Theme, mechanics and Fit to Print: An interview with designer Peter McPherson

I sat down virtually with the designer of the latest Flatout Games release.

Peter McPherson, the creator of smash hit Tiny Towns, Wormholes and now Fit to Print has designed two of my favorite games over the last few years. Tiny Towns is a great pattern building game that will test your planning ability, and we’ll get more into Fit to Print through the course of the newsletter. (I’m sure Wormholes is great, but I haven’t played it.)

We had a wide-ranging conversation last week, focusing on his latest published design, Fit to Print, published by hitmakers Flatout Games in collaboration with AEG. Fit to Print sees players taking on the role of editors at a newspaper in a delightfully illustrated anthropomorphic animal town. McPherson’s design is paired with illustrations from Ian O’Toole, one of the industry’s top artists, and the whole production is as good as you’d expect from a Flatout Games offering.

Fit to Print is slated for a Sept. 29 release from AEG and Flatout Games. It can be preordered from Flatout Games directly.

Fit to Print | Photo by Matt Montgomery

Competing newspapers is a theme underutilized in board games, and McPherson harnesses it here to great effect. With strong influence from his wife, a journalist at The Daily Gazette, an independent newspaper in New York, theme and mechanics collide in Pete’s design seamlessly.

“Working in journalism is a real-time job,” McPherson told me during an interview last week. “You have to write (stories) as quickly as possible and as accurately as possible while they're still relevant, and then when things need to go to press, you need to go to press. There are, as my wife has told me, stop the press's moments that does really happen, but for the most part it's a hard deadline … everything for the next day must be laid out and submitted and hitting the press.”

The real-world profession and the daily routines translated directly to the table in Fit to Print.

“That's why the deadline is the same as everyone, everyone has the same amount of time,” he said. “You're awarded for finishing your paper before other players, which represents you getting the news out first, but there are 24 hours in a day. That's why all three rounds to the game — Friday, Saturday and Sunday — are different sized boards. But you have the same exact amount of time for each day, because that's just how the reality of throwing a paper together works. There's obviously a tremendous amount of pressure involved for everyone at the paper, from the reporters to the content editors to the the layout editors.”

Games and “fake stress”

That pressure — that’s the game coming alive. As you’re clawing for tiles, pulling things up as quickly as you can and collecting articles, photography and advertisements, you’ll probably make mistakes, or you’ll put in extra effort to ensure you don’t.

While some games are centered around more immersive qualities, transporting players to new worlds, McPherson’s focus is elsewhere.

“For me, game design and playing games is less about immersion — just for my personal taste in games,” he told me. “Obviously there's a whole world of that, not just in tabletop RPGs but also in board games for people who want that sort of experience.”

For McPherson, the focus in his board games designs is twofold.

“Board games are more for the the pleasant puzzliness they offer and the social time, the face-to-face time with family and friends, and probably most of all, the fake stress of board games,” he said. “I love just sitting down and stressing out about something that doesn't matter at all and will disappear when the game is packed up and put away. I find that relaxing for some reason."

I asked him more about that fake stress. It’s a topic I’ve been reading about recently in Games: Agency as Art, and we’ll talk about it more in future editions of this newsletter.

“I’m always trying to think about the tension in my games,” he told me. “At the start of the game, what are the tensions the players faced with, and at the middle, and at the end? (…) keeping that tension at the right level all the way throughout, and ending it with the sense of relief and satisfaction and rewarding the player for their hard work.”

There’s something important there in the way he’s thinking about games. It’s not about the complexity of a mechanical design. It’s about the decision-making games require and the relief of fixing mistakes.

“I love being stressed out in games,” he said. “For me, I like when the stress of games comes from my own choices, the tension of which is the right choice here, which am I going to regret less, then that feeling of I've made a terrible mistake, but it was my fault and I bet I can fix it — or, I made a mistake, I can't fix it, but next time I play, I’m going to: that build-up of stress and then that that relief.”

Fit to Print, which will see retail release at the end of month after a successful Kickstarter launch, takes the idea of “fake stress” and adds a real-time component to play.

“That's the sort of feeling I was hoping to achieve,” he said. “To me, it's not fun to get the end of the game and feel like man, that game really smacked me around, I got super unlucky and I lost because of that, I wanted to feel like it’s your fault. I don't want people to feel bad, but I want you to feel like ‘I made poor decisions, and next time I’m going to do better, I learned something when I played this game.’”

Fit to Print | Photo by Matt Montgomery

Early successes

While Fit to Print is only just making its way into the hands of players, McPherson saw resounding success early in his game design career with the release of Tiny Towns, published by AEG, his first published game. The success was enough that it put him in a position to work on his designs full time. 

“When I was working on Tiny Towns initially, I had a very, very boring desk job, which is probably why I had so many game ideas then,” he said. “I remember thinking, man, it would be so nice if I could just be a full-time game designer. Though I have side gigs — I do freelance writing and some teaching now — I do consider myself a full-time game designer, and all that is thanks to Tiny Towns and the hard work that ever in AEG put into making that game the hit that it was.”

Tiny Towns is in BoardGameGeek’s top 100 family games and the site’s top 500 games. For McPherson, the feeling its success brings has been enduring.

“It's totally surreal,” he said. “It's weird every time I see Tiny Towns in a store or Instagram posts of people I don't know playing this game at their family game night. That that never gets old, and of course I’ve experienced that with Wormholes as well and Fit to Print, seeing strangers playing my game, but not to the extent of Tiny Towns. That feeling never really goes away. It's so weird that my like strange, goofy little ideas that I had hand-drawn prototypes for are now being played by thousands of people. Utterly bizarre, and I'm just so grateful to have had this opportunity.”

What’s next?

While McPherson doesn’t have any releases on the immediate horizon, he’s been working on new designs. Among his plans are designs based around the pattern-building mechanism in Tiny Towns, a fantasy world building design, and a tile-laying game built around buying and selling antiques.

“Antiques is coming along well — I’ve gotten really good responses from play-testers and folks online,” he told me. “I can tell you it's not signed yet, and to be honest, I don't actually have any signed games on the horizon right now that have not come out. I’ve got a lot of games I’m pitching. I’ve had a little bit of a lull in signed games the past few years, but that's given me time to really build up a library of prototypes I think are good to go, so it's been a different experience for me because Tiny Towns, Wormholes and Fit to Print all happened very quickly.”

With any creative profession comes rejection, but McPherson’s attitude remains positive.

“I’ve had to work a lot more at my current designs and go through process of many rejections from publishers and great feedback from publishers, but I think — I hope — I become a better designer for it and better at pitching for it,” he said. “You don't only learn from pitching from your successes, but also the pitches that don't go the way you'd hoped. I don't have anything coming out on the horizon, but I’ve got a lot of designs I’m really really excited about and many that are just done and I’m just pitching, which is also kind of fun.”

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Thanks, as always, for reading Don’t Eat the Meeples. It’s because of your readership that I can take the time to interview board game designers, and I’m hoping it’s something I can continue to bring. If you’re not already a subscriber to my weekly, free newsletter, I’ve popped a little box below for you.