A chat with Eric Lang

 

31 Jan 2026. Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Rising Sun, Ankh, Chaos in the Old World) was in town. He has been staying in Malaysia on and off for many years, and is now planning to spend more time living in Kuala Lumpur. He wants to get to know the local designer community and the local boardgame community. Aaron arranged two meet-up sessions for game designers and other industry players to get to know Eric. I almost couldn't make it due to prior appointments, but luckily one of them was rescheduled and I made it to the session at BGC Space. 

This was an inspiring and insightful session. Eric shared some of his experiences being in the industry for so many years, and also his perspectives on the boardgame scene in Malaysia, Singapore and Asia. He had decided he wanted to become a game designer from very early on, and had been highly committed to make this work. Here are some of my takeaways from the session: 

1. Be clear about what you want to be. What kind of role do you want to play in the boardgame industry? Do you want to be doing this as your life career? Choose one clear role you want to be good at. What kind of games do you want to make? How does a day in your life look like in 5 years? Envision what you want to be in 5 years, and don't let limiting thoughts stop you from moving towards it. 
2. If you want to pitch to a publisher, look at the games they have been publishing for the past 3 years and pitch the right games to them. Know their standards and meet them before you pitch. 
3. Always hold yourself to high standards and to international standards. Surround yourself with people with that level of standard. 
4. Game designers who are gamers often overestimate the appetite of the general public for complexity in games. Machi Koro is too complex. 
5. If you want to make a mass market game, the back of the box should have 3 bullet points that describe and sell the game, but not teach the game. 
6. Monopoly Deal is a great gateway game to convert non-gamers, more so than Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. 
7. If you run a boardgame cafe or boardgame store targeting non-gamers, make sure you have chess, Scrabble and Monopoly in your shop window. 
8. For an industry to grow, say the Malaysian boardgame market, you need multiple people who are good at different specific things. E.g. game designers, game retailers, game distributors, game reviewers, event organisers, marketeers, content creators. These people need to be very good at what they do. Don't try to do everything, because you will likely burn out. What Eric has observed in Malaysia is we local publishers are generalists who do the whole spectrum of stuff, which might not be healthy. 

One thing we discussed was bringing people into the hobby. This is something Malaysia needs to do. Boardgames is still too niche a hobby, and the market is tiny. But that also means the potential for growth is big. 

Eric is enthusiastic and energetic, and keen to help the Malaysian boardgame scene. It is great to be able to learn from him. I look forward to more opportunities to meet and learn from him when he settles down in KL. 

My fanboy moment with Seiji Kanai (Love Letter)

In December 2022 my family visited Japan on holiday. When planning this family trip, one idea came to me - why not take the opportunity to meet a game designer I greatly admire, Mr Seiji Kanai, designer of Love Letter, one of my favourite games. Now I'm not exactly a young boy and it is weird to be still doing this kind of fanboy stuff. But YOLO. It's a little awkward reaching out to a complete stranger, and I didn't dare to have too high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised when Mr Seiji Kanai responded promptly and positively. I don't know Japanese and the email I sent out was translated using Google Translate. I guess it was at least understandable even if it probably sounded weird. We arranged to meet on Christmas Day, Sun 25 Dec 2022, in Tokyo Train Station, at the famous silver bell.  

We had hoped to be able to find a cafe to sit down and chat, but Christmas Day and a Sunday at Tokyo Station? It was mission impossible that even Tom Cruise couldn't have managed. So we stood and chatted a while. 

Both my daughters have played Love Letter and they enjoyed it a lot too. Unfortunately my wife Michelle could not be in the photo, because she was holding the camera and taking the photo. 

When I wrote to Mr Seiji Kanai, I said I was a fan of Love Letter and I would like to meet him to ask for his signature on my copy of the game. After he replied, I remembered that I actually didn't have a copy of the game! At least not an official copy. The old battered copy I had was a print-and-play version downloaded from BoardGameGeek.com. Someone created an Adventure Time retheme of the game, and that was long before the official Adventure Time version was released. I saw it and thought it was rather cute. That was what prompted me to print and make a copy of the game and to try it out. I really should thank this BGG user. This fan retheme was what introduced me to Love Letter, which I eventually fell in love with. 

For many years I have been playing with this old print-and-play copy. I never had the urge to buy the official copy because I liked the art style of the fan version more. Now that I was going to ask for the designer's signature, I certainly must buy an official copy. I bought the latest English edition, which comes with a classy velvet pouch instead of a box. The game has changed a little. There are two new characters. However you can still play with the original rules by removing some cards. I have been playing Love Letter since 2014, and I have introduced it to many friends, yet only now I own an official copy. 

In the latest English edition, the princess is a 9 instead of an 8. Don't take it the wrong way. I don't mean scoring beauty out of 10. I just mean the number value in the game. So this above is my designer signed copy of the princess card and my preciousss. I brought a silver marker pen all the way to Japan for Mr Seiji Kanai to sign on this card. 

In our email communication, I asked Mr Seiji Kanai that I would like to purchase a Japanese edition of Love Letter from him. When we met, he handed me a copy and insisted it was a gift for my children. It was not just a copy of Love Letter, but also two more games he designed. That was so kind of him. I brought a copy of my recently released game Dancing Queen for him too. Although Dancing Queen is a rather different game, when designing it I applied many principles I learned from Love Letter. I also brought three woodcraft bookmarks from Malaysia for Mr Seiji Kanai. I said if he ever visits Malaysia, he must let me know and I would bring him around. 

I love the art in this Japanese edition of Love Letter. Absolutely lovely. 

True and experienced celebrities are well prepared and professional when it comes to giving signatures to fans. Mr Seiji Kanai brought along a compact toolbox packed with equipment for signing games, including marker pens, his own custom stamp and an ink pad. His game signing includes putting his unique stamp. 

Secret Moon was the second game Mr Seiji Kanai gave to me (well technically he said it was for the children, but, you know, communism). This is an English edition game. It requires a minimum of 5 players and I have yet to give it a go. 

Naturally I grabbed the chance and asked Mr Seiji Kanai to sign this game too. 

The third gift was R. I have played it before. It is a 2-player microgame with only 16 cards. The version I played was a fan retheme using Star Wars characters. The original is certainly very different. 

Before meeting Mr Seiji Kanai, he told me that his English was poor and communication might be challenging. I was prepared that we might have to rely on Google Translate to speak and conversation might be slow. However his English was much more fluent than he had lead me to believe. We were able to converse smoothly and did not touch Google Translate or our smartphones at all. 

One thing I asked him was his secret to success in the boardgame industry. His reply was simple, and it was the same thing Alan Moon (Ticket to Ride) said in an interview. He said he was just lucky. I notice one common trait among successful people. They tend to be humble. I think it is because they are humble, that they have open minds and they are always ready to learn and improve, and thus they become better and better persons. Mr Seiji Kanai explained that he was an early mover in the boardgame industry in Japan. When he got into boardgames, there weren't many other people doing it, so he enjoyed the first mover advantage. He was a pioneer. I say his success is much more than luck. I believe there is much hard work and sacrifices to achieve what he has achieved. His games are clever and well-crafted. 

He shared with me that visiting the Essen game fair was an excellent learning experience. He learned how to market his games to an international audience. There is certainly a lot I can learn from him, his journey and his games. 

Reiner Knizia

Reiner Knizia is one of the most prolific and well-respected Eurogame designers. When I look at the games in my collection, there is a very wide range of designers. Among the games that I like a lot, I find that most of them are designed by different designers. Reiner Knizia is the only designer whose games I own, and like, at a disproportionate ratio, compared to games by other designers.

Knizia's design style pretty much encapsulates the Eurogame design philosophy - simple and streamlined rules, short playing time, clever mechanisms and meaningful decisions. Knizia does have his own unique style of game design. There are more intricacies that make his games different from those by other designers. So what makes me like so many of his games, compared to other designers?

The first thing that attracts me to Knizia's game is the simple rules. It is not the simplicity itself that attracts me. When I first learn about a Knizia game, I read the rules or reviews and I can quickly understand how the game plays. Some of his games are quite clever. So once I obtained a quick understanding of how the game works, I am interested to give it a try. I have home-made quite a number of Knizia games. Because of the rule simplicity of many of his games, it is sometimes quite easy to home-make them. E.g. En Garde just needs a simple board, 2 player pieces, 2 scoring markers, and cards numbered 1 to 5. Simplicity brings me in, but simplicity itself cannot make me stay. There are many other elements of Knizia's designs that make me like his games.

Many of Knizia's games are very clever. There is often a unique game mechanism, something that makes you think, "This is ingenious!". En Garde is a very simple game about fencing. Yes through the simple rules and game play, you can really see how much it feels like fencing - the bluffing, the positioning of your pawn, guessing your opponent's hand of cards, taking a risk when moving into "attack range" of your opponent. Clever! When I read the rules of Medici vs Strozzi, a 2-player-only version of Medici (which is a 3-6 player game), I was very impressed with how Knizia managed to create this 2-player version of an auction game, which really does work, and yet has so many similarities to it's predecessor. Later when I played Medici vs Strozzi, I found that it felt different from Medici, and the strategies were different. I like Medici more. But still, I am very impressed with the design of Medici vs Strozzi.

Because of the simple rules, many of Knizia's games are easy to learn, and players can also quickly learn the strategies. It is fun to discover and explore a game, to try different tactics and see which ones work under which situations. Blue Moon City is a game like this. New players can quickly catch on, and sometimes even win the game. It happened to both Ricky and Jeanne in their first games, when they played with others who have played the game before. It is rewarding and satisfying to be able to understand a game quickly and be able to learn and apply the tricks quickly. Streamlined, clean and intuitive rules definitely help in this regard. Being easy to learn and to pick up strategies does not necessary mean a game is too simple and shallow. Sometimes a game simple on the surface can still offer some unexpected depth. It still offers players some nuances to be discovered through more plays. Modern Art, a game about auctioning pieces of art and then selling them, seems straight-forward enough. A player can quickly learn to calculate what are the possible values of a painting, even in his/her first game. However, as he/she plays a bit more, he/she will start to discover the importance of guessing which artists the other players are betting on, guaging the relative positions against other players, thinking about whether it is better to earn money up front when auctioning off own paintings or to earn money at the end of a round when selling all previously bought paintings.

Some Knizia games are very subtle. There is a lot of depth that is not immediately apparent. Sometimes the game can even seem boring at first try. However, if you give it a few more tries, you will gradually find out and appreciate the beauty of the design. Tower of Babel is one such game. On your turn, you only have two options - you draw a card, or you attempt to build part of one of the wonders of the world, and other players may offer to help you. The reward for successfully building part of a wonder is either you collect a token, or you place your influence on the wonder. Players score points by 3 main ways (there are others): (a) when a wonder is completed, (b) when your kind offer to help build a wonder gets rejected, and (c) at game end depending on the tokens you have collected. Although the basic game turn is so simple (so simple that in fact it can feel repetitive), there is a lot of subtlety in where you want to focus, how to maximise your score, and how to hinder your opponents.

Most of Knizia's games have some form of luck. In most of them, despite the luck element, there are many ways for you to mitigate the luck. So you feel that your luck does not determine whether you win or lose, but it is how well you manage your luck and how well you manage your risks that determines whether you win or lose. At one end of the spectrum there are games like

Pickomino, a simple dice game, where I would say there is a lot of luck, you still have meaningful decisions to make, so you still feel you are partly responsible for your win or loss. At the other end of the spectrum, you have games like Lord of the Rings, where there is still a lot of luck element (what kind of event tiles you draw, what die rolls you make - but you don't roll very frequently, what cards you draw etc), but there are so many things that you can do to maximise your chance of winning and to reduce your risk. You are making the decisions about what risks to take, considering the potential rewards as well as the potential penalties. Of course, if you have really really bad luck, you probably will still lose the game. In such games, the luck element creates replayability. You'll face different challenges and experience different stories when you play the game.

I find Knizia games are very well refined - well polished, well balanced. I have never come across any Knizia game that I felt could have been improved further, even for some of the games that I do not fancy. There are no rough edges or glaring issues. Knizia's works emanate professionalism. They are very well crafted. Everything is there for a reason. I have heard of a phrase which is applied to physics / science, which goes something like, "A theory should be expressed in the simplest form, and no more simpler". I see this in Knizia's design. This, is elegance. Amun-Re is one of Knizia's more complex games, about pyramid building, farming and worshipping along the Nile. It has a number of distinct elements, like auctions to buy provinces, and blind bidding when worshipping the sun god Amun-Re (where you can even decide to steal money from Amun-Re's temple). However everything is crafted very well and comes together as a game that really works.

Amun-Re

One of the great things in Knizia's games is the tension, the angst, the frustration. All these fantastic keywords related to one important element - decisions. You have a choice. You make the decisions. You decide how big a risk to take, considering the potential rewards / penalties. Making meaningful decisions is, to me, one of the most important elements of a good boardgame. Knizia's games not only has that, but also often put in a lot of excitement into this decision-making. In a game as simple as Lost Cities, you can sometimes find yourself so torn between whether to bite the bullet and start an expedition, because your three handshake (investment) cards may mean a highly successful expedition, but you may also be heading for doom if your opponent is actually secretly holding many high value cards of that suit. In Taj Mahal and Beowulf: The Legend you spend your cards hoping to be the player with the most number of certain symbols and thus being able to win the rewards you have been eyeing. However, each card played is spent and cannot be taken back, even if you eventually lose to an opponent, who just so happened to have 1 more symbol than your 12 symbols. Ooooh... that is just painful. I have more than once played Lord of the Rings (a game I really really like) where winning or losing came down to that one last event tile draw. Sometimes you can feel your heart beating and your nerves twitching as your hand approach that fateful tile. Ra has a push-your-luck / gambling element. There are moments when you are about to win a decent set of 5 or 6 tiles, and yet you are so tempted to pull yet another tile from the bag, hoping to get a very valuable tile, but you are also so scared of pulling a Ra tile, which would end the round and make you lose those 5 or 6 tiles.

Many people feel that Knizia's games have a very thin theme, "the theme is pasted on", or the theme doesn't really tie with the game mechanics. I do not really agree with this. I think people have this feeling because he tends to try to simplify and streamline his rules as much as possible, thus many concepts / thematic elements become quite abstracted. To me, a solid game mechanic is more important than an interesting theme. Right now I'd say the importance is 70% vs 30%.

Here's a list of games by Reiner Knizia that I own.

1. Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (and the Deluxe version, which contains a variant game designed by other people, which, unfortunately, I didn't quite like)
2. Lord of the Rings
3. Lord of the Rings - Friends & Foes expansion
4. Lord of the Rings - Sauron expansion
5. Lord of the Rings - Battlefields expansion
6. Traumfabrik (Hollywood Blockbuster) - self made
7. Through the Desert - self made but later bought anyway
8. Amun-Re
9. Lost Cities
10. Blue Moon City
11. Euphrat & Tigris
12. Modern Art - self made but later bought anyway
13. Ra - self made (a LOT of work!) but later bought anyway
14. Medici
15. Ingenious
16. Samurai - self made
17. Battle Line - self made
18. Tower of Babel
19. Loco - don't really own this, but I play it using Sticheln cards
20. Pickomino
21. Medici & Strozzi - self made
22. En Garde - self made
23. Poison - self made
24. Kingdoms - self made
25. Taj Mahal
26. Beowulf: The Legend

Through the Desert

There's one quote of Reiner Knizia that I quite like, and I made it part of my blog. Scroll to the bottom.