James Ernest, the 30-year-old founder of Cheapass Games, a company which has quickly established itself as a favorite among gamers for simple designs and rock-bottom prices, started publishing games in 1997. Several (five to be specific) have been nominated for various Origins Awards and a few (two -- Kill Doctor Lucky and Give Me the Brain!) have won. Kill Doctor Lucky, my personal favorite Cheapass Game release, also is an inductee into the Games Magazine Games 100 list (so are several others).
Ernest's latest creation is Brawl, a real-time fighting card game that he has high hopes for. After a successful preview at this year's GenCon, Brawl has been released to the general public. Games generally take less than a minute, but has a turn-based variant known as "training mode" so players can get the hang of the game under less pressure-packed conditions.
Ernest left the University of Missouri at Rolla (he called it "an engineering school dressed up as a university") after five semesters as a mechanical engineering major. ("I majored in mechanical engineering until I discovered that I was on track to work among geeks for the rest of my life," he said. "Look at me now: I'm a game designer. Not much different really.")
He recently took some time to answer a few questions about Brawl, the upcoming word game Escape from Elba (you're Napoleon; so is everyone else) and all things Cheapass.
When did you first become interested in board and card games?
I don't know. I've played the old standards for as long as I can remember.
What were some of your first favorite board games?
I used to play games like Monopoly, Scrabble, chess, and so forth with my family. My mom and I spent a lot of time on the road, playing games like Botticelli and 20 Questions, and my grandfather taught me how to play license-plate poker. (For real money!)
My mom's family also has a house version of Pitch which was a perennial favorite. Learning to play this game was a part of growing up. My grandfather (the license-plate poker player) is the family champion, mainly because he's crazy enough to bid on just about anything.
I think as a kid I played games because it gave me something to do with the grownups. I was sometimes a sore loser, but in retrospect I think this happened when I was beaten by the game, not by the players. That's why I try to write simple games, to avoid that feeling that there's something you were too stupid to get.
What are some of your current favorites?
I don't play a lot of hobby games, and rarely have. Currently, my favorite games are all casino games: blackjack, poker, craps. As a designer, I'm fascinated by the apparent contradictions in a game like craps. There is absolutely no strategy to the game, aside from choosing the single best bet (or, really, not playing at all) -- yet people will play it for hours, usually without even understanding the rules. A lot of casino games behave like this: slots, mini baccarat, roulette, take your pick.
Poker is fascinating for other reasons: Poker is all about psychology. Figuring out how smart somebody else is, what they are thinking, what they are trying to make you think. Sure, there's a lot of math you can get into. But it's all tempered by the fuzzy facts about who you're playing with and what they might be holding.
When and why did you start designing games?
I designed a chess variant in high school, called Tishai (currently free on my web site). Before that, I'd come up with a few simple things, but I worked on Tishai for months. It was part of a fantasy novel which I never finished. Which explains the ridiculous name.
After Tishai, fast-forward to the mid-90s, when Wizards of the Coast released Magic. I knew some folks there, and we all decided that Wizards needed a TCG to appeal to younger kids. (Yes, a crazy idea, I know. But we were young and foolish.) I wrote a simple TCG called Hero, and tried to sell it to them. They wasted a lot of my time and eventually bought the rights, with the understanding that this game would never get published.
During the same time, I was beginning to collect the ideas which would eventually become the first wave of Cheapass Games: Get Out, Huzzah! and Kill Doctor Lucky.
From your perspective, what's the status of board games (and table games in general) today?
I'm not sure what's happening. There wasn't much new at GenCon this year. A couple of new RPGs (which I don't follow at all), plus Disk Wars in wargames, Apples to Apples in party games, Brawl in card games. I think the extant board and card games are trucking along strong, but there's nothing really new. I'm sure there will be soon.
