Four Questions with Bruno Faidutti

Bruno Faidutti is one of the most prolific game designers working today. His ludography includes Citadels, Mystery of the Abbey, and Boomtown. Bruno also maintains a personal web site which gives insight into the game design process and includes his notion of the games which would be found in an Ideal Game Library.

What's your favorite recently played (for the first time) game?

Manila -- though it was not exactly the first time... I've always thought that casino games with no real money involved could not work, and Manila proves the contrary. It has all the excitement of Craps or Roulette with some more skill involved and at a much lower cost.

In the last years, there seems to have been a trend towards strategy in games, and when luck was involved, which is often necessary to make a game more exciting, it had to be hidden, shameful. That's why, in German games, luck relies more often on cards than on dice -- there's the same amount of luck when rolling dice and drawing cards, but players can talk of "card hand management" while "dice management" sounds strange.

Manila deliberately goes the other way -- there's some skill in it, with calculating the odds and the value of the captain, but the emphasis is put on the luck element, and all players stand up and look with tension and anguish when dice are rolled. That's probably what made it non-politically correct for the Spiel des Jahres, and it's a shame.

If you want a game I've really played only once and very recently, it must be Nexus Ops. Nothing new here, but it's fun, dynamic, has a good balance between luck and tactics, and the fluo figures are really cute. Feels like Axis and Alies played in one hour.

What game do you want to play most that you haven't played yet?

Probably some big and heavy game like Struggle of Empires. It's hard to get players to start a game that could take a whole night, and it's also difficult for me because it means that I probably won't test any prototype during this gaming session. But I'm sure I'll play it someday.

Or may be it's just the opposite -- I've never managed so far to play a game of Pirates of the Spanish Main. The main reason is that I'm weary with buying collectible games, even when this one seems to be really fun, and that I wait for someone with many nice ships to explain it to me.

A lot of your games -- including the upcoming Hollywood, Red Planet Mission, Key Largo and Silk Road -- are collaborations. Why is that, and do you prefer working as a collaborator or working solo?

I prefer to work in collaboration with some other author. I enjoy the sharing of ideas, the email or phone discussions about the game, and I think that it often makes for a better game, since there are the good ideas of two authors in it rather than only of one. Also, it's difficult to be really blocked in a collaboration work, since when one authors is stalled with no idea, the other often makes the right move to have the design go further.

There's also a vicious circle in it -- other authors know I'm good at collaborations, so when they are stuck with a game system and don't find out what to do with it, they often ask me, but it doesn't always work. I've a card deck by Michael Schacht on my desk for almost one year now, I know there's a good idea there that doesn't work yet, but I've not found out what to do with it yet.

Has the amount of strong positive reaction to the cooperative game Shadows Over Camelot (designed by two of your friends, Bruno Cathala and Serge Laget) surprised you?

Not at all, I was sure it will be a hit. I knew for years that the gameplay was a blast, having played it regularly with Serge and Bruno at the ludopathic gathering, and the wonderful graphics by Julien Delval could only make it better. The only other cooperative story-telling game so far was Lord of the Rings, which was already very good but Shadows over camelot is so much better. It is less linear, it has added tension with the possibility of a traitor, and it refers to a storyline that is so embedded in our culture that it is more or less known by everybody.

Of course, a cooperative game has probably less replay value than a competitive one, but it makes for such a great experience that I'm sure everybody will want to live it. For me, a game like Shadows over Camelot has all the qualities of both boardgames and role playing games, and that's what makes for its great appeal.