Welcome to another interview with a board game industry professional! Today we will be talking to game designer Jay Cormier about what makes him tick as a designer and what new projects are coming from him in the near future!
Welcome and thanks for joining us Jay! Let’s start with an easy question: What started you into game design?
You could say I’ve always been a game designer. I know I was designing games in grade school, or altering existing games with different rules. But it became serious when I moved to the other side of the country to my best friend, Sen-Foong Lim. We thought a good way to stay connected would be to DO something together, and so we thought game design would be the thing! We had tried our hand at it previously, but after a few sessions of moving some pieces of paper around, we couldn’t figure out how to make it FUN….so we gave up. But by starting anew a few years later, we had more technology on our side. We started our own forum and it did a wonderful job at keeping track of all of our ideas and it was a nice repository for each game idea we had. We’d hash out ideas until one of us got excited about one of them, then we’d move to prototyping it and trying it out!
Let’s talk about your newest game MIND MGMT. What inspired you to design the MIND MGMT board game?
Sen and I were so fortunate 4 years ago at GenCon. We happened to be at the Oni Press booth and Sen wondered aloud about who he’d have to talk to in order to make a game based on a comic they were selling called Sixth Gun. A man named Charlie turned around and said, “That’d be me!” We chatted with him, and the writer and artist team of Sixth Gun (a game that never did come to fruition unfortunately), but after that conversation, Charlie said, “oh you guys should meet Matt Kindt. He’s here somewhere too?” We were both taken aback. Matt Kindt was here? And you wanted to introduce us to him?!?!! Now if you don’t know who Matt Kindt is, that’s understandable, but know that I’m a huge fan of his work. At that point I already had two pieces of his artwork hanging in my room! Needless to say, we met with Matt at GenCon, and he had played and loved our game Akrotiri! It’s still his favourite 2-player game. He off-handedly said that he’d love a game to be made about his then current comic book, MIND MGMT. Well, we just about lost it and fanboyed all over him – as professionally as we could. We agreed to try to put something together. We knew that the game would have to get into the heads of players and after numerous attempts, and numerous ‘back to the drawing boards’, we finally settled on a 1 vs. many game. Sen and I both loved that genre, but wanted to make one that could play in less than an hour!
Who are some of your game designer inspirations?
Bauza is high up there because he seems to find new ways to do simple things while still ensuring there are meaningful decisions. 7 Wonders introduced drafting to the world as a game mechanic, instead of just a pre-game activity. Hanabi made me feel more different when playing than any game before – and that’s a super rare experience to have nowadays! I love designers that are varied in their designs. Designers that take risks, or designers that are hard to pigeon hole into a specific type of game.
What are your goals when creating a game?
For me, more than ever, the game has to be unique. It has to have a reason to exist in this world. Too often I playtest other designers’ games — and even some of my own designs — where the game works and is balanced, but there’s nothing new to it. There’s no real reason that this game should exist in the market today as it just won’t stand out enough. Sen and I pride ourselves on being so unique, whether it’s stacking weird blocks with Junk Art, to using your hand gestures to cast spells in D&D: Rock Paper Wizard to the hidden movement game that is meaty and full of interesting decisions, but plays in less than an hour with MIND MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game”.Other than that goal, our main goal throughout the entire process is to follow the fun. What are the playtesters telling us is the most fun? Should the game change to become something different because there’s more fun over here than where we thought it would be?
What are the current games we could play of yours?
In stores now I have In the Hall of the Mountain King, co-designed by Graeme Jahns (who I alternate teaching a game design class with at Vancouver Film School), Draw Your Own Conclusions, a party game I designed by myself, D&D: Rock Paper Wizard along with its expansion, Fistful of Monsters, co-designed with Sen-Foong Lim and Josh Cappel, MIB: Undercover, co-designed by Sen-Foong Lim, and finally Junk Art, which is the highest selling game that Sen and I have designed so far.The Belfort reprint, along with the Expansion Expansion and the new expansion: In Her Majesty’s Civil Service should be out shortly to Kickstarter backers and then onto retail.Coming out soon is a re-implementation of Rock Paper Wizard, but with WWE branding! It’s called…wait for it… Headlock Paper Scissors! It’s not just a new skin to the same game though as we had to come up with brand new mechanics to ensure this felt like a wrestling game! I think I like it more than Rock Paper Wizard actually!There are a few out of print games that you might find here and there like: But Wait There’s More, Train of Thought, Godfather A New Don and Orphan Black: The Card Game. If you live in Germany you could also play Tic Tac Moo and Djinn, both co-designed by Sen-Foong Lim.
What is coming down the pipeline from you in the near future?
MIND MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game” is our big game this year and we’ll be showing it off at every con we can get to this year. It’s a one vs. many game with one player secretly moving around trying to find recruits on specific spaces on the board, while the others are rogue agents trying to deduce the Recruiter’s whereabouts.We have a couple of escape room in a box games coming out this year that I don’t think we’re allowed to fully talk about. They are both based on very popular IPs, with each of them being a dream IP to work on for both of us!I have another party game, this time co-designed with Chase Disher about communicating with your partner about a drawing you made. It’s clever and totally different than any other game out there.We have 4-5 more games signed, but we’re not sure when they are being released!
What do you think sets you apart in the industry?
I think it’s three things:
1) the variety of games that I make – from drawing games to polyominos to stacking to resource engine to social deduction to dice rolling area control to escape rooms…I’m always trying to do something different!
2) The amount that I try to give back to the industry. When Sen and I first started out I created a blog called www.bamboozlebrothers.com. On this site we detailed The Steps we took to get our game published. It ended up being 33 steps and I’ve heard from many people that this has helped them with their process. It’s a bit dated now, but it’s all still relevant! Back when we started there weren’t any other sites with this kind of information available. Currently I’m now running a weekly YouTube show called How to Start a Board Game Company and I’m detailing every week what has to be done to get a board game company up and running. Some weeks I have guests talking us through the finances or through marketing, and some weeks it’s me showing you how I prototype or how I’m laying out my Kickstarter page. Sen does the same thing: give back to the community. He runs a weekly podcast called Meeple Syrup in which he interviews designers and other people that have something interesting to talk about in the industry. Some great behind the scenes type of info.
3) I designed the Fail Faster Playtesting Journal and put it on Kickstarter last year and funded to over 500% of my target! This is a journal that helps designers take the notes they need to take in order to get the information they need to improve their design. It’s still selling on www.failfaster.ca, and I have plans to grow the brand with another book next year that will be called the Fail Faster Game Design Workbook!
What was the first game you remember playing as a kid?
I played all the classics like Trouble and Monopoly but I remember loving Perfection and a Canadian Monopoly-type game called Poleconomy. I remember that there were actual decisions in Poleconomy and loved it when my dad wanted to play it! When not with the family, I do remember playing D&D, and then ALL the video games I could get my hands on! I had all the Commodore systems growing up, so I always had video games around!
What games inspired you in designing MIND MGMT?
Games like Letters From Whitechapel and Fury of Dracula since they’re both one vs. many/hidden movement games. We love them, but we don’t always have 2-3 hours to play these games. Seemed like there was an opportunity to get more people into the one vs. many market! Scotland Yard can be fun, but if you want an even meatier experience, MIND MGMT has been the sweet spot between those two extremes.
What is your ideal game night? Games, group size, snacks, etc:
I love a 4 person game night. 5 is ok but it means you’re going to play fewer games because each game will take longer. I’d love to get through 3 games at least in an ideal game night. Snacks are chips of almost any flavour and beverage of choice is Diet Coke (possibly a bit of rum if others are drinking!). As for games, I’ve always loved playing new games, but I had been trying to ensure at least one game every game night was an older game that we all knew how to play. Less time explaining rules, and more time exploring strategies in all the games we all own!
For any aspiring designers out there, what is something you wish you would have known early on?
KEEP AT IT! Persistence is so important. We love games, and that’s often why we get into making them. When we start making games we quickly realize that the game we made is NOT VERY GOOD! This is ok and this is normal. This is called experience. Unfortunately too many people stop trying around this stage because they feel like they are not good at it. Guess what? Neither was anyone at anything when they first started. It’s only through the experience of doing something that you get better at it. One piece of advice I’ve given to many designers that are stuck on one game that they’ve been designing for a long time, is to put it away for awhile and design 2,4,12 other games and then come back to it later. Some do this and find success eventually, but others don’t and hang all their hopes on this one design. Unfortunately many will feel so discourage from seeing so little advancement towards an end goal if they are struggling on one game for such a long time. Mix it up — move onto another design!
Any extra information you’d love to share?
Check out www.offthepagegames.com for more info about our MIND MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game” (on Kickstarter from March 3rd to April 2nd) and www.failfaster.ca for more information about the Fail Faster Playtesting Journal.
Thank you Jay for your time and insight! If you have any questions for him please leave a comment and we will get them right over to him!
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