An interview with Tim Fowers, Burgle Bros 2 designer

On Friday afternoon, I sat down virtually with Tim Fowers, designer of Burgle Bros, Now Boarding, Sabotage, Fugitive and several other games. We talked about the release of Burgle Bros 2, the changes that game makes to its predecessor, his design philosophies, and a lot more.

Below is the full interview, lightly edited for clarity. You’ll also catch some of this interview in my next newsletter, which drops Monday — but I didn’t think a 4,000-word interview was quite right for your inbox on a Monday morning.

What's new in the world of Tim Fowers?

I'm excited to finally get Burgle out. We ran into this big worldwide shipping backup, where the whole Merchant Marine fleet is super short on storage containers and boats. And for various global reasons, we got caught in the middle of it — and the production was delayed, first of all, just the manufacturer was super slow. It took most of 2020 to just get it done. I was sending files over in June, and we did not have it done till December. It was really too long. I mean, some of it was just delays. They did get the box wrong in every possible way. I mean, what we're trying to do at the box. So there was that. Finally, right at Christmas, it was done.

And they're like, cool, and it was all scheduled to get on the boat. And it just sat there until

two days from now, it's gonna finally leave, but it's just got to make it to — usually goes to San Francisco, and then comes over here to Utah, and we'll get it out. I mean, that's, that's like 80% of people. And then there's another 20% that are other places.

Yes. Finally, it's moving. I'm always a little behind schedule, but like, this is one — there's a lot of pressure — it's Burgle. It's my most popular game, I want to make sure that people are really happy with it.

There's a lot you learn making a sequel, I heard advice through a friend, he heard it from Tom Lehmann: When you first do a sequel to a game, you want to just give them more of what they love. Then, on the next expansion after that, you can try new, crazy things. So, we tried the crazy things, and the game kind of fell apart. The early experiments involved this character called the Whistler, which is a fifth player, and they're outside of the game, and they're trying to, like, help you out and open doors for you. We took too much away from the players, to where the players didn't have enough information, they didn't have enough ability to change things.

One thing that came out of that was this feeling of the gear, where it's like, having a divine intervention ability, where I can just be like, I got you, I'm gonna use this to save you. At the core of co op games, there's this idea of vulnerability, where I cannot help myself, so somebody else comes in and says you're valuable, but the way they say you're valuable is through sacrifice, either sacrificing time or resources. So it was important that these gear were limited use. So it's like they're signaling to you, you're important, because you're using their most powerful gear or whatever to save you. And I think that can form bonds between between people when you when you get that kind of interchange.

So it sounds like it almost started as an expansion idea — or were you planning a sequel? 

I felt like I had already done a lot of the design space. I wasn't sure I could get new rooms out of it. And there were a lot of people that wanted new layouts. People wanted more in kind of different axes. There was a really fun thing that we got that actually interesting we got rid of was the doors — and the doors are still interesting. They just weren't — we call it pulling your weight. They make the decision interesting enough, and you're always looking at any new thing or any facet of a game, you always want to look for multiple angles, from the experienced player, from the new player. We call them user stories.

The door was really easy to forget, and it didn't have enough rich play. I still like it, though. I might do it as a little mini expansion or something, or a little module you can play with.

A big decision with (Burgle Bros) 2 was actually cutting the third floor. That was kind of a lot of what I felt Burgle's identity was, but you want to look at all of your assumptions going into something. Burgle (Bros) 1 can overstay its welcome with three. Sometimes you can get puzzle fatigue, where you're like trying to solve puzzles, trying to solve puzzles, and it can go on a little too long.

The event system in the first one was designed to be like, I'm just gonna wait on the first floor and nothing's gonna happen and like, ooh, if you wait, you're gonna get an event. That became a thing. But it still is like this thing where it's like, well, it's optimal for you to stay down the bottom floor. We decided with the guard to just turn up the heat, and when you run out of cards, he's just going to hunt you. It really ups the desperation and the urgency of the whole thing, where you barely have enough time to get everything you need done. In that sense, it's a big tonal shift. Before, you could, you could kind of wait.

Hopefully it aligns with the setting, because with this at-night heist, you've got all the time in the world, you've got to just, you know, you've got to just get the puzzle figured out, whereas in the casino, it's like, people are catching on to you, people are trying to start to connect the dots, what's going on? You do not have a lot of time to pull this off. 

So cutting that third floor was a pretty big decision then, and for me it changed the game pretty significantly. How much did you have to wrestle over that? Or was it once you decided to do it, did you ever have to look back?

This is Jeff Krause — I usually work with a co-designer, either written or unwritten. I've developed a lot of my ability around working with a certain type of personality. Usually it's somebody who is really judgmental, because I'll be like, oh, we'll do this, and we'll do this. It's good to have somebody that just says, nope. So he's been good at pushing back on simplicity and pruning. I mean, I have similar instincts, so I don't disagree, but it solved a lot of problems. It let us make the tower being the box, which I felt was one of the goals. And also, just not overstay our welcome. But now there's the finale at the end, which you know, so it's not quite as short as a two-floor.

I thought the heist finale idea was an interesting one. Because you're implementing a bit of a story in there, right? Where before, you could tell a story, but you're making that story up as you go. This has something kind of in mind as you play. How important was it for you to implement something like that?

The nature of Burgle is that there's this thing where people actually project themselves onto the guard. They'll often say, what is the guard thinking when he sees a hole in the wall? We've really left the guard as this faceless force of nature. People like to kind of fill in the gaps. And you want to feel like you're outwitting him, you know, you want to see the look on his face when you pull off this huge thing, and he's kind of your foil that you're playing against. People project themselves.

The nature of Burgle is that it is kind of a procedural story as more of a sequence of events, especially with the event deck itself and kind of that craziness, those were kind of the plot twists in the original. But we realized that leaning on them, going back to the movies, Ocean's 11 and whatnot, is like kind of having this high stakes thing as the culmination.

I don't remember at what point it came in, but it felt like to have a climax to the game, instead of just being like, oh, we got the last safe open. Usually in Burgle, just because everything's so tight, you had just enough time to get out. But this one, you're going out with a bang. And actually, Rob Daviau gave me a little bit of his time and helped me work out the suspicion system, so the game can calibrate to your group. But also, he helped me figure out — so what we do is a little wonky in the rules. There's always been this thing: Well, the Burgle Bros. don't even know what they're stealing. So we have one side, that's the story. And it gives a little hint of what's what's going to happen for the finale, but you don't get to know exactly how it's going to play out, so you can't try to solve it.

A big part of Burgle is this unknown of whether to run or to peek. There's not a right answer. It really helps the alpha gamer problem because there wasn't a right answer, there's no way you could have known. You've got to trust, go with your gut, and when it pays off, it feels great. So, it's similar with the finales.

Once you've played through and beat all the finales, we actually didn't even want you to repeat, so win or lose, you play through all of them. And then you can go back and play the one specifically if you want. But generally, once you've played everything, then it's just random. So again, you can't plan. You can prepare, and you can kind of look at the possibilities of what might happen. We want a little bit of like group adaptation.

This goes back to like Left 4 Dead, which was a big inspiration. There's an article about the video game Left 4 Dead and how the zombies were designed, these super zombies were designed to break up groups and to be a curveball for a whole group. That's what I want the finale to be as well, where it's this big problem you all have to solve together.

I never want you to have — and I did this in Now Boarding — I just don't want you to have all the variables, so that you think you can game it out exactly until on your turn you do it live.

It feels like you've added a little bit of randomness that you have to that gives you a little bit of risk-taking in some of the rounds. So like the slots, some of the tables.

The table games — there was gonna be this app, and then a lot of the feedback was like, you know, we can't. So in the Vegas tradition, we wanted to have something so we made one room that has a random output. The rest of them are based on your behavior. So, the buffet builds up over time. The other thing is we now have these rooms that are not a problem now, but they're going to be a problem later. That's often in the middle of the finale, the buffet is going to trigger, or the cages. Every time you enter the cages, it gets harder to get out. So cages, you have to roll to get out. And that's kind of like an inverted keypad from the first game. The table games — you know, you can lose a heat out of it, you know? And the heat system. I mean, it's very much like a stealth system, but it's meant to be a little more granular. So some things aren't aren't as bad.

A lot of it, we did little shifts — like a guard versus a bouncer. They're very similar. And so this is kind of an expandalone. We actually at the last minute decided to keep the tiles the same, so you can go with a bouncer type system or guard system, you can go with a commotion system or an alarm system. They're really interchangeable. We just felt like the new ones are a little bit cleaner and a little bit more accessible. So you can mix up the tiles. So like they should play together as long as you just swap those two terms, based on what system you're playing in, you should be able to do bigger things now. So I was happy with that, that it really can be an expansion. People like to do custom setups and stuff like layouts and whatnot, and hopefully this helps with that.

Jeff Krause got a co-design credit on this. He did, if I'm not mistaken, on Sabotage as well.

We've been together for three years, and we've also been working with Jeff Beck. I worked with him on Hardback. But yeah, me and Krause have been doing video games, and you don't know about any of them because they get cancelled before we release them. But we're working on three video games together right now, and then another board game. We've got good, a good rapport, and we bounce back and forth. We were very much on the same page with Sabotage. And with Burgle, from pushing on things like getting rid of doors, to getting rid of the third floor, in really brainstorming all the different gear.

He's a programmer, so what happens is I'm kind of the ADD, flighty guy has all the ideas. I'll be like, what about this, and I'll point at something, and he'll calculate, and he's good at seeing outcomes, like several steps down. He'll be like, you're gonna run into this problem. It's so much faster than me, like, go print the game out, try the thing, and be like, oh it breaks down over here. So he can see further ahead than me. They do this at a Wizards of the Coast. They have the inventor and the developer pairs, where you have someone who's trying a lot of things and then someone who's like, OK, this one works, that one doesn't work. A little more judgmental., So that's kind of how our roles work.

So you've got quite a few credits to your name now, from Paperback to Burgle Bros to Now Boarding. What's your favorite game you've designed?

Sabotage was my most indulgent, in the sense that it was a game that I loved, and I don't know if anybody will love it. And it's OK. I totally went overboard. I'm like, I had to make a barrier, so like, let's make this big barrier with minis. Let's go bananas. I still really, really like the interchange with that game. It's probably my favorite right now.

Most designers, it's kind of like, well, I'm really excited about this game that no one's seen yet. It's the one that you haven't gotten any feedback on. It's still great, because no one's said anything to the contrary yet.

If you do distill some of your design philosophies down to a few key ideas, what would they be?

Like a chef, you're looking for flavor combinations people haven't done before. At my level, a lot of stuff is more combinatorial. Once you kind of know all the mechanical tools, you kind of like seeing which ones fit together, sometimes you're doing a theme and mechanics.

If you look at my games, a very common thing is their difficulty level. Their difficulty level or their complexity level on BGG are very close to each other, down the line. I kind of try to find this sweet spot, between a core game and a casual game. Right? There's a cap on how much bookkeeping I want to have and how much thinking head you have to do.

I don't like domination. I don't like the idea of, I'm better at this game than you and I proved it. I've really moved away from that. Even my most directly competitive is like Sabotage. So when I do direct competition, I like to hedge it with something — like is it asymmetrical, like Fugitive, where it's like, OK, we're competing, but we're doing different things. And so it's not as emotionally taxing.

Good people really need an out when they lose. You want to lose because of luck and you want to win because of skill. Just in general, I just feel like there's enough other emotions out there to have, so tapping into movies has been really good. The emotion and the setting and all this stuff, you get to inherit all that. And as long as your mechanics live up to creating a similar emotion — like Burgle, it's actually being clever, and outwitting the guards and the system, and you feel like you're smarter than it.

And, and that lines up with the fantasy of the heist and what that movie is like. Fugitive is like, you know, am I gonna get caught this turn? Are they right outside my doors? Am I gonna get caught right now? There's intensity.

At my best I'm designing from kind of an emotional level.

I just haven't been able to really latch on to a sci-fi or fantasy setting. I really like the adventure of the contemporary themes, where it's like, this is something familiar. For my whole kind of business to work, I have to kind of over-index on innovation — at least, I believe I do. I have to have a cool theme, a cool art style, and then I have to have cool mechanics.

I feel like I have to be doing something new on all of those so when somebody sees my game at a convention, they're like, what is this game? I've really got to wow people because I rely on word of mouth. I mean, that's how my whole business works. People see this game, or what is this game? Like, oh, you've got to go to his website. I mean, it's the internet, it's not that hard to find things, but I'm not advertising — OK, I'm doing a little bit of advertising now. I'm getting a lot smarter. But like, it's been the "secret menu" at In-N-Out forever, where it's just like, hey, you've got to the site, and then you feel like you're in the club.

I am very player-centric; I'm trying to create a new experience. And now I've got to make cool boxes — I don't have to, but I feel like it. I want to make a whole new thing that looks cool on your shelf, and the box does something cool, and then the game does something cool. I just want it to be really soup to nuts, with a thought out, thoughtful, artistic experience. So yeah, that's what I'm shooting for.

I don't know, I don't think I'll ever have a Spiel des Jahres, but it's fine. People that have found me, I get to directly correspond with them. If you call the customer support number on the website, it's my number.

I want to take care of the people that take care of me. I'm trying to stay really lean. I have Jeff and people that I work with, and I have a few people that I contract with. But like Jamey Stegmaier, I'm kind of a one man company, but it's also because I want to have more of a connection with my audience.

So I've got letters where people are like, oh, I proposed to my fiancé with the Paperback cards. Those kinds of letters are what I really enjoy. From very early, I just decided I wasn't really shooting for being on a game store shelf. I've done it for different reasons, but I'm trying to sidestep that whole game of distribution and fighting for shelf space and everything. I mean, I have paperback and Barnes and Noble now, and mostly, that's just so I can kind of reach some more people. 

I've just got philosophies about like, trying to make a sustainable business.You kind of have to work your way around distribution. Retailers are good, because a good local retailer will bring new people to you. Like, I've got certain stores that will sing my praises. And they'll they'll definitely be like, hey, you need this game. So I'm happy to work with them. Once go into retail the margins are very different.

It's working. I'm trying to get to more of a cadence where I'm working on a couple projects at a time — probably have one board game a year and do some video games. For me, they're kind of just the same media. I'm just flipping the coin.

With that in mind, what's next for you?

I've been working with Skye Larsen on Paperback Adventures, which is a solo roguelike deckbuilder in the Paperback universe. I'm actually looking for testers right now. We just got it up on Tabletop Simulator so you don't have to cut everything out — because it's a lot of parts. We're trying to get people to play that and just see it. We think it's working, but between COVID and it being a solo game, it's harder to get feedback. That's gonna be the next phase: is it working like we think it is, or do we need to go back? Because if it's working right now, it will probably be a Kickstarter soon. But if it's not, then it's just like, OK.

Video games are going good too. I've got this — I think we're gonna call it Inverted — I'm going to enter it in the (Independent Games Festival) at the end of the month, so we're kind of hurrying to get it out right now. You know those box puzzles where you push a box around, you know, pushing a box around a warehouse and trying not to block yourself — except for half of the level, time is moving backwards. So this is very much like Tenet, and it's like watching Tenet. So it's very much a pretentious brain teaser of a game, like that movie. But I love it. We'll see it's going to be a shorter game, it's only going to be an hour — it depends on how hard it is. We've kind of got it fleshed out, the puzzles are going to be in it. Now we're just trying to make a really cool presentation for it. So I'm going to enter that in the IGF and then maybe it'll be out in the summer.

I'm working on a new digital Now Boarding, a route building game where you grab a plane, and you draw a line to see which cities you want it to go through, and it picks up people. So you're sitting there, orchestrating the planes. That's also in testing. So I'm looking for testers on that. 

And then another an unannounced project that I'm more consulting on — I shouldn't say anything yet. Jeff is working with another person and me on yet another project. That's kind of a slow burn, it's gonna be probably a year before it's out in the public.

I liked this. I like to spin lots of plates — I'm really happiest.

I've been able to find a few more contractors. I've been working on the time game, I've been working with another artist. So I feel like I'm kind of moving into more of a director role or a producer role, where I'm kind of able to spin a couple things because I've got more help with more things. Before, it was like, I do everything, you know, I put in all the work. And now I feel like I can multiply my work a little bit. But I'm still playing it close — I just don't want to form a company, get a bunch of overhead, and then run out of money. That's one of my biggest fears. I try to play it smart and and not over-invest in any one thing, and hopefully be able to keep doing this.