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From Blog website: www.brettspiel.co.uk By Brett J. Gilbert
July 12, 2009
LEGO Board Games: Interview with Cephas Howard
In which I am lucky enough to get the scoop on the new LEGO board games from
Cephas Howard, the lead designer of all 10 games, and discover more about the
games’ genesis and his own game design philosophy.
When I requested (in a fit of rhetorical whimsy!) that ‘the real Cephas Howard
stand up and make himself known’ I did not for one moment expect him to do so. I
am therefore profoundly grateful to Cephas for getting in touch with me after
reading my earlier posts, and for subsequently being so open and generous in
sharing his experiences and insights, thereby allowing us all a glimpse of the
remarkable development program undertaken at LEGO.
Cephas is a British game designer who, for the past three years, has been
leading a mammoth design effort at LEGO. The initial tranche of 10 games are
available online now in the UK LEGO shop; they will soon be available more
widely in UK and Europe, and will see a widespread international release in
2010. LEGO is a global toy brand and their bold move into the board game market
is notable for many reasons. But who is Cephas, and how did he come to be
spearheading such a remarkable endeavour?
Cephas describes a childhood experience of designing games to play with family
and friends that I think will be familiar to many adult game designers, although
even at that age his approach seems preternaturally rigourous: repeatedly
playing and evolving the games with his two brothers before sharing them with
their friends. However, few children grow up actively wanting to be game
designers, even if the ‘bug’ is never lost, and though he continued to maintain
notebooks of game ideas (a practice I would definitely recommend!) he otherwise
pursued a professional design career within the publishing industry.
The roll of the die
The opportunity at LEGO arose at a time when Cephas was actively looking to
self-publish two of his own games. He had quotes from manufacturers, he had a
website, he had business cards; and then he saw an advertisement for the job at
LEGO and events took an entirely unexpected turn. He says that he had always
dreamed of working for LEGO as a boy and, as an adult, continued to admire the
brand and the toys. Here, then, was his chance. He applied for the position and
— to quote Cephas — ‘lo and behold’ landed the job based on his past portfolio,
his enthusiasm and ideas, and what was perhaps a true meeting of minds with his
future bosses.
And then the real work began, and for Cephas the ‘real battle’ was to convince
LEGO to launch with many games, not just one. This is clearly a battle he
convincingly won, and now, three years after Cephas designed his first LEGO
game, the trademark ‘buildable’ dice and the entire range of 10 games is finally
available for the public to play.
‘One of the aspects I believe is necessary for getting your games launched is to
have a belief in yourself and your ideas, and the ability to convince others and
make believers of them also.’
CEPHAS HOWARD
Many designers might have been humbled by both the scale of the project and the
fact that the envisioned product range was something genuinely new to LEGO and
therefore not without significant commercial risk. Cephas, however, gives the
impression of a man both utterly undaunted by such concerns and incredibly eager
to get going. In his first year alone he developed around 30 game ideas.
The deliberate focus of the launch range of games were children in the age range
6–10 years old, and from the outset the games were constantly being evolved and
playtested with groups of children from Germany, the UK and the US. Cephas’
express hope is to encourage children familiar with LEGO but who do not have the
‘game bug’ to play, and that within the first 10 games there is a range of
experiences that contains ‘something for everyone’, including the grown-ups.
Cephas describes LEGO itself as a great prototyping tool: fast, flexible and
endlessly rebuildable. Most of his game ideas came to him without a preconceived
‘theme’, and were the result of exercises in investigating possible game
mechanisms and different uses of LEGO bricks. These ideas could be quickly
playtested in-house before being presented to the playtest groups. Only later in
the process did he begin to try out possible ‘stories’ that could be applied to
the games to create a sense of narrative play for the children.
Although Cephas has been the lead designer on the games it is clear that a large
team of developers and designers within LEGO have been at his side, and that he
and his team have wisely sought counsel from some carefully chosen experts. Of
all the games, the flagship title Ramses Pyramid is alone in featuring a
well-known designer’s name on the box: that of Reiner Knizia, who is very
possibly the best known game designer at work today.
‘It was great getting to playtest my game ideas with Reiner and just tap into
his huge vault of experience. He is a great character and a fantastic games
designer.’
CEPHAS HOWARD
Cephas worked with Knizia on both Ramses Pyramid and Lunar Command specifically,
but Knizia also acted as a consultant on the project as a whole and continues to
work with LEGO on future games.
Cephas also has praise for Bernie DeKoven’s book ‘The Well-Played Game’. “I have
also been inspired by the thinking of DeKoven, and his idea of the ‘well-played
game’. He suggests you should be able to break or change the rules of a game if
this is necessary to play it well together.”
Build – Play – Change
The concept of a breakable, changeable, rebuildable game is the central conceit
of the entire range. LEGO’s tagline for the games is ‘Build - Play - Change’ and
the game rules themselves contain an explicit challenge to players to do just
that. The players are actively encouraged to change the board or the dice, to
break the rules; to not just play the game, but to play with the game.
‘We give you the express permission to change the game we have designed.’
CEPHAS HOWARD
“First you build your game,” says Cephas. “This creates a bond and a greater
sense of ownership, immersion and understanding of the game for the kids. It
also gives them the confidence to change it later on.”
“Next you play. The games all have good, solid game experiences that can be
played over and over, and allow kids to have fun with their friends and family
while doing so.” Cephas points out that truly social play is something that LEGO
has not always offered, but that these games allow parents to be genuinely
involved in LEGO play with their children.
“Then you change. Now if gets interesting!” Cephas explains that each game
provides new ideas for gameplay, including not just advanced rules but also the
challenge to children to get creative, albeit with the wise suggestion to try
out one idea at a time so that they can see what works and hopefully learn why.
“The dice we designed sums all of this up in itself,” says Cephas. “You build
it, play with it, and can change it. And it creates the element of chance in all
our games which means that any player has a chance of winning a strategic game.”
The dice is the one physical element common to all the games and its image is
used across their packaging and as an icon for LEGO’s marketing of the new
products. The notion of designing a ‘buildable’ dice for a line of new LEGO
games may seem obvious, but the project began with the assumption that any dice
used would be wooden. It was Cephas’ suggestion that just such a buildable dice
was needed, although he freely admits that many people were involved in creating
the final design, which took the company 16 months to perfect.
In addition the games demanded the design of a completely new LEGO ‘microfig’
that would occupy a single LEGO ‘stud’ when placed onto a gameboard. Given the
importance of this component, its design, like that of the dice, was iterated
extensively before the final production microfig was born.
Climbing the mountain
There is a story to be told about the genesis and evolution of each of the
games, but to illustrate some of the ways in which individual games changed
Cephas chose the example of Lava Dragon. The game is a ‘simple’ race game: the
first player to reach the top of the mountain and command the dragon wins; along
the way players try to block their opponents or even push them off the mountain
with the special ‘lava stick’.
The game began as an Alpine adventure (photos 1 and 2). The very first prototype
was not even a game, rather just a model used to illustrate the concept to the
first group of kids the team showed it to.
“When I first test games they are very basic looking,” says Cephas. “Just a few
bricks and a dice. The principle is to test the game idea; if that works then we
start to dress and theme the game in stages, testing as we go, evolving the
built set and the rules at the same time.”
Unseen in the photos, but part of the game from the beginning, is the dice. The
game’s innovative core mechanism is that the coloured panels on the dice (which
correspond to the player colours) are added to the dice during the game and so
the dice configures differently each time. Players roll the dice in turn, but
all of the players can move on any roll if their colour comes up. “You might end
up moving with every roll,” expains Cephas. “No more waiting for your turn to be
engaged in the game.”
As the game developed the setting was changed from an Alpine setting to a
volcanic one (photo 3), and the game’s ‘trophy’ became a dragon (photo 4).
Cephas explains that the so-called ‘lava stick’ both inspired and arose from
this transition: “It gave the possibity to eject a player from the mountain back
to the bottom in a very physical and rewarding manner. The players’ men really
pop off nicely!”
The wisdom of children
Cephas describes an exhaustive program of playtesting the entire range of games.
The team held weekly playtest sessions with groups of children, introducing new
ideas to them at very early stages, often before any formal rules had been
written. These groups included new children each week, so that each time even
the experience of playing a board game using LEGO would be new.
“Playtesting with your friends is never enough,” observes Cephas. “You must have
total strangers play your games and be brutally honest about them. Kids are good
like that. They tell it like it is. Then listen to what they say and make
changes. I don’t mean do exactly what they say, merely listen to what they are
saying and why they are saying it. Usually you, the designer, will be able to
fix any problems much better than they will, but you might never spot those
problems if they didn’t point them out.”
‘Accept that some games just don’t work and can’t be saved; be prepared to let
them go and move on.’
CEPHAS HOWARD
Cephas suggests that most game designs are unpublishable, principally because,
in his opinion, the game designer designed the game that he wanted to play and
did not give enough thought to what others would enjoy. “Don’t design it for
yourself, design it for others to enjoy. This might actually mean you no longer
really enjoy playing the game you designed, but as long as everyone else does
then you have succeeded. Remember, if you are publishing it then it is work, it
is a business; it is no longer about you nor about trying to design the perfect
game for you.”
‘From the second you decide to publish a game it is no longer truly yours.’
CEPHAS HOWARD
Cephas highlights that the purpose of the playtesting sessions was never to
simply ‘rubber stamp’ an already established game idea but to allow those ideas
to evolve and improve as much as possible before they were made available to the
public. Which, of course, is not intended to be the end of a process, but just
the beginning.
“We believe it is truly bringing the LEGO experience to games in a way we’ve
never done before,” says Cephas, whose personal wish is to see the games
continue to evolve in the hands of everyone who buys them. “I am just trying to
give them a solid starting point. Designing, refining and experimenting with
games should be every bit as much fun as playing them.” And from everything
Cephas has told me, it sounds as if he has indeed had a great deal of fun. Lucky
him!
As for LEGO the die may now be well and truly cast, but given the care and
creativity with which these games have been designed success seems assured;
luck, I think, won’t come into it.
(There are images on the website)
LEGO Board Games: Interview with Cephas Howard
-end of report-
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: LEGO Board Games: Interview with Cephas Howard
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| (...) Great stuff. (...) Lunar Command (the only game I've bought so far) really does feel like it's been designed by someone with a good feeling for what works in boardgames. Turns out it's not someone but sometwo. :-) Maybe it's just me, but I (...) (15 years ago, 4-Aug-09, to lugnet.gaming)
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