rally, but has that little bit of the feel: you kind of know what your opponents are doing, but not really.

M: Can you leave a chain of tokens crossing the whole board?

D: you can, but your opponent will know you’re doing that. If you can’t use the token, because you messed up or got pushed off course, then you can spend to move another one, so you can recover.

M: I look forward to seeing it! Thanks so much for your time David!