Issue 7: An interview with Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck is the designer of Intrepid, Getaway Driver, Hardback and more.
Hello, all!
It’s been yet another week in this crazy world, and while I didn’t play nearly as many games as I would have liked to, that’s also something that very rarely happens, in part because I’d like to play a lot of games all the time, and that’s simply not going to happen every week.
I recently exchanged some correspondence with local board game designer Jeff Beck, who recently saw success with what seems to be an extremely exciting design, Intrepid, which funded on Kickstarter recently. It’s available for preorder, so if it’s your sort of thing, go check it out.
(I should note that this isn’t sponsorship or anything of the sort. Nobody’s paying me to say anything, which is fair, as there aren’t that many of you reading this yet. [I do say ‘yet’, but, uh, yeah. Share if you enjoy nested parentheticals, folks!] I just like what Jeff’s doing and am really excited by it, and I also really want to support game designers in my area, too.)
I'll skip sharing in-depth game thoughts today, but I will briefly say that I played Floor Plan, CTRL, and Welcome To New Las Vegas in the last week, and I enjoyed each of them, so be ready for that and more next week.) Also, I’ll probably talk about Star Trek: Lower Decks, as it’s just started, and I can’t get enough Star Trek.
An interview with Jeff Beck: Preface
So before we dive headlong into this, I thought I’d introduce Jeff, who works closely with Tim Fowers, a fellow Utahn and the sharer of some office space. It’s a cool arrangement they’ve got going, where they do some development work on each others’ games, and they collaborate on some ideas, and generally just lift each other to new heights.
Jeff Beck is the founder of Uproarious Games, which has historically published his own games, but that’s changing with the release of The Grand Carnival by Rob Cramer. (He talks about this in the interview, so do keep reading for more.) Beck also designed Getaway Driver, a two-player car chase game that I find really delightful, as well as Hardback, the sequel to Tim Fowers’ Paperback.
With all that said, let’s get to the interview.
A prototype of Intrepid mid-game. Photo courtesy of Jeff Beck.
Intrepid is a considerably bigger game than your others to date, and it's a good deal more serious in nature. What's set you down this path?
Wow, you are definitely not kidding. Intrepid started off innocently enough - a simple game of dice manipulation. I was playing and becoming frustrated with a number of dice games at the time. I felt the luck factor was much too high to build any kind of strategy out of - either you rolled what you needed, or you didn't. I started thinking about what a dice game would look like that still had an element of luck, but allowed for a high degree of skill and luck mitigation - a game where the luck of the dice was more the beginning of the puzzle you needed to solve in order to optimize your turn.
The original theme for the game was a cooperative city builder of sorts — trying to capture the fun of playing SimCity, especially the moment when you unleash Godzilla upon your creation (disasters were part of the game from day-1, if you can't tell). While it was a fun idea, building a city is not really a theme that captures the imagination. I kicked around a number of different ideas with my team, trying to find something that fit the mechanics but also would help the game stand out. In the back of my mind, I really wanted it to become a survival game — the "feels" of the game are very much "hanging on by a thread, trying to keep things running for one more round." However, though survival is a fantastic theme, it didn't really fit the mechanics super well... until we hit on the idea of setting it aboard the International Space Station. There was the perfect union of theme and mechanics — trying to generate enough life-sustaining resources each round to avoid dying in the vacuum of space.
As a designer, how difficult has it been to move into that space, and how have you managed to find the right balance?
It definitely took a while to get my head around a more serious theme. Up to this point, all of my past games have been fairly light, with themes and content that perhaps felt a bit slapstick. Intrepid is 100% not that. It's brutally serious - about real people and real situations. I even went as far as working with a NASA engineer to help vet all the scenarios and technologies we reference in the game.
Designing a game that is completely void of little gags and puns hurt a bit, I'll admit. But watching players puzzle out a solution to life-threateningly difficult situations — and give high-fives around the table when they do — helps a lot 😉
Intrepid has been a journey of stop-and-go. As soon as we landed on the theme, I knew Ryan Goldsberry, the artist I've used for my other games, was not the right fit. His whimsical style is perfect for a jovial game like Word Domination or Getaway Driver, but didn't really line up with the gritty realism I was aiming for with Intrepid. It took the better part of a year to find the right artist. I finally stumbled into our artist, Gwalchmai Doran, on Reddit. As soon as I saw his stuff - serious with just a hint of abstract, painterly style — I knew he was our guy. After that, we spent maybe 6 months working in preparation for a Kickstarter launch. It was only a few days before the scheduled launch when the entire country shut down for Covid-19. Now, I don't mean to complain, as I realize a lot of people have had it way harder than I have, but that was a bit of a blow for me. I kind of turtled up for several weeks — wasn't interested in playing, much less designing any games at all. Thankfully, I had a few other projects to work on (created an online version of my colleague's, Tim Fowers, fantastic 2-player game, Fugitive, which you can now play here: playfugitive.com ), which gave me the time I needed to get my mojo back and get Intrepid out into the world.
Uproarious Games has typically been a publishing house for your games — that changes with The Grand Carnival. What sent you down this path, and is it one you'll continue exploring?
I've known Rob Cramer, the designer of The Grand Carnival, for several years now — we were neighbors at the LUCI Game Design contest back in 2017. Early last year he approached Tim Fowers and me about a new design he was working on — a crazy mashup of tile placement and polyominos. Neither Tim nor I had published an outside game before, but after playing Rob's prototype, we knew there was something special here. It had that perfect blend of only a few, simple mechanics, but the depth of a brain-burning puzzle to wrap your head around - just the kind of game I like. Tim and I worked on it for several months, polishing it up, adding a few game flairs, and locking down the theme.
Publishing The Grand Carnival has been a big experiment — see how my audience would react to a game designed by someone else, with a theme that was perhaps a bit drier than car chases or world domination. I also wanted to gauge my interest in working primarily on the publishing side, rather than the design side. In the end, I'm very proud of The Grand Carnival and think it's a fantastic game — but, for me personally, I think it helped me realize that my real love is game design.
Do you have any exciting projects on the horizon beyond Intrepid, or is that your focus until it's done?
I'm always a bit hesitant to talk about work-in-progress projects, as so many of our prototypes don't make it past the initial playtesting phase. That said, I'm working on a few projects that might someday see the light of day (knock on wood). One is a very light, almost party-game-style card game called Misadventure. In a somewhat satirical-fantasy setting, players take the role of misfit adventurers, questing for treasure. Players need to work together in order to survive, but it's definitely not a co-op. The player with the most treasure wins the game, so players are encouraged to backstab and betray each other every chance they get. It's a game that definitely brings me back to my roots with lots of gags and silly humor.
The other design I'm working on that, though it's even further away from being an actual game, is a cooperative, asymmetric "4X" style game, where each player is uniquely dedicated to their own "X". One player is playing an exploration/survival game, while another player is playing a city/engine-building game, and another is playing a pick-up-and-deliver/logistics game, and another is playing a strategic war game. Each player is dependant on the others to succeed at what they are trying to do. It's a bit kooky and wild, but, hopefully, in just the right way to make a splash. We'll see!
Anything else you'd like to share?
I'd just like to encourage anyone who hasn't checked out Intrepid to go take a look. If you're not really into cooperative games, it might just be the one for you. Players take their turns simultaneously, so there are virtually no opportunities for "alpha-players" that crop up and take over. And with 8 completely asymmetric characters to try, and 3 completely different disasters to face up against, I really think the game is something pretty cool.
A big thanks to Jeff Beck for taking the time to answer my questions. Do check out Intrepid if you haven’t already, as I really can’t wait to play it.
I’ll be back next week with more board game discussion. Have a good week!