One for All: Q&A with Matt Leacock

When Matt Leacock released Pandemic in 2008 the gaming landscape was very different. Cooperative games were still relatively uncommon and, although momentum was building, the board gaming phenomenon had still not quite exploded. Pandemic was one of the games that lit the fuse.

Drawing on his background as a software engineer and user experience designer, Matt Leacock created what remains today the archetypal cooperative game, a genre that has arguably done more to broaden the appeal of gaming than any other, due to its substitution of competitiveness for collaboration. Pandemic sees players working together to rid the world of an infectious disease, that spreads across the map via a cleverly designed set of systems, essentially allowing you to play against the game’s AI on varying difficulties.

Matt then went on to apply his experience in cooperative game design to create Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, which were devised as entry level games for children, though still provided a strong challenge. As well as working on a narratively and mechanically evolving ‘Legacy’ version of Pandemic with Rob Daviau (of Risk Legacy fame), he is now working on a Thunderbirds board game, putting players in the role of International Rescue, which seems the perfect theme for what has become his characteristic approach to board games as collaborative narrative experiences.

At the UK Games Expo I had the pleasure of meeting Matt and being one of the first to try the prototype of his new dice variant of Pandemic, Pandemic: The Cure, which used a yahtzee mechanic to abstract the systems of the game into a more streamlined play time, whilst maintaining most of the things that make it so interesting. This follow up interview, in which Matt tells us about projects past, present and future and gives an insight into his design process, was conducted by email.

Ready Up: Was Pandemic your first game or did you make any other notable attempts prior to this?

Matt Leacock: I created a couple of games prior, but the runs were limited to a handful of self-published copies. I printed Borderlands while in college (220 copies) and Lunatix Loop shortly after (200 copies). I brought Lunatix Loop to Essen in 2000 where I met a lot of great people who helped me refine my designs until I eventually broke into the industry with Pandemic in 2008.

RU: You’re best known for designing cooperative games. What attracts you to this style of game over competitive games?

I think you can get more mileage out of a game if the stories unfold organically and if the players can knit together the sequence of events that happen into a narrative—by themselves—without being dragged through it by the game.

ML: I love creating cooperative games because I find them more fun to play with family and friends. They’re easier to teach and they offer a low-stress way to introduce non-gamers to the hobby. Plus, win or lose, when you’re done with the game, there are rarely bad feelings between players.

RU: When Pandemic was released cooperative games weren’t nearly as big as they are now. How significant do you feel its impact has been specifically? How do you feel cooperative games have contributed to the growing popularity of the medium more generally?

ML: I was curious about whether Pandemic had any impact on the rise of cooperative games as well. I asked the admins at Board Game Geek to modify their search interface so I could count the number of titles that were released each year with a “cooperative play element.” It turns out that the number of titles featuring cooperation shot up by about 400% over the four years following Pandemic’s release. Before its release, games with a cooperative play element held steady at about 2.5% of all titles released for about 30 years. Now about 10% of each year’s titles feature some sort of cooperation.

I’d like to think the genre has helped to contribute to the growth of the hobby. When I go to conventions, I repeatedly hear stories of people who discovered the hobby through Pandemic.

RU: You consider yourself an ‘interaction designer’ first and foremost, can you describe what you mean by this and how your professional career feeds in and influences your game design work?

ML: I’m happy to report though that in July 2014, I was able to leave my job for a full time career in game design. You can call what I was doing previously interaction design or user experience design. Essentially it boils down to crafting an experience for people—which is exactly what you do when you’re designing a game. I was able to take most of the skills I used at my (former) day job and apply them directly to game design. It’s a huge host of skills and areas of expertise including visual design, writing, low-fidelity prototyping, psychology, and certain research methods.

RU: Pandemic is famous for ramping up really quickly, which is mainly down to the way the infection card mechanic works and the tension between dealing with the immediate threat of  the disease and the long term aim of finding a cure. Can you speak a little about how you came up with and balanced these systems and how do you think they structure the game?

ML: As you say, the players need to balance the long-term need to find the four cures with the short term need to put out local crises. There’s usually an ongoing struggle between the strategic and tactical objectives. The strategic goals require more coordination between players while the tactical problems can often be resolved by yourself, so there’s tension there as well. Players often lose if they concentrate too much on the short-term.

I developed the game over the course of about three years, but the basic mechanisms behind moving, curing, and treating were in place in the very first sketch. Balance was achieved by brute force iteration with a very large and diverse playtest community. The game engine was not modelled statistically. No spreadsheets were used in the creation of the game.

RU: You talk about your games as featuring emergent systems, which is an idea that has become popular within the videogame industry (particularly with MMOs like World of Warcraft and Eve Online). Why do you think this is important and how does emergent gameplay function differently in board games compared to videogames?

ML: In his book, The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell suggest that good games are “story making machines” and that’s what I strive for. I think you can get more mileage out of a game if the stories unfold organically and if the players can knit together the sequence of events that happen into a narrative—by themselves—without being dragged through it by the game. I’m not sure the core of this concept is all that different in board games vs. computer games, except that computers can handle much larger scale and can do far more bookkeeping than human players would be interested in doing by hand.

I’m not sure that these are fundamental advantages though. To be interesting, the game has to unfold in the players’ minds. If the computer does all the thinking, what is the player doing? You can create wonderful immersive movie-like experiences with computers, but those don’t necessarily provide more meaningful decisions.

RU: You’ve spoken in the past about how important collective thinking is, but how do you get around the problem of one player in a group taking control over the course of a cooperative game?

ML: That’s sort of like asking how do you handle players who cheat when they play. You can provide certain mechanisms to mitigate things (for example, with a cheater, you can ensure that their components are in plain sight at all times) but it’s difficult to completely solve this with a purely cooperative game. My best advice is to play with people who don’t dominate the conversation.
I expect this will be an area that will receive a lot of design attention over the coming years. It’s been fun to see the various cooperative games that employ traitor elements, realtime play, or hidden information to mitigate this.

In Forbidden Desert, I introduced canteens that each player must monitor (lest they die of thirst) as well as equipment cards that only the possessing player can control. Both increase the feeling of autonomy and individuality for the player. I’m sure other designers will come up with more ideas. Fundamentally though, this is a human problem and I’m not sure designers should try to eliminate it completely. I think we (as players) need to consider giving others a part to play in conversations a necessary ingredient of good sportsmanship.

RU: You’re about to release Pandemic: The Cure, a dice version of the game. What were your design objectives in creating this? How different do you feel it is from the experience of the core game?

I set out to create an even more accessible version of Pandemic—one that could be played in less time, set up in less time, and be even easier to learn—that bottles up the same feel and tension of the base game.

ML: I set out to create an even more accessible version of Pandemic—one that could be played in less time, set up in less time, and be even easier to learn—that bottles up the same feel and tension of the base game. Pandemic: The Cure can be played in under 30 minutes, sets up in about a minute, and is the perfect game to use to introduce new people to cooperative games.

The game packs in just as much tension and about as many decisions as Pandemic, but feels a bit lighter and more immediate. The dice also introduce a press your luck mechanism, challenging players to ask themselves whether they’re “happy enough” with what they rolled or if they should risk a better turn by opening up the possibility that they may trigger an epidemic.

RU: You were recently a guest and speaker at the UK Games Expo. What was your experience of the festival like and how was the reaction to The Cure there?

ML: I had a fantastic time at UK Games Expo. The two seminars I attended were well moderated and attended and I loved meeting the attendees of the show. Pandemic: The Cure was well received and the copy I brought was in heavy rotation in the open gaming area.

RU: Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert are cooperative games aimed at a younger audience. What lessons did you learn from Pandemic that affected how you approached these projects?

ML: When developing Forbidden Island, my aim was to create the most accessible cooperative game that I could that would appeal to parents and kids alike. My daughter (for example) is turned off by Pandemic’s disease theme, but has no trouble whatsoever searching for treasures—especially when the sculpts look good enough to eat! I also tried to ensure that the game was easy to set up. In Forbidden Island I knew I couldn’t ask young players to create a player deck (like the one in Pandemic) and so I developed the game so only simple shuffles are needed for setup. Lastly, I aimed to introduce a better sense of closure to the end game. After the players discover their four treasures, they must make it to the helicopter pad and take off for the win.

Forbidden Desert is targeted at players who have tried Forbidden Island and are looking for even more of a challenge. In Forbidden Desert, players must contend with rising sand, a ticking clock, and dwindling water supplies. I (myself) find the game is even harder than Pandemic. At the Heroic and Legendary levels of difficulty, you need to squeeze every available ounce of power out of every role and equipment card and it can be quite a brain burner.

RU: Are you working on anything else you could tell us about?

ML: I’m currently splitting my time between Pandemic Legacy (release date to be announced) and Thunderbirds, The Board Game as well as a couple of other unannounced projects.

Pandemic Legacy is a joint project with Rob Daviau of Risk Legacy fame. I’m a big fan of Risk Legacy and asked Rob if he’d be interested in collaborating on a Legacy variant set in the Pandemic universe. We’ve been working together on the project ever since. Not much has been released about the game so far, but I can tell you that the game plays out over the course of a horrible year on Earth and that both the characters and the world undergo permanent changes from game to game.

Thunderbirds is a cooperative tabletop game that I’m designing for Mōdiphiüs Entertainment, based on the classic 1960s TV show, Thunderbirds. The game is set in the year 2065 and follows the exploits of International Rescue—a secret organization committed to saving human life. The game will include all the wonderful vehicles from the show and the players will get to see if they have what it takes to be a member of International Rescue. It’s is set to debut in the Fall of 2015 for the 50th anniversary of Thunderbirds and will appeal to both people familiar with the show and those just being introduced to it.