Interview: Sophie Williams of Needy Cat Games

It’s a rare treat to be able to talk to a creator about their work – to hear the story straight from the source, without the filters of second hand knowledge and other people’s opinions, like the world’s longest game of Chinese Whispers.

The terrific thing about board game designers is how willing they are to discuss what they do – because it’s not just a job for them, it’s a passion. The lovely folks at the UK’s Needy Cat Games are particularly passionate and open to chat (if you don’t believe me, just watch them shoot the breeze about their Hellboy: The Board Game with Robin), and lead designer Sophie Williams was kind enough to talk about their latest game, The League of Infamy, which is published by Mantic Games and is currently smashing it on Kickstarter.

League of Infamy hilariously describes itself as an “occasionally co-operative dungeon crawler”. Could you elaborate on that?

The premise of League of Infamy is that a band of Villains are sent on nefarious missions to achieve goals for the League. The Keep Master controls the defence and can decide how they want to set up their Keep in preparation for the incoming Villains – they can make rooms harder to break into, increase patrols and Defenders or even build barricades out of stacked furniture. The Villains, on the other hand, only have their wits and whatever kit they carried into the Keep with them… oh, and each other. They have a mission to achieve and have been told by the League in no uncertain terms to work together… but they’re also all being measured on their individual performance! Once you’re in the Keep and all hell is breaking loose, well… it’s quite hard to not want to be the one who comes out with the best Loot and the best stories to tell.

Ultimately, the Villains must work together to defeat the Keep Master and they’ll all get a reward for completing the mission. But exactly which one of you is considered the best among thieves… well, it’s up to you how you make that happen. In our experience, the Villains all work together until one of them decides to do something selfish, at which point everything goes a bit mad.

Which came first, the theme or the “co-operatish” idea for the gameplay? Is it the same for every game you’ve worked on?

The amazing folks at Mantic approached us with the concept for this game, both the setting and the co-operatish style. We were super lucky that they had a really solid idea of what they wanted the game to be, we just worked out how to do it. We mainly focused on fine-tuning the player experience, making sure there’s lots of interaction and table talk. As the Villains you really do feel like a group of people who grudgingly have to work together, and the Keep Master has a great time sowing dissent.

Most of the time we get approached to write a game for a client and they’ve got either an IP – such as Hellboy, or they’ve got an idea of the style of game they want, maybe a specific range of models they want to use. We tend to bury ourselves in the theme of a game and do loads of R&D. We explore films, books, TV shows, plays, articles, pictures – anything that can inspire us about the theme of the story. Then as we build the core engine of the game we constantly ask: how does this make us feel? Does it fit the theme?

How long have you been working on League of Infamy? Has it taken longer or shorter time than other games you’ve worked on?

League of Infamy took us about six months to make. That’s a pretty standard time for a board game of this size. We’ve got our timescales down to a fine art now and we’re pretty good at sounding out a project timeline. Of course, you sometimes get something like Hellboy that explodes and creates an extra six months of work thanks to all the stretch goals, but you can never predict that kind of stuff!

This isn’t your first miniatures game. How tricky is it to balance production and design?

Again, we’re pretty lucky to collaborate with Mantic on this one. We are always careful to scope out the full resources of a project at the start and inevitably, we’ll come back and ask for more during the development. This game was a really interesting challenge of trying to balance having interesting items and being able to collect loot without having so many hundreds of loot cards that they were unwieldy. So that was a physical constraint that then led to a mechanical solution within the game. You’ll find little quirks like that in every game design – they usually make the game better, but it can take some work to get past the bumpy bits! 

How has experience influenced your process for working on big box games?
League of Infamy was a treat because we were told that we’d need two expansions as well as the core game from the get-go. It allowed us to plan for an ongoing story in each of the three campaigns and gave us a clear ‘route’ through the three expansions (if you’re interested we recommend the core game, then No Half Measures, then Siren’s Wrath). When we did Hellboy, we added loads of content in afterwards and had to also work out how we were going to implement so many different missions, bosses and monsters without having too much repetition in the game-play. That was a huge undertaking. From Hellboy, we learnt that a clearer plan from the get-go was essential and it was lovely to have that and be able to do it! I think this time around there’s a much clearer way to use all of the Defenders and a better overall view about how the game plays.

Your previous dungeon crawler, Hellboy: The Board Game, was a fully co-operative “players vs the game” experience, whereas League of Infamy has a Keep Master for a 1-v-All experience. What inspired that choice?

We chatted to the folks at Mantic about what would suit the theme and style of the game they wanted to make and we felt this suited it best. We were really proud of how Hellboy turned out, and we’re thrilled to this day at how popular it is. But the last thing we wanted to do was something that felt like a rip-off or re-skin of the same game. There are definitely some elements from Hellboy that run through League of Infamy (the dice and action mechanics are similar, for a start), but we wanted League of Infamy to be its own game with different player experiences and challenges. If players want a fully cooperative experience, they can play Hellboy. If they want something a little bit more antagonistic but still having the coop feel, then they can play League of Infamy. Both games can exist alongside each other. I think games generally are better for them being able to double down on what they’re good at rather than trying to stretch a game to be all things to all players. In this instance, the theme of League of Infamy really favours the 1 vs many dynamic, especially when you throw in the Disorder cards which allow incredibly petty levels of betrayal without breaking the game. 

With the massive deck of 200 cards, 200 tokens(!), 45 enemy miniatures and 6 playable characters (7 in the Kickstarter), the game promises to ‘have more replay value than knives up a goblin’s sleeve.’ In what ways have you built that into the base game’s six scenarios?

As I mentioned before, the Keep Master gets a lot of choice in how the Keep is set up before the Villains arrive. This, coupled with the variety of Defenders, the random contents of each room and the Villains themselves, means that no scenario will ever play out the same way twice. Each of the six scenarios in the core game is a framework – it’s an objective and a board layout, but the details will always be different. We’ve played through each scenario a number of times during testing, and the amount of variety just within the core box is something we’re really proud of. Then you add in all the expansions and extras and it increases exponentially. With Hellboy we created a very modular system, and we were really keen to repeat that here!

How important is replayability to you as a designer? For instance, are there any aspects of design that you are willing to compromise on, in order to increase a game’s replayability?

It’s really important to me that people can enjoy playing the game multiple times. I don’t want someone to play a mission once and feel they’ve finished it, so they’ll never play it again. I have games I’ve played over and over again, and I believe the missions should provide a framework on which to hang a fun and interesting experience. If you don’t feel compelled to try again but do it differently (both the Keep Master and the Villains) then you’re missing out on hours more potential fun with your friends. It’s why we (Needy Cat Games) always design our games with lots of modularity. Change one thing and you’ll freshen the game up again for another go! Who doesn’t want to have an excuse to play more games? 

The League of Infamy is set in the Kings of War universe, isn’t it? How much freedom were you given to work/play within that setting? Or is it quite prescriptive, akin to Hellboy?

Somewhere between the two. The folks at Mantic had most of the rough concepts about the Villains and settings for the expansions and core game mapped out, but we were able to wiggle around within that. We suggested some alternative options for Villains to provide a wider variety of play-styles for gamers and we were able to create some Defenders from scratch as long as they fit within the setting. We’re big fans of the Kings of War universe and wanted to make sure we represented it well in the game. But we were always asking, why are the Villains here? If they’re not fighting on the frontlines, why not? That’s how you end up with unusual characters, they’ve got something about them that makes them different from their ‘normal’ counterparts in the Kings of War universe. I think that gives the game a lot of character.

What’s next for you and Needy Cat Games?

Loads of really exciting stuff! We’re hoping to bring our robot arena fighting game, Robot Fight Club, to Kickstarter in Q1 next year. It’s set in a retro-futuristic abandoned robotics academy where kids have rebuilt old robots and set up a league to battle them against each other.

If you’d like to play the game and give us feedback, you can download an early test build here.

You can also sign up to the Needy Cat Games Newsletter or check out their Facebook page for updates.

The League of Infamy Kickstarter finishes on November 13th.