Origins is so much more than just board gaming with strangers and buying the latest and greatest. You can meet your favorite designers and chat with them! Imagine going to ye olde E3 and having a chance to talk with Hideo Kojima or Shigeru Miyamoto. With a wealth of guests and board gaming celebrities to choose from, I simply couldnât pass up a chance to speak with Eric Lang.
For the uninitiated, Eric Lang is one of the premier designers in the world of board gaming, with several titles falling within the top 500 on BoardGameGeek, and even a couple in the top 100. Blood Rage, a Viking journey to Valhalla, is probably his most noteworthy title, developed way back in 2015; it sits at a cushy rank 50. For you RPGFanners, you might recall our two Bloodborne: The Card Game reviewsâthe base game, and the Hunterâs Nightmare expansionâfrom a few years ago, which Lang also developed.
In my conversation with Lang, we spoke about his ability to choose what games he covers, and that heâs not taken on a game he wasnât interested in working on. A Bloodborne fan, he spoke about having already thought of the card gameâs design when he was approached about the opportunity. Langâs approach to designing games is a sit-on-it approach, as he likes to revisit his work months after touching it. In this way, he becomes less personal and defensive about his work, as he can more easily scrap what doesnât work and fine-tune that which needs a facelift. When conversing with his fellow designers, he often hears stories from folks that they simply canât get rid of something because they put x amount of hours into it; he no longer has this problem.
We also discussed his views on balance. Balance is a constant discussion in both video games and board games, especially among consumers. The idea of balance is held on a pedestal, but Lang has no problem accepting that some facets simply donât need to be balanced. Why shouldnât a card or five, for instance, be relatively overpowered? This creates a âwow factorâ when players get such a card, especially in cooperative games. In competitive games, like the Bloodborne card game, fellow players can even the scales by simply aggressing on the lucky player. My own insertion here is that I think playing with a reasonably sensible group of players who can recognize when someoneâs shooting ahead is a fine way to insert balance into the game.
Lang spoke about what he called âsandpapering the lows,â an idea many designers admire. In his mind, though, Lang says that if you try to shave the lows, you minimize the peaks, which can water down the experience. Lows should exist, as they allow for highs to exist as well. In addition, he stated that if no lows exist, the middling experiences become the lows, and then whatâs achieved is mediocrity. I enjoy this perspective, because Iâve grown to love games when they make me feel something, even if itâs not great; the opposite of love is not hate. Itâs ambivalence.
I could have spoken to Lang for another half hour, but my time got interrupted by another developer who had something to say; I didnât mind at all, as I had already monopolized Langâs time. This person was none other than R. Eric Reuss, the genius behind the critically acclaimed Spirit Island, a cooperative game developed in 2017 in which players take the role of island gods to terrorize and straight-up murder imperialists. (Itâs as fun as it sounds.) My gaming group and I instantly fell in love with this outstanding title, which currently sits at rank 11 on BoardGameGeekâs top games list. He immediately apologized for injecting himself, and when I found out who he was, my jaw dropped, eyes wide. I asked to shake his hand because his game had meant so much to us, and I couldnât believe I just happened to meet him by chance. And speaking with Eric Lang, no less! The two spoke about views on design, seemingly in a different language, and it felt like watching two masterwork painters talk shop.
These are the experiences that make Origins a fantastic event to attend. Not only did I get to speak with Eric Lang, I got toâby pure chanceâsee him speak with another favorite designer of mine. My wife and I walked away after a warm departure with smiles from ear to ear. What a joy.
