If we start by taking a peek into your back-catalog: Hangtown, Sierra West, Coloma, A Fistful of Meeples… even the highly anticipated Merchant’s Cove. Each well loved, each offers different mechanics but all appear to carry a core theme around pioneering spirit.

Is that by coincidence, preference or do you think based on the success of these titles you’re the go-to-guy for studios who need engaging games that deliver on frontier adventure?

Well, I live in the foothills of Northern California, just upriver from Coloma. My hometown of Placerville was called Hangtown during the Gold Rush era. So there are some obvious ties! Echoes of the pioneer days are all around me. For example, everything in town is named Mother Lode This, Gold Rush That, and Sierra What-have-you. Down on Main Street you can get burgers and fries served in gold pans—I kid you not! It’s fun stuff. Integrating the Wild West theme into my games was not a hard thing to do.

Obviously Merchants Cove is a bit of a departure from Americana. The game was first created by Carl Van Ostrand, then set in Final Frontier’s fantasy universe, The Five Realms, after they signed it. Cavern Tavern, Rise to Nobility, and the recently-announced, Drawn to Adventure (which I developed), are all stand-alone games with an overarching Five Realms theme. My first contribution to Merchants Cove was fusing the high-concept ideas of the original game into a robust economic system. Then with that core in place, I focused on building and refining the highly asymmetrical shopkeeper roles to interlock with it.

The other important talent who helped shape the game is Drake Villareal; besides being my usual partner in crime, he went the extra mile in creating a large collection of scenarios for the game’s solo mode.

In the midst of it we were a power-trio designing and developing everything, while the Macedonian side of the team (including The Mico) focused on the art, product design, and marketing—all the fun stuff publishers have to do. We are all super excited for its big release later this year. I can’t wait to see it on tables…

As a Freelance Board Game Designer (a gun-for-hire) keeping things fresh is vital to engaging studios and customers. That seems to be working out well as each of your games offers differing game-play, so where do you find inspiration for new designs time-after-time?

I find that game design is often iterative and built from mashups of established ideas with creative whims. It’s a process that banks on the emergence of new things as the result of other things synergizing in unexpected ways. I have a predisposition for synthetic (or integrative) thinking styles, if you will, and that seems to be in harmony with the experimental process.

For instance, I tend to be amused by games that offer some kind of “stupid fun” stuff alongside more thinky elements. Tzolk’in’s gears, Potion Explosion’s marbles, Torres’s towers, Montana’s spinner—those things are all stupid fun to play with. But the games themselves are also very sophisticated compared to, say, Mouse Trap or Trouble. Roll the dice and move your mice. Pop the bubble. Not much thinking necessary there.

Now with this lens, you might see where Coloma’s magnetic wheel, Sierra West’s card-tucking boards, and all the zany toy-like stuff in Merchants Cove come from. Even the Mancala element in Fistful is something physically enjoyable to do: picking up a pile of something and dropping each unit off one-by-one… Mix that with some means of indirect player interaction—usually of the economic variety—and you have me there.

For anyone with aspirations out there: What’s the expectations in the industry for a game designer? Do you bring the whole shebang to the table beforehand: theme, mechanics and testing, or do studios approach you with a brief and it goes from there?

That’s an interesting one. Yes and no. If you are just getting established you kind of have to fake it till you make it. You might need to create sell sheets and show up to speed-dating gigs with turn-key designs. Some games get signed that way. In theory. But it seems like most of the stories I hear are more idiosyncratic than that.

Several of my games, for example, were rejected over and over despite the fancy sell sheets and prototypes I offered. It was pretty disheartening. Eventually a couple companies took risks on me, signing my work. Then, boom, 2019 proved to be a good year, with more success than anyone had expected. In fact, Coloma just got awarded The Dice Tower’s Seal of Excellence. That felt kind of unreal!

To those have not gotten a break yet, I’d say just keep at it. Keep challenging yourself. Designing games is like learning to play music—it takes tons of practice, you improve, you eventually get good enough to book gigs, but you will never completely master it. Music will always outrun and outlive you. There is always more to discover. And I would argue that game design shares some of that vastness already.

So be humble, put in the hours, and focus on finding your unique voice.

Now we mentioned the importance of shaking things up to keep people engaged and you’ve certainly done it again with your next game: “Lions of Lydia“.

We’ve played it and it’s definitely JonnyPac DNA through it, but people may be in for a surprise as the theme of pioneering endeavor while still present is now shifted from Americana to focus on the Dawn of Currency in the ancient world…

What can you tell us about the game design and how that theme came about?

Lions of Lydia is coming out soon from Bellwether Games. It is set in ancient Lydia, around the time the Lydians first invented metal coins—so yes, the Dawn of Currency.

The coins themselves are commonly known as Lydian Lions because of the iconic lion head imprint on them. While the theme is a quite a step away from the frontier lands, we might find a similarity in that it showcases an important transition point in history—something akin to the Gold Rush.

The gameplay itself leans toward the lighter side—maybe somewhere in between Fistful and Coloma in complexity. This is because it was designed from the beginning to be an elegent gateway game—something to bring engine-building to a wider audience.

I would love to see it on the shelf next to games like Splendor, 7 Wonders, and Quacks. But that’s not to say the whole thing is derivative; it offers some unique elements and mechanisms—perhaps most notably the “bag-management” and mid-game turning point, when coins really begin to change the economy.

Going back to the previous question of how complete games are when I pitch them: Lions of Lydia was an example where I’d say “mostly complete”, maybe 80%. I found the theme and built the game around it, and the meeple-drawing mechanic.

When I pitched it I was pretty firm on not changing those elements. Dennis – the owner of Bellwether – really liked it and had a clear vision on how to get that last 20% done, which is often the most challenging chunk. From when it was signed to present, we’ve been in an open collaboration mode—everything from gameplay refinements to thematic details and art direction. It’s been a very fun and inspiring process. He runs an excellent studio.

For more information about Jonny Pac Cantin…

jonnypac.com
twitter.com/JPacCantin
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