What goes in to writing those flavour paragraphs?
For the main set, they had an awful "impress the king" thing they put in as a placeholder. Man. Impress the king. You don't need to acquire land to impress anyone - it's its own reward. So I wrote up a replacement intro, which then got hacked up to be less conversational and therefore slightly less funny. It was still better than what they'd had so okay (the later ones mostly escaped editing).
For Intrigue I thought, oops, now I have to write another funny intro. I wrote it very quickly though, it was effortless.
For Seaside I sat down to work on a list of jokes to turn into a paragraph. You can see that in detail at
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=124.0.
For Alchemy I again worked on a list of jokes. It didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, but people seemed to like the main jokes, phew. For Prosperity, another list, this one turned out well. The baklava statue was originally a piece of pumice that looked like the pope, but not enough people got that joke. For Cornucopia I didn't do as well and then Jay cut the jesters fighting to the death, which was one of the main jokes. The roast hay doesn't carry the paragraph but well it turns out these things don't loom large in my life afterwards, hooray.
For Hinterlands I wrote down, "The world is big and your kingdom small," fitting the faraway lands theme, and then immediately thought of a joke from one of my screenplays, that started, "It's a big city out there, and we're little people. I mean little when compared to the city..." So I just copied that with the words changed, and the rest was easy except for what concept exactly for them not even to have a word for, which I picked a day or two later, although I think mamihlapinatapai was immediately in the running.
For Dark Ages I wrote one paragraph the usual way. It wasn't as good as I wanted and I wrote a completely new one, then merged them.
What gave you the idea for doing secret histories?
There was a BoardGameNews preview of Dominion. I was asked a bunch of questions, but whereas most people would just post my answers, W. Eric Martin kind of hacked it up. There would be one sentence quoting me, and then two sentences describing what I said. This made it a little less accurate, but I corrected the thing I cared most about in a comment on it, and hey W. Eric has to have fun too. Anyway that article was about the game and he also asked about the outtakes (which I barely said anything about), but it didn't cover the cards in the set. And there was stuff to say there. So I wrote up an article and posted it on BGG, which didn't have an article.
These days BGN is no more, and BGG has "designer diaries." I stuck with the Secret Histories though. I feel like they're plenty visible to the people that want to see them, and I don't want to be too in-your-face with them.
What are your thoughts, if any, about "classic" board games (chess, go, or even things like risk, stratego, monopoly)?
I will just cover those five.
Chess: Chess has two huge flaws. First, for new players, it's hard to even see what the pieces can do. You have to remember how all the pieces move and then consider how they would all interact with any potential move. Second, you can potentially see many moves in advance, perfectly. Only, you personally, you cannot do that, because it's too hard. You aren't looking ten moves ahead and therefore you're playing suboptimally. I guess you're just stupid, Chess tells you. Chess magnifies this due to the way the game works; it's not just perfect information, it's perfect information and small differences can get blown up. At one point I made a game in the Chess family. People would ask me about Magic, and I would say, well suppose we were going to play Chess, only we each brought half of the board and pieces. You've got knights and pawns and so forth, but I've got archers and pikemen, and half of my board is under water. After using this analogy a few times, I thought, I should make that game. And I made a game and well, it was way too hard to even see what the pieces could do.
Go: Go is also perfect information but somehow does not seem as flawed in that way as chess, in addition of course to not making you remember how the pieces work and stuff. I've barely gotten to play it. It was interesting. I guess I'm more interested in it in terms of implications than as a game to play. It's cool that like a piece in the middle of nowhere is doing good work for you.
Risk: Risk (the old version, not whatever goes by that name today) is perhaps the game I most often use as a bad example. In Risk, the better you're doing, the more fun you get to have; the worse you're doing, the less you get to do. It's like if in Scrabble, the player in last place only got 3 letters to work with. In Risk all losers look identical - they all have nothing. No-one has any interest in seeing that position but the winner. Risk eliminates players with hours left in the game. It's heavily political. Having a map of the world with armies in the countries is great, but that's all it's got.
Stratego: The premise is cute. I've played but don't really remember it.
Monopoly: I think people take the wrong lesson away from Monopoly. Monopoly is a bad game, because it gives you pointless decisions and lasts a random huge amount of time and eliminates players with hours left in the game and is political. But Monopoly is also a successful game, perhaps because it's filled with fun things - you roll dice and draw cards and see what you get, you get stuff that's yours that goes in front of you, you build up your stuff. On anyone else's turn you might get paid. People focused on cashing in on Monopoly by making more roll-and-move games (yes they predate Monopoly but don't you think?), so that roll-and-move (a completely reasonable mechanic) has all these negative connotations now, when the real direction to go in was more games of building up your stuff. Settlers is more or less a fixed Monopoly - you roll dice and draw cards, you get stuff that's yours, both on the board and in your hand, you build up your stuff, you trade, you get paid when it's not your turn. But it's fast and doesn't eliminate players and isn't full of pointless decisions. It's still political of course.
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