Jervis Johnson

0:05Speaker 1:Out of the street corners they scream. You knew it was coming. You've been waiting for this for months. Rumour hardened into fear and now they scream at you. The sirens, the hysterical wail tearing through the white noise of the city. And you run. You run to pick up those things that can never be replaced. A picture of them in the days when they still loved you. Your mother's wedding ring. And then you turn to your shelf of games. You only have room for five. Five Games for Doomsday. Five Games for Doomsday is a show in which board game personalities are thrust into a cabin in the woods to outrun an oncoming disaster. but can only take five of their games with them. But which will they choose? My guest this week is a legend in the tabletop gaming industry.

0:53Speaker 1:Son of actor Richard Johnson, he started working for Games Workshop in 1982. Since then, he's worked on Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy Battles. He also created or co-created Blood Bowl, epic 40,000, Necromunda and Age of Sigmar. Since his retirement from Games Workshop, he's revamped to Dreadball and is currently designing Valor and Fortitude for Perry Miniatures. My guest this week is Jervis Johnson. Jervis, welcome to the cabin.

1:18Speaker 2:Thank you.

1:19Speaker 3:Thank you for such a wonderful introduction as well. I'll do my best to live up to it.

1:24Speaker 1:I'm sure you'll be wonderful. So my first question is, how difficult was it for you to pick the five games to take to the cabin?

1:30Speaker 2:Uh, It proved to be quite hard. Yes, yes.

1:34Speaker 3:It's difficult. I love all sorts of different kinds of games. So I went round and round the houses on this for a bit. And in the end, I decided, well, I'll split it into five categories. So like a role-playing game, a hex and counter war game, or war game, and so on, a miniatures game.

1:55Speaker 2:And that helped.

1:55Speaker 3:And then the second thing I did was say, well, This will be something that I think should be saved for future generations and also something that will give me a lot of gameplay. I'm assuming that I'm in a bunker somewhere, hopefully with several other survivors of the apocalypse, so we can actually get to play the games.

2:12Speaker 1:Well, it's a cabin in the woods that is under my dictatorship. So, you know, you've been saved by the zombies, but you have to deal with me, unfortunately.

2:23Speaker 2:Okay, okay. Well, that should be fine anyway.

2:26Speaker 3:I've picked things that will give us a lot of gameplay, hopefully, if there'll be any five games we've got.

2:32Speaker 1:So let's go back to the beginning then. So you're the son of actor Richard Johnson. So firstly, a primer for the listeners. What did he do? What was he in? And what was it like growing up in the presence of showbiz?

2:47Speaker 2:Okay, well, that is a big question.

2:49Speaker 3:So, yeah, my dad started out as a theatre actor. He went to RADA and then on to the RSC, Royal Shakespeare Company, where he did very well and then got into films. He was very well respected, though not particularly a household name. I would say, back in the 60s. When I'm talking to geeky people, the film that they tend to have seen or know about is Zombie Flesh Eaters. He was in Zombie Flesh Eaters. He was the doctor on the island in Zombie Flesh Eaters. And they've also quite often seen a movie called Cartoons. where he got killed and had his hand cut off. So it comes to a violent end, generally, in these things. But he loved theatre. He was a theatre actor, primarily, and did lots of film and TV work as well over the years.

3:45Speaker 1:He was in Magnum, I noticed just about.

3:51Speaker 3:I don't know every single thing he's been in, because there are quite a few really. But yeah, generally there'll be something or another. He's in Tales of the Unexpected a couple of times, which is cool too. And his last movie, Radiator, if you get a chance to track it down, is one of the best things he ever did, if you ask me. So Radiator is a fantastic indie movie that kind of flew under the radar a bit, but is well worth a watch if you can track it down. So I did lots of stuff like that.

4:20Speaker 3:My mum, when they married, my mum was more famous than my dad, actually. She was also an actor. She was called Sheila Sweet, Sheila Johnson. And she was in a TV series in the 50s called The Grove Family. And The Grove Family was like the precursor to Coronation Street. She was young Miss Grove. And so she had quite a lot of stories and she knew people like Tony Hancock and stuff like that. But then when she got married and got pregnant, she retired. But I can remember her telling me a story that she, because when she was doing television, it was live, it was live TV.

5:02Speaker 3:And she said that she was chatting to Tony Hancock, who was a famous comedian at the time and had a show called Hancock's Half Hour. And he was saying, of doing live TV was like being hit by a bus twice a week, basically. Uh, and, uh, so I think that she agreed, you know, she found it very stressful. So I think she was quite pleased really to retire, uh, but they got divorced when I was very young. So for me growing up, you know, like the, yeah, dad was away being, uh, you know, like in movies and things like that, but wasn't really around terribly much when I was growing up. Um, So we were fairly sheltered from that showbiz side of things. We'd kind of get to go on a holiday to Saint-Tropez or something like that.

5:46Speaker 3:And I was in a movie once. One of our holidays, they needed a young Richard Johnson. So I got recruited. I was 12, I think, at the time. And I remember I got paid five whole pounds, which, yes, I spent on model kits, So, yeah, like a kind of like geeky modeler type person, even back then. So it was a movie with Raquel Welsh called something ridiculous like Lust in the Dust or something like that.

6:19Speaker 2:I can't quite remember.

6:20Speaker 3:But if you ever see that, then the child dancing on the beach is me. And the girl I'm dancing with is Raquel Welsh's daughter.

6:29Speaker 2:Yeah. So it was an interesting kind of life.

6:37Speaker 1:And so when did gaming enter your life then?

6:40Speaker 2:Well, it entered very early.

6:41Speaker 3:Actually, I've got something I can show you. I don't know whether that will help terribly much for the listeners.

6:45Speaker 1:Unfortunately, the listeners won't be able to see it, but I'm curious.

6:48Speaker 2:Okay.

6:49Speaker 3:So just recently in the Oxfam online store, I found a game called Exploration, which I'm just holding up to the camera so that Ben can see it.

6:59Speaker 2:Exploration.

7:01Speaker 3:Which is really quite difficult to get hold of, actually. I remember it very fondly. It came out in 1967, I think, so I'd been about eight when I had it. But I used to play Wildlife and Civilization and games with my sister. And I just wanted to get hold of that one because I remember it being quite good. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, so I'm going to be interested to see how well it stands up. So I played games like that.

7:28Speaker 2:And then I collected.

7:32Speaker 3:I made model kits, which is why I spent that £ 5 on model kits, and collected Airfix toy soldiers. And when I was about 11, I came across a book called Battle Practical Wargaming by Charles Grant, which was a World War II set of miniatures rules using Airfix toy soldiers. So I got I bought it and started to become a war gamer. And then the shop that I went to sold, it was my 14th birthday, and they had White Box D & D on sale. I can remember saying, is it any good? To the chap, I said, yeah, it's meant to be pretty good. So I bought White Box D & D, and that got me into role-playing games.

8:15Speaker 3:And then another local shop had Hex Encounter War Games games. So SPI and games like that. And I picked up some of those, so I got into those too. So I love all sorts of games. I like miniatures games, board games, role-playing games, classic games. I really love them all, and I've played them all throughout my life, really.

8:38Speaker 1:So let's go forward a little bit. You started working at a little company in the UK in 1982 called Games Workshop. How did that come about?

8:48Speaker 3:Well, actually, I worked for another littler company before then. So my first job was at a place called Game Centre. Game Centre, as was, was a little chain of game shops in the UK.

9:02Speaker 2:That I used to go to.

9:03Speaker 3:It was in central London, a place called Hanway Street near Tottenham Court Road. And I used to cycle there on my bicycle. It was just a fantastic game shop. And they had an advert in Games and Puzzles magazine, which they published, saying that they wanted somebody to work there. So I was looking at it and I was just coming up to my A-levels and my mum said, well, you should apply for it. Just go for it.

9:27Speaker 2:And I did.

9:29Speaker 3:And they gave me an interview and said, well, wait till after you've done your A-levels and you can work here. So I worked in Game Centre. I got to know Ian and Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. And also a chap called Peter Dove-Levins, who was, you know, there. And obviously, you know, Steve set up Games Workshop. I also knew Albie, who was the first editor on White Wolf magazine from my time at Game Centre. And I was at a Games Day in 1982, and Pete was there.

10:01Speaker 3:He said, I'm looking for.

10:03Speaker 2:An assistant.

10:04Speaker 3:Would you be interested? So I said, yeah, sure, I'll do that. And went and joined Games Workshop and was there for 39 years, basically. So I just stayed.

10:15Speaker 1:So your first game, then, is a game probably most of the people listening to this will have heard of, because it's quite famous, and this is Dungeons & Dragons. So my first question is, then, why is Dungeons & Dragons so influential, do you think?

10:30Speaker 2:Oh, gosh.

10:33Speaker 3:That's a question and a half, isn't it?

10:36Speaker 2:I think that.

10:38Speaker 3:At the time, it's interesting because, you know, D & D isn't the first role-playing game by a long stretch of the imagination. But I think what they. My experience with success in games is that it comes down to there are elements of skill, but there's also luck and zeitgeist, basically. There's doing the right kind of stuff and it being coming out at the right time. And I think that when D & D First Edition was launched, it captured a number of ideas that were in the zeitgeist at the time.

11:13Speaker 2:And it allowed....

11:18Speaker 3:People to escape into a different world at a time which was really quite frightening. I mean, when I was growing up, my mum had plans for what should happen if there was a nuclear apocalypse. She was one of the founder members of CND. I was on the Aldermaston marches on my tricycle and stuff. So it was a big part of life growing up then. And so the ability to kind of like escape somewhere else where you didn't have to worry about the ever looming threat of nuclear destruction was quite a nice thing, I think. So I think there was elements of that. And it just being an imaginative, you know, like clever piece of games design at a time when gaming was starting to become quite a popular thing. I think that, I mean, it had been in Germany for quite a while, but you'd got an explosion of different sorts of gaming going on at the time, miniatures gaming, board gaming. Games and Puzzles magazine was a good example of that, just the breadth of the hobby that was coming out. And then you got D & D fitting right into that.

12:31Speaker 1:And so then we think of, when we think of Games Workshop, we primarily think of Warhammer. Well, we almost exclusively think of Warhammer now, I think. But how important was D & D to GW when you joined?

12:43Speaker 3:Well, it was incredibly important. I mean, when I joined, Warhammer hadn't come out when I joined Games Workshop. So Games Workshop was set up as an importer and distributor of D & D, actually. Ian and Steve had heard about the game and had played it a little bit. met Gary Gygax at a convention in America and got permission to distribute the game. So they started out distributing the game around the UK, and they caught it just at the right time. So it was a very, very important part of Games Workshop's initial success. And then they printed stuff under license, so I've still got my copy of the Games Workshop DMG and a player's handbook and stuff like that. So they printed stuff up licensed. Games Workshop did a great set of things called dungeon floor plans.

13:42Speaker 3:I remember were a big thing that sold really, really well back in the day, which were floor plans that you could play your games of D & D on because you didn't have computers back then in the way that you do nowadays. So laying things out was an important part of it. So Dungeons & Dragons created Games Workshop. And they went on really to create Citadel miniatures because Citadel miniatures started out primarily as making fantasy miniatures for use in games of Dungeons and Dragons. And that's why when Brian Ansell approached Ian and Steve and said, look, I can set up a place that makes really good toy soldiers for you up in Nottingham. they said yes, because they knew that the floor plans that they were doing and the use of miniatures was an aspect of the game that was fairly underutilized, really. It was definitely part of the hobby, but they could see that it could grow. Brian had different plans to do with things.

14:43Speaker 3:Brian Ansell's first.

14:47Speaker 2:Kind of stuff.

14:48Speaker 3:I was writing Trollcrusher, which was a fanzine all about Dungeons and Dragons. So it was very important overall, both for Games Workshop and for Citadel Miniatures.

15:01Speaker 1:And why is D & D important to you?

15:05Speaker 2:Well, I just love it.

15:07Speaker 3:I've been playing it since I was 14 years old in one form or another. I'm playing a game of D & D, actually fifth edition at the moment with three of my kids. My son Jack is the DM and my daughters India and Bella and me are going through this big long exhibition we've been playing for years now online. So a kind of modern version.

15:32Speaker 2:Of the game.

15:34Speaker 3:So it's been part of my life. And I love role-playing games. I love losing myself in them. There's nothing quite as immersive, I think, as a really good D & D session, but also it's such a social activity. Even when you're doing it online, you know, it's for me, it's it's that, you know, it's a little group of friends and you get an excuse to get together and you're spending as much time really chit chatting about stuff and doing things.

16:03Speaker 2:As you are playing.

16:06Speaker 3:You know, I love that. And back when I was young, I hadn't really had much of a chance to actually create dungeons. But when I first started out, I loved the aspect of it, you know, kind of like coming up with a world, filling out a dungeon. I've got my own kind of like points of view about what worked and what didn't.

16:26Speaker 2:You know. And so....

16:30Speaker 3:It has a lot of lonely fun associated with it, which I think is an important part of a lot of hobbies. I mean, obviously, getting together to play D & D is one aspect of it, but being able to sit around and kind of like create stuff is another. So there's a lot of fun that you can have with D & D in your own time. And that was when I was growing up and there weren't computer games and stuff around. That was an important aspect. I'd go up to my room and I'd be listening on my headphones to some prog rock of some kind or another and maybe reading like Dune or Lord of the Rings.

17:10Speaker 3:But I could also be painting some soldiers up and kind of like creating my dungeon and the story. And those two things came together. I used to have a model that I painted or made and I'd incorporate it in. in some way or another it would be a monster that was going to be met or a character that you were going to bump into so it was very creative and immersive it filled me up if that makes sense.

17:40Speaker 1:So I want to talk now about your work on those early GW games Warhammer Fantasy Battles and 40k so first of all how did you get on the design team at GW.

17:52Speaker 3:Okay, well, I started out working for Pete. So what I used to do is phone up game shops and say, you really should be stocking our games and miniatures and stuff. I started out doing that. And after a while, Ian and Steve had had a lot of success with Viking Fantasy, and they wanted to step back a bit. So the operation moved up to Nottingham, and I came too. And I was kind of like quite senior in the board games bit of it. John Stallard, who runs Warlord Games nowadays, being kind of like my opposite number on the Citadel side.

18:25Speaker 3:And I had a conversation with Brian saying, I think it would be really helpful if we had a little range of games that were quite small footprint is what I was thinking, not terribly expensive. And I came up with three or four ideas, one of which was sort of like a fantasy American football. I was obsessed with American football at the time, except it's orcs and goblins playing it. And Brian said, yeah, no, that sounds like a great idea. It was you go off and design it.

18:54Speaker 3:Which wasn't really what I'd expected. I expected it to be handed on to people like Rick Priestley or Richard Halliwell to do the design. But Brian obviously had seen something in me, so I went off and designed it in my own time. It was the first thing I'd ever done like that. I'd designed games for myself before then. I think everybody did at that period, one way or another, particularly miniatures gaming and stuff like that. You'd invent stuff and come up with things in role-playing. But it was the first time that I'd written some rules. So that's how it came about. It was an off-the-cuff remark and then a request to actually go off and design it.

19:34Speaker 3:And that led me to, it worked out okay, fortunately, and led to me moving over to the design studio from sales, initially as a manager, primarily, Yeah, kind of like corralling people like Rick and Albert. I didn't particularly like.

19:50Speaker 2:Being a manager.

19:51Speaker 3:In the end, I said, can I just be a games designer, please? And they said, yeah, sure. So I concentrated on the games pretty much exclusively from that point on and didn't have to run teams of staff or anything like that.

20:05Speaker 1:And so then, when Fantasy Battles and 40K... were being made. What was the original intention for them? Did they want them as just an accompaniment to miniatures, or did they want them as an accompaniment to D & D?

20:24Speaker 3:So the idea initially, Warhammer came first, was that the Citadel miniatures for Dungeons & Dragons were selling reasonably well, but you didn't need to get loads of them. Brian was a wargamer, Rick and Hal the same. And me too, for that matter. We'd all grown up playing wargames, research group, ancient battles games. We'd made our own fantasy games. So the idea of playing battles with toy soldiers was something that we understood. And Brian thought, well, this sounds like a good idea to me. I mean, because obviously if you're collecting an army, you're collecting much more miniatures than if you're collecting just for a game. So that was the initial kind of idea with Warhammer. Now, if you look at first edition Warhammer, the other thing that was going on there was that it was kind of like baby steps. It was presented very much as a role-playing game because role-playing games were the things that we knew sold.

21:19Speaker 3:Miniature war games were... especially fantasy and science fiction ones really didn't at that time. There were, there, there weren't really, there was some around, but not really terribly popular ones. So to start off with Warhammer was this kind of like, almost like a role-playing game with a dungeon master and, uh, uh, wrote a scenario and, and it would be more like a skirmish game as we'd consider it now, more like something like Necromunda or Warcry, uh, really in what you were doing. Um, But slowly over time, it evolved into a tabletop battle game. So I think that by the time that you get to the third edition, first edition in the hardback book, you're really seeing that. 4TK, Rogue Trader, when it first came out, still had quite a lot of those trappings of a role-playing game. So it still had the idea that there'd be an umpire, somebody who wrote the scenario. And the games were quite small. But by the time the second edition in the box came out, again, that had been dropped completely. So really, from the early 90s, what you've got is Warhammer and 40k dropped. Any trappings have been presented as some form of role playing game.

22:30Speaker 3:And they are tabletop battle games. You collect an army and you fight battles against your friends who have also collected armies. And that was always, I mean, that was Brian's goal, yeah, to get it up so you collected armies of miniatures.

22:47Speaker 1:And so if you look at first edition Rogue Trader, this is when I sort of first interacted with Games Workshop. It is, firstly, it's funny. Secondly, it's intensely British.

23:07Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.

23:08Speaker 1:Was this just reflecting the design studio at the time, the people who were there? It was just like, we want to have. Because the British deflect everything with humour. Was it just this idea, we just want something that reflects the way we act in real life and our interests and all of that sort of stuff?

23:28Speaker 2:Yes.

23:29Speaker 3:Just before I answer, I'm just going to say one thing that I should have said earlier on. But obviously what I'm saying here is my point of view, my memories of what happened. Memory is a fallible thing, and people remember things differently. So if you speak to Rick or Ian Livingstone or people who were around at the time, they'll probably remember things slightly differently to me. So that caveat said. I think that with those early games, they were primarily written by Rick and Hal, both of whom had grown up, and they're both British, you know, like, grown up reading 2000 AD, Board of the Rings, you know, all of these kinds of things, watching Monty Python on television.

24:12Speaker 2:Yeah, so they... So they... And they... Those....

24:21Speaker 3:Both Rick and Alan had a really strong sense of humour. They saw the ridiculousness in a lot of what we were doing. And that's kind of reflected in what they wrote. And again, it's a very British sense of humour. So it's quite, from an American point of view, quite dark, the humour, rather sardonic, I suppose. Not really sarcastic, sardonic. I'd say sardonic. sense of humour, that was something that, if you were a white teenage or early 20s gamer, then you understood all of that, if you were British.

25:04Speaker 3:And it went down okay enough in America and around the rest of the world. I think it was a step away of from it enough to for that not to be a major issue but it is give it did give the particularly it's particularly noticeable in the earlier versions of things a particular style to it so yeah I think you look at the early campaign packs for Warhammer MacDeath you know and in particular MacDeath has got all kinds of stuff about growing up in an English school and being taught And there was less oversight at that time. So the writers would just generally, you didn't, you're working to very tight deadlines. And then you just went away and you just did stuff. It got edited and printed pretty quickly, basically. Um, uh, so you can see the same kind of thing in Blood Bowl as well, though it's more or less stayed in Blood Bowl all the way through the years. But again, it was, uh, when I did that very first edition on my own, um, uh, I wrote, I, I had, it had a sense of humor.

26:16Speaker 3:I particularly drew on board of the rings. It's the kind of like, like the tone that I, I put into it, which, uh, uh, if any listeners haven't read board of the rings is very influential, interestingly on games workshop, you know, the early years it's worth tracking down. I still think it's quite funny in a very pure sort of way. Um, uh, and blood bowl was quite funny in a rather pure sort of way as well. I, I would say, um, uh, So, you know, because I was the same. I was a product of the same culture, and you can see that kind of embedded into Blood Bowl 2. So, you know, as time went along, that was going to change and evolve once the games had been successful, and the IP definitely isn't like nowadays, like it was when we first wrote it.

27:05Speaker 1:But what does, I think, remain with 40K? The people... that people talk about, but it's not so to the fore, but nevertheless, it's the elements of satire in 40K. It seems to me to be satirising. Religion, it seems to be satirising. Conservatism, the Orcs seem to be satirising. Football hooligans of the time and all of that sort of stuff. Was that disgust that we want to do this, or was this just people would go off and they had their own particular peccadillos and hobby horses that they wanted to bring into the game?

27:40Speaker 3:I can't remember it ever being discussed. It's just something that we did. I mean, we would have talked about stuff like that at the pub. And again, it was a product of the culture and the type of people that we were, you know, that kind of like slightly cynical view of all of these things was in there.

27:53Speaker 2:So yes, absolutely.

27:55Speaker 3:Satire was definitely an important part of those early games and Blood Bowl 2, you know, which satirizes kind of sports, basically sports presentation and the whole kind of like thing behind it. So yeah, But it wasn't deliberate. It was just the way our minds worked, as I can remember. It wasn't like we said, we're going to satirise these things. We like games and we like certain aspects of culture. We like reading certain things. So you kind of see those being our interests being captured in the games and things that we're doing and the society that we were living in. being captured in those games um i think you know if you've grown up through the 70s in particular you couldn't help but be sardonic and a little bit cynical about quite a lot of things really it wasn't it wasn't the best of decades uh and not just because of the awful clothes yeah it's like it was yeah it was.

28:54Speaker 2:And so um.

28:56Speaker 3:By the 80s, obviously, things were changing, but the games that Games Workshop were producing at the time were reflective very much of British society in the 1970s.

29:07Speaker 1:And so are you happy that even though it seems to be under a shroud of serious gaming... Are you happy that those absurdities still remain in 40K?

29:20Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.

29:22Speaker 3:No, no, if anything, I think if you speak to any of the old-timers, they would say that it's got a bit po-faced nowadays. We'd like it to be less serious. I think that, yeah, yeah it was there was a definite push towards making it more and more serious over time and And so a lot of the rough edges got cut off. And I guess I think that's partly the kind of thing I was talking about. As time went along, Games Workshop grew as a company. You got more and more oversight onto what was going on. You couldn't just put in silly jokes. So I'd never have got away with Sly Marbo, for example.

30:04Speaker 1:Or Obi-Wan, what was it, Obi-Wan Sherlock Clouseau?

30:11Speaker 3:That's right, exactly. Stuff like that you wouldn't really get away with nowadays. Somebody would spot it very, very quickly and tell you you weren't allowed to do it because you might get sued or something like that. So it's a different environment for a lot of reasons. I think that when I talk to people, I often say that when those early years were very creative, but without the oversight, what you tended to get was highs and lows, very extreme.

30:42Speaker 3:you know, you'd either kind of like knock it out of the park or really kind of like shoot yourself in the foot. There wasn't a lot in between. And the more modern style of games, workshop stuff tends to cleave towards the middle more. So you don't necessarily get those kind of amazing kind of like, you know, like flights of fancy, but you also don't get the really bad things. You know, there are no pygmies anymore, for example, and stuff like that. You know, and the attitude towards lots of other cultures is much more, much more, inclusive in a good way. I really think that's, you know, because you look back at the product of those, you've got a bunch of white British lads, you know, in their early 20s writing stuff. In the 1980s, it's, you know, there are aspects of it which don't really stand up to very close scrutiny. nowadays so you look back at it with pride but also there's a certain sense of embarrassment about some of the stuff that did get through back then and so I tend to look at it as just being different rather than one being better than the other.

31:53Speaker 1:So your next game then is a war game and this is Empires in Arms Why do you think, why do Napoleonics lend themselves so well to war gaming?

32:05Speaker 2:Oh, I don't.

32:07Speaker 3:It's got fantastic uniforms, amazing characters that lots of people have heard about. You know, miniature wargaming and board wargaming, which grew out of miniature wargaming generally, you know, like started out very much as a British kind of thing. So, yeah, we were quite proud of what we did in the Napoleonic Wars. So a lot of the early wargamers were. The First World War or the Second World War would have been a bit too close to comfort I think for many people in many ways at that time so the Napoleonic Wars was kind of safe in a way it's like it's not quite real and looks amazing so if you're collecting miniatures and things and that reflects through into the board gaming hobby too it's a really interesting period of history with larger than life characters and a wide variety of different armies to think about and that gets reflected in the games too it's just it's remains incredibly popular to this day and on the historical war gaming side yeah um uh i just had a i was just playing a very large napoleonic war game with the peris just on friday basically we were fighting battle of salamanca so it's still yeah like right up there

33:22Speaker 3:the napoleonic period and i know that for peri miniatures you know they're They do other periods too, but Napoleonics is where they're... is much more popular than really any other period. So it's true to this day.

33:36Speaker 1:And so then, you know, you've got the... there are a plethora of Napoleonics games having been published. Why is this one coming to the cabin?

33:45Speaker 3:This one's got... is very special for me and my friend and colleague Alessio Cavattori as well. So back in the day.

33:57Speaker 2:I'd got a house.

33:58Speaker 3:So this would be back in, let's say 2000 or something like that, maybe a little bit earlier than that, maybe the late 90s. I got a house and I had a spare room upstairs. And when I was young, I played plenty of board games, including SPI and Avalon Hill games. And I picked up a copy of this game called Empires in Arms, which allowed you to refight the Napoleonic Wars from 1805. The problem with it was it was really long. And I mean really long. So I got together with Alessio and two or three other friends and I could set the game up in my top room and leave it set up. And we played that first session of Empires in Arms for something like a year and a half. roughly, it was like a role-playing session. It was like you would meet up. The idea was we'd meet up each Friday. That obviously didn't survive contact with the enemy terribly much, but it'd be at least a couple of times a month. So we were meeting up, you know, like two or three times a month for a year and a half playing this game.

35:00Speaker 3:And it was just fantastic. I think I was written You know, so you each had a country that you were running, it's grand political, and it had this fantastic kind of rule in it where often in multiplayer games, you can get knocked out, basically, you get knocked out, like Prussia could get conquered, what would happen then to the Prussian player. And it had this fantastic rule where if you were being beaten, you could soothe the peace. with the person who was beating you up. And they basically had to agree. If you'd agree to unconditional surrender, and then it had a little system where you'd write a peace treaty, and it would say, well, I won't attack you for the next nine months, and you can borrow this army corps, and I will pay you 500 gold a quarter, or something like that. You'd get to pick different bits. And so that gave it real longevity.

35:51Speaker 3:and all kinds of stuff going on, backstabbing and ridiculous outcomes in battles. Napoleon managed to lose one battle against the Prussians, actually. And in our minds, he ended up, he got captured and paraded through the streets of Berlin in his underpants, placed that clay before, you know, and then handed back when the French had to sue the Prussians for peace.

36:14Speaker 2:That was a real turn-up.

36:16Speaker 3:And outrageously lucky on the part of the Prussian player. So it's got a very, uh, and it, that board game group, um, kind of like I still play in a, in a descendant of it to this day, it evolved into us playing like games that didn't take a year and a half to play. Uh, so we'd be, we'd meet up regularly, an evolving, changing group of people, uh, over, over, over the years. Um, playing lots of different board games, generally card games and board games. And that all came out of Empires in Arms. It's an amazing, extraordinary game.

36:59Speaker 3:And if anybody gets the chance to play it, it's still to this day, it's worth playing. It's quite an amazing experience.

37:11Speaker 1:So I want to dig a bit more in now to Blood Bowl. So Blood Bowl, You know, you have these ideas, you're into American football. Hopefully it was the Miami Dolphins at the time.

37:22Speaker 2:New York Jets for my side.

37:23Speaker 1:I was a big Dan Marino fan at the time. And so, you know, Brian Ansell says, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Go and do it. How did you approach it?

37:37Speaker 3:Well, so I think the quote that I've come to really appreciate is it goes along the lines of artists steal amateurs merely copy. And at that time, I was definitely an amateur games designer. So it was kind of like, well, okay, I played American football games. I really love it. There's a game I absolutely adore called Football Strategy, which I really liked, and such pro football and stuff. So I played American football games over the years, but that wasn't really what I was looking for here. So what I did was I took the Warhammer rules at that time, and transferred them onto a square grid. So I created a pitch and created a game where it was like a little Warhammer skirmish, basically. You'd have the two teams of players and they'd earn a football and they'd fight each other and punch and kick and hopefully take down enough of the opposing players and then create a gap and run through and score a touchdown. So that was the initial idea for the game. And it worked well enough.

38:44Speaker 3:I mean, I'd love to say that it was extensively playtested, but back then it really wasn't. And then I struck lucky. I'd got enough of a basic idea for the game and I'd written the different sorts of teams. I can remember that the Champions of Death were one of the teams which were very much all hammer horror movie kind of like cliches and stuff and different sorts of teams. And they'd already got this kind of like slight sense of humor. But then to move the game on, I was joined by Mark Gascoigne, who is a fantastic editor and has gone on to set up Black Live the Games Workshop, numbers of other publications and publishing houses and stuff over the years. And by Ali Morrison, who's better known as a miniature designer, but is also a very talented artist. And basically what Mark did was he took my very rough and ready text and kind of evolved it, but then helped me expand the background. So he came up with the did you knows that you get in Blood Bowl.

39:58Speaker 2:That was Mark's creation.

40:00Speaker 3:And the idea of there being two commentators to do the examples at play. That was Mark's idea. I can remember we used to go down to Smith's and get American football magazines and we'd scour them and look for the kind of the tone and kind of thing.

40:13Speaker 2:So ideas came from there.

40:16Speaker 3:And then Ali came on board and he started to kind of like draw concept sketches, basically, for what the players and the different teams could look like. First edition Blood Bowl didn't have plastic miniatures, it had little cardboard standees. So he did all of the artwork for all of those. So basically, I came up with the initial concepts and then was kind of like the lead rules writer, I suppose. But Ali and Mark really helped me build the background up.

40:47Speaker 3:So it was a team effort. And it's one of the things I say about games design to this day. It's not like writing a novel. you're working with a group of people it's a collaborative process and good stuff comes out of you being lucky enough to get teamed up with a group of people who are on the same wavelength as you and you each then get encouraged to kind of like like hit above your weight so when that was certainly true with me um yeah so i've uh you know i uh I owe a huge amount to what Ali and Mark put into the game there.

41:23Speaker 3:And between the three of us, we were able to get that first edition of the game together with a playable enough game in there that it landed really well. And it surprised everybody how popular it was, because I don't think that anybody other than us three really thought it was going to be, you know, weren't really interested in it. It certainly wasn't, you know, like Rick doesn't really like American football, you know, Hal wasn't into it. Brian was like, I don't really get it. But they could all see that it was successful. So we very quickly did an expansion for it. And then fairly quickly after that, the second edition with the polystyrene pitch.

42:04Speaker 1:And so then, Easy, do you think its success is something to do with the fact that It's sport kind of only in name. Firstly, it's a skirmish game rather than a sort of realistic evocation of sport. And then secondly, it has that dark humour shot through it that you're not really trying to score goals, especially if you're playing the team I play, which is Orcs. You're trying to murder as many people on the pitch. Is that the attraction to it?

42:36Speaker 3:Uh, yeah, well, I think that, uh, you know, it's, it, it, it's, it's quite a successful satire of sports stuff. So if you, if you're into sports of almost any kind, like rugby or American football in particular, then you, then it will make you chuckle. Uh, and, uh, the game's close enough to those things that a lot of the tactics that you kind of like, you'll have seen kind of, you can kind of see being emulated with the exception that you can kill people in blood bowl and you're not really allowed to do that, uh, in rugby or American football. Um, Uh, so it's kind of reflective, uh, of those things. So I think that, uh, you know, it, you know, it, it was lucky when it landed, you know, American football in the UK was, was having a bit of a moment because of channel four.

43:18Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.

43:19Speaker 3:So, so we were lucky in that way. Um, uh, and obviously it worked well with the American market who could under, you know, it was much more kind of like accessible and obvious for them. Um, uh, So we were lucky in that way. But I think that the other thing that Blood Bowl did right from the start and has carried on doing, and surprisingly few other board games do, is that it mixes a board game with the hobby of collecting miniatures. And In particular, your team in Blood Bowl is a bit like Warhammer or 40K Army in that it's unique. You choose it from a set of lists and then you paint it yourself. And so nobody else's team is quite like your one. So it captures that bit of the hobby. And then when you're working with a board, the rules could be much tighter.

44:14Speaker 3:The focus on that one scenario allows the game to, it works better as purely as a game. So it spreads out the net of people who might be interested in joining in with that hobby a bit wider. You get people who are really interested in it because it's a pretty good game. But you also get people who are interested in it because they can collect little teams of Bloodbog players and keep them in their cabinet and paint them and have fun doing that and then play games with them. But actually, that's probably quite secondary to them compared to the hobby of the player. of collecting the miniatures and creating their teams. So I think that it had quite a broad appeal and also had an appeal to a market that Games Workshop weren't particularly appealing to at all, which is the board games market. So I think that there were a number of reasons that it was successful. all of those kind of mixed together really the team i tend to play the most is the dark elves uh and i've still got my dark elf team but the um uh the uh as a games designer you can't really afford to do that the reason i i i took on the dark elves was

45:28Speaker 3:because nobody when we uh so for me blood bowl first and second edition blood bowl perfectly workmanlike kind of like things but the game really becomes a good game I would say a third edition and that's really where I learned to become a games designer so it was a very important piece of games design for me in terms of learning my craft as it were that's where I would say I stopped being an amateur and became a professional games designer But one of the reasons it worked so well was that we did get a lot of playtesting. The studio was quite big by then, and Blood Bowl turned out to be a great thing to playtest because we could play at lunchtime and then after work.

46:05Speaker 3:You could generally get a game at lunchtime and a half after work. So there were lots and lots of games going on. But the one team that didn't get taken were the Dark Elves, so I took those. to playtest them, and I've just stuck with them over the years. So I play with them a lot, but I don't really have a favourite. It's like I don't really have a favourite Army 40K or Warhammer, because you have to fall in love with the thing that you're working on at the present time, if you're going to do this professionally, to give it the commitment and the passion that it needs.

46:36Speaker 3:So generally, when people ask me at Games Days, when I was still at workshop, well, I say, well, generally, it's the last thing I worked on. because I had it had to be the last thing that I worked on because otherwise I wasn't doing my job right.

46:48Speaker 1:So your next game then is Warhammer and in the email you sent me you said Warhammer 5th edition and so my first question on this reflects this firstly which Warhammer and.

46:59Speaker 3:Why Okay, so this is the fifth edition of Warhammer.

47:03Speaker 1:Warhammer Fantasy or Warhammer 40k?

47:05Speaker 2:Warhammer Fantasy. Okay.

47:07Speaker 3:Yeah, so not the role-playing game. Warhammer would be called the old world nowadays. The reason that I picked it is that I had a brilliant time playing Warhammer 5th. It was me and Andy and Nigel and Bill King actually back then as well. We did lots of battle reports. We had lots of fun just playing the game to put stuff into White Dwarf magazine. A lot of people remember it as the Hero Hammer Edition, because heroes were very, very powerful. But I didn't mind that, and I really, really like the magic system with the cards. I still think it's the best version of the magic system that Warhammer's ever had, really. um so i've just got very very fond memories of it i just had a blast playing that game and it it was the version of the game that i based warhammer ancient battles on so i did uh me and uh the perrys and rick did a historical version of warhammer and that was pretty much warhammer fourth or fifth edition yeah round about that fourth is very close to fifth to be honest there's hardly any difference between Now, that's not to disparage the editions that came along later. I know that lots of

48:20Speaker 3:people absolutely adore 6th edition, which was done by Thomas Piranin, or 8th edition, which was the last one, and now The Old World. So I think they're all great. And for me, they're all basically variations on the theme, really. If you said, no, you've got to have The Old World, I would cry. I'm taking 5th edition just because of nostalgia as much as anything else and because I like the magic system more than the other magic systems that have come along later but it's dancing on the head of the pin territory really I think the other thing that I'll say with Warhammer is that the other thing I requested was that it came with marmies and terrain because just having the Warhammer rules wouldn't be terribly useful really.

49:06Speaker 1:Well we can use zombies fingers or.

49:08Speaker 3:Something that's true you can carve stuff out of old bones and things.

49:14Speaker 1:And so when you look at the kind of way people interact with, whether it be old world Age of Sigmar, Warhammer Fantasy that was 40k, that are you surprised and gratified that you can have people who... never play the games, they just read the books. You can have people who buy the models, never play the games, and just paint and model, and people who are obsessed with playing the games. Is it weird and also gratifying that there are so many approaches to these games?

49:53Speaker 2:It is gratifying.

49:53Speaker 3:I've never thought of it as being weird, but I think that's partly probably because I just grew up in the same kind of hobby. uh uh so and it never seemed particularly with niche maybe um um no i don't i don't i don't think so because i think that the uh yeah that that we're all different we're all looking for for different things so um i think that so warhammer and 40k for that matter um have their roots in historical war gaming. So as I said, you know, Rick and Alan, we all started out really playing World War II games with Air Fixed Toy Soldiers.

50:34Speaker 3:The first fantasy games that I played, I converted Air Fixed Toy Soldiers into orcs and stuff and made up my own rules to be able to play them. So that was what our grounding was. And a lot of the stuff that you're talking about is reflective of people who are interested in history, too. People who are interested in history, they might like historical novels. They might like reading the history books, the actual history books. They might like playing war games, historical war games, or seeing movies, or watching Band of Brothers, or whatever it might be.

51:08Speaker 2:And so.

51:11Speaker 3:It doesn't seem strange to me that Warhammer, which in many ways, what we chose to do, we took things that we knew worked for historical wargaming and then emulated them. So you look at the army books and the codexes, a lot of those are taking aspects of Osprey books or history books and kind of like applying those to Warhammer 40k. And the reason that we did that is that it starts to make it feel real. And once you've started to get that feeling of reality about it, you can immerse yourself in it. Uh, and then the stories naturally followed on from that, you know, and the computer games that you get now, these things, um, uh, they're designed to be immersive. Uh, and, uh, so you can suspend your disbelief sometimes when you're playing and kind of imagine it.

51:56Speaker 2:As a story or a piece of history that you've been reading.

51:59Speaker 3:Um, So, no, it doesn't seem strange to me that you get all those different approaches to it because what we were drawing on was a similarly diverse kind of hobby, basically.

52:11Speaker 1:So I want to talk now about Epic 40K and AOS. And Epic 40K isn't a thing, though there is, and you're going to have to remind me of the name, there is an Epic game that's set in 30K, right?

52:24Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, the Specialist Design Studio. I always think of them still as Forgeworld, basically, because I'm old. Uh, so new names take a little while to knock the old names out of my head, basically. But yeah, uh, yes, they've got, um, a Titan game. I think, um, they're a real combat game. Um, So there are games around at the moment, and I'm in the old Epic Games, so it's funny, I was just chatting just recently with somebody, one of, I work on a game called Strange Crusade as well, which has been great fun, and this is one of, you know, it's been, I got to work with Andy Chambers and Thomas Piran in there as well, and various other cronies of mine. but I was sent a link to some people playing Epic 40,000, which is the third version of Epic.

53:12Speaker 1:So for the listeners who don't know, when you think of 40K, you think of the 28mm miniatures. Epic is very, the men are very, very tiny and they come in big battalions.

53:22Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.

53:23Speaker 3:So a man is round about sort of like, sort of about five or six millimetres tall originally. I think more recent ones, they're more like 10mm. And that means that you can have tanks and you can have giant robots. So the starting point for Epic was Adeptus Titanicus because we wanted to have a giant robot game, a bit like Battletech. So obviously we couldn't do that in 28mm scale. So the very first Epic game just had giant robots in. We very quickly started doing some rhinos and little space marines.

54:00Speaker 3:Partly because what they did was, once you made them, they scaled the robots. When you just look at the robots on Epic Titans on their own, they look like Dregnawts for all intents and purposes. Unless you've got something little beside them, so you go, oh my God, a rhino's only the size of his foot.

54:14Speaker 2:Then, I mean, that's big.

54:17Speaker 3:So you needed these other things to scale it. And then the game evolved from there over the years. There was a second edition, which was very much concentrated on all of the armies. A third edition, which was Epic 40,000, which landed very badly. And then a fourth edition called Epic Armageddon, which I did through the Specialist Game Studio, which is still probably one of the best rule.

54:41Speaker 2:Books that I've written, I'd say. And was.

54:46Speaker 3:popular within its own kind of light lights. And now there's a more recent version, which I must admit I haven't played, a slightly different scale to the earlier version. So there have been quite a few over the years.

54:59Speaker 1:And so moving on to Age of Sigmar then. So Warhammer Fantasy Battle was ended. Firstly, what was the reason behind that? And secondly, were you surprised? Because there's the famous video of of the guy who burns all of his war hammer armies because he's so outraged. Were you surprised at the uproar when Fantasy Battles.

55:21Speaker 2:Was going on? I can't say that I was.

55:23Speaker 3:Again, this is one where lots of people have different points of view about it, so I can only really talk of my own experience with Age of Sigmar. So, Age of Sigmar, I was brought in as the rules writer. And the brief was that the rules should fit onto four sides of A4. And the law, the blowing up of the old world, was decided by other people, basically.

55:59Speaker 2:But we.

56:01Speaker 3:we could tell that people were going to be happy about it. You just knew, really. The other bit for me was that they won't get any points values. The reason for this, as I understand it, is that at that time, there was kind of like a kind of like an ideology within Games Workshop, about Workshop being first and foremost and above everything else a manufacturing company that made plastic miniatures and sold them, and then sold.

56:35Speaker 2:Them to people.

56:37Speaker 3:And people were starting to get worried that potentially the games were restricting people's ability to buy models because army lists will imply restrictions on what you can buy. So the desire was to have a game where you didn't have those restrictions, so you could just buy any models that you liked and then play games with them. And that's really what you see with the first edition of Age of Sigmar. Now, the problem that we ran into really quite quickly when we were trying to write the four-page rules sheet, the actual process of trying to get the rules down to four pages was a rather interesting one as a games designer, because you basically just have to kind of cut a lot of stuff out and really get down to the nitty-gritty of what you're about.

57:19Speaker 3:But you also have to tell people how to organize a game. And without points values, that was very difficult. And the people who asked us to do that weren't terribly helpful in then giving us any kind of way on a four-page rule sheet telling people how to organize a game. And I think that came through when the product came out. People were left a bit confused, basically. Well, what do I do? Yeah. And the good thing about all of that was it very quickly proved that the Games Workshop isn't just a manufacturing company that makes plastic miniatures.

57:57Speaker 3:And that's where the success lies. It's a company that creates big hobbies. And all of these things are interrelated and kind of like bring each other. It's a bit like I was saying earlier about games design being a collaborative process. Everybody brings everybody else up. The rules, the army lists, the background, the games that you play, the miniatures all come together to create the hobby. And people have lots of little bits of it that they go into.

58:24Speaker 3:So Modern Games Workshop is more reflective of that truth. And you saw it happening with Age of Sigmar very, very quickly. We quickly had to pivot and do a set of army lists and give people points, values and instructions on how to play the game. And so, you know, first edition Age of Sigmar was a tough project to work on. It really was, you know, one of the least enjoyable projects I've worked on at Workshop. The second and third edition, particularly third edition, you know, were fantastic fun.

59:03Speaker 3:I think partly because Age of Sigmar had launched so badly and 40k was doing so well that the Age of Sigmar team, which I was on, we kind of flew under the radar a bit. It was kind of like we got to just go away and do stuff. And it was just a fantastic team of people to work with. So we had an absolute blast once the oversight was kind of taken away to a very large extent. And so where it evolved to in the end, I was very, very pleased with, but the initial bit was tough.

59:37Speaker 3:And it didn't surprise us. It didn't surprise me when it landed like a lead balloon, basically. I think a lot of lessons were learned from that experience. It's still slightly scarred Games Workshop to this day. I think the downside of it is that it means that doing something really radical and innovative is very, very scary for Games Workshop. So one of the experiences on being on the games design team after Age of Sigmar was that whenever a new edition was coming, it would always go through this process where you'd start off and management would say, okay, it's up to you, Gamestead, so you can do anything you like. Anything's on the table. Maybe we'll have alternating activations, all of these kind of things. We'd go away and design some new stuff and say, this is brilliant. And slowly, over that year of development, everything would get chipped away and what you would get would be the last version of the game with something new added onto it basically just to break it in a slightly new different way and that's because that shadow of the failure of Age of Sigmar's launch when we really did do something very

1:00:52Speaker 3:radical to try and save Warhammer I guess that's the other thing that's worth saying here is that this wasn't done just out of spite what was happening was that in the run-up to Age of Sigmar, what you could see was that 40k was becoming more popular and Warhammer was getting less popular. Now, that's not good from Games Workshop's point of view. What they really want are two equally popular game systems because then when you're launching new additions, you get like-for-like growth, if you see what I mean.

1:01:23Speaker 3:What you don't want is one game that's much more popular because when a new addition of 40k comes out, you get an artificially high spike in sales. And that means that next year looks bad. And then the year after that, when the new Age of Sigmar comes out, looks bad too in comparison. So really what you want is for Warhammer or Age of Sigmar and 40K to be equally popular game systems. So the aim with Age of Sigmar was to say, well, we've got to do something here. We're going to have to really shake things up if we're going to get Warhammer to be as popular as 40K. And that's what was trying to be achieved there. It just didn't work.

1:02:01Speaker 1:And so why did you end up leaving GW.

1:02:05Speaker 2:In the end?

1:02:06Speaker 3:Well, I've been there for 39 years. So just being there for a very long time was part of it. I was running into retirement age and I've been speaking to my financial consultant who said, basically, you can retire soon if you want to. Because I was saying, I'm starting, it's started to get, As I was saying earlier, what you have to do is you've got to find the passion in the project that you're working on. And when the project that you're working on is the army book that you've done five times before, that can get harder.

1:02:39Speaker 3:I was finding it hard to be as passionate as I knew I needed to be to create things. It was tiring. And as you get older, working at Caves Workshop can get.

1:02:53Speaker 2:Easier as I got older.

1:02:54Speaker 3:The cycle is much more intense nowadays than it was when I started. It's just the nature of modern kind of businesses, basically. The aim is to get the same stuff out in less time for less money. And so the work just got harder and harder. And I was starting to burn out a bit, basically. So I thought, well, I can take early retirement. and my financial advisor says that we'll be fine.

1:03:22Speaker 2:So I did. I retired. And then.

1:03:26Speaker 3:Once I've done that, you know, I started, you know, I met up with old people who haven't seen for quite a while. So the Perry's, the very first thing I did was the Valorant Fortitude rules, which have been going for.

1:03:36Speaker 2:A little while now.

1:03:36Speaker 3:Uh, and that was just, you know, like me, me to get back to the, together with the Perry's talking about games. Uh, we, we played a game of a game called Black Powder, which Rick and I designed, um, um, uh, is available now. Um, But we were playing that, but it was difficult. The rules are spread all over the place. And I said, well, when I did Age of Sigmar, I got the rules onto four pages. I bet I can do the same for a game like Black Powder. And maybe we can get it so the army sheets just fit onto a page. So we've got all of the rules right there, just a couple of pieces of paper, basically, was the design concept for that. And that's proved to be a quite interesting project. And I've just got version four, it's called. out which is the final version so it's been kind of like effectively kind of it's available for free go to the peri miniatures website you just download it you just it's all there and there's been a great community and it's kind of evolved and over time but now that's finished And then in between then, that kind of led to me getting some other little bits of freelance work. Then I got carried away and said

1:04:39Speaker 3:yes to too many projects. And so I ended up working almost full time again. And remember, that wasn't really the plan. So now I'm trying to ease back on things. So I'm doing some work with my friends over at Factory Fortress. And I'm still doing stuff with the Perrys because that's really my hobby rather than work. But Which is a long answer to say that, yeah, Workshop, I was just starting to burn out on it for too long, doing the same things, and I needed to take a break from it and recharge my batteries.

1:05:15Speaker 1:So your next game, then, is a cheat, and this is a games compendium. And so this is one that has all of the sort of classic games. Of those classic games, which is your favourite?

1:05:28Speaker 3:It's hard for me to pick my favourite, which is why I asked for a games compendium in the first place. I've got two that vie for top place, and that's Bridge and Backgammon, which is why I was thinking a pack of cards and a Backgammon set would do me, but actually, I mean, it would be nice to have a chess set, because I'd like to get better at chess. And it's got drafts in there as well. But I love classic games. I've probably played more Bridge and more Backgammon than any other game I've ever played. I played Backgammon almost every day with my wife. We usually play five games a day, basically. And I still enjoy it.

1:06:08Speaker 3:It's still fascinating. I still curse my horrible bad luck when she wins and say, no, no, it's pure skill when I win.

1:06:16Speaker 1:Of course.

1:06:17Speaker 2:Of course, of course.

1:06:18Speaker 1:I just refuse to play with my girlfriend. If she beats me, that's it. That game's out of rotation now.

1:06:25Speaker 3:It's funny because we were watching something or another and they had a bit which was a little bit like me because if I have a really bad run, then I'll just say, that's it. I'm not playing anymore today. Maybe not tomorrow, because I just can't stand it. But yeah, I love backgammon. And there's lots to be learned there about how very simple game mechanics can generate stuff. The importance of chaos in terms of longevity for a game. Being able, I mean, Go and chess are the games that aren't luck-based. But trying to create a game that can't be solved when without having some dice rolling in is very difficult. And so there's lots of interesting stuff to do with statistics and the way that you use maths and luck and how gamers react to luck and that kind of stuff I find fascinating with Backgammon. And Bridge is very similar. I haven't had a chance to play Bridge again for a few years, but I'd love to be able to get together a four and properly play Bridge like I used to. It's a remarkably deep game, quite complicated, so it's very gaming. in a modern style, it's the closest thing to a Euro game that you'll

1:07:43Speaker 3:get in a, in a, in, in amongst the classic games. But there's also, I find fascinating that, that, that it's got a lot of miniatures and role-playing kind of aspects to it in that it relies on a social contract for it to work. If you want to cheat a bridge, then you can cheat a bridge. I mean, they've tried to make it so that you can't, but you, the players need to, to, work together to make the game work. You can't use secret signals. You've got to play within the rules of the game. And that reminds me a lot, particularly of tabletop wargaming, because I think a lot of what's interesting about tabletop wargaming is that really, as a game, it's kind of broken. There are too many things which are inexact, in particular the way the terrain and movement work.

1:08:32Speaker 3:is why Blood Bowl works much better purely as a game than Warhammer or 40k will because it's got a square grid that resolves a lot of those little issues so you've got a pure game there but it lacks the immersiveness that you then get or the hobby that you then get from a tabletop game so I think that I find that very interesting and just the fact that these games have stood the test of time you know they've been playing for hundreds of years I love cribbage too for a similar reason cribbage again that's interesting because they know who invented it so you get your first kind of games designer you know like who's invented it I mean Yeah, exactly. I mean, can you imagine if people would still be playing Warhammer or Blood Bowl in the year, what would be like 2500 or something like that? It's just an amazing achievement. This guy and it's a great game. It stands up to this day.

1:09:25Speaker 2:A bit.

1:09:25Speaker 3:I mean, all of those are they're a bit random for very modern kind of like like games designers tastes. But that doesn't really bother me. I think they're fabulous games. And like I said, I've played them more than I've played anything else. So I'd really like to be able to have them with me. And hopefully there are two other people with us in the wooden shack or a couple of zombies that we can train to be the other pair.

1:09:57Speaker 1:Well, I've already had Ian Livingston and Rick Priestley in, so they're already here. So you can play with them.

1:10:05Speaker 3:Okay, excellent, excellent. So we've got our four for playing bridge. That's good news.

1:10:11Speaker 1:So I want to talk about the future now. So you said, you know, you retired, but you didn't really retire. So what can we see from you coming up in the future?

1:10:21Speaker 3:Well, I think that what I've learned, so it was an interesting experience for me retiring. I mean, just retiring is a weird experience anyway. Everybody will take this again. So all the cliched things kind of like happened to the people who retire kind.

1:10:32Speaker 2:Of like that.

1:10:32Speaker 1:Did you get a carriage clock?

1:10:35Speaker 3:No, no, I got much better stuff, actually. I got a Yarrick painted up by the.

1:10:42Speaker 2:And I got this fabulous... Okay, I'll.

1:10:45Speaker 3:Show it to you. It's the most amazing thing. I was gobsmacked. So I'm holding it up there. So this is.

1:10:55Speaker 2:Age of Jervis.

1:10:57Speaker 3:And it's a book that the studio put together. which is basically a going-away card, like a very elaborate going-away card, with stuff about the things that I've done, and then lots of people saying nice things in it, basically. So it's just an amazing thing to have got. So I got that, and this is a piece of John Blanche artwork. I got the piece of John Blanche artwork as well, which hangs in our living room. So better than a carriage clock, really. But no, what I meant was that you.

1:11:28Speaker 3:Working at a workshop was a large part of my life and very defining. So when you leave, you start to think, well, who am I? So I went through all of that kind of stuff. But what I learned was that actually, yeah, no, I'm still the same person. Yeah, that games designing is part of me and a vocation. And then with the freelance work that I've been doing, I've learned that actually, yes, people will You know, they want me to do work for them.

1:12:00Speaker 2:I think that.

1:12:02Speaker 3:Going forward, what I'm more likely to do, I'm very happy working with the Factory Fortress team pretty much as a consultant, having been at Workshop for.

1:12:13Speaker 2:A long time, basically.

1:12:15Speaker 3:But I've got a few ideas for games of my own. And what I know now is that I can work those up and then go to somebody and say, would you be interested in doing this game? And they'll probably say yes. uh you know i've learned that uh yes i've got enough of a reputation to kind of like be able to do that kind of stuff so that's my plan really is to ease back on things a little bit i've got a couple of ideas for stuff to do with the peris so we've got a couple of uh of games which we've started to do a bit of play testing with um and i've also got a couple of other games that are very niche just obsessions of mine, things that I want to get out of my head and actually finally get down onto a paper and get the time to develop. And then I'll either keep them for myself or hopefully I can convince somebody to publish them and then other people will get a chance to look at them too.

1:13:09Speaker 1:So, you know, you said you worked at GW for 39 years. You're still making games. It's fair to say that you made your home in gaming. When you look back over the years you've lived within gaming, is it a nice place to live? Yes.

1:13:29Speaker 3:Without a doubt. No, I am incredibly lucky. I know that. I've managed to make my hobby my job and work with loads of fabulous people. And uh you know with some of the games that i've got you know like become so i've got a little story a little story when i was growing up i also used to play wrg war games research group ancient battle ancient rules it's one of the games i played it was written by a fantastic games designer called phil barker um uh and uh when i did warhammer ancient battles um Phil Barker wrote me a letter about it because I'd written an article.

1:14:10Speaker 3:If you play ancient war games, there's a fantastic society you can join called Society of Ancients, which isn't a comment on the age of the people who are members of it, but that you're playing ancient war games. And I'd written an article for their magazine. So he wrote to me about that. And I was like, Phil Barker knows my name and he's written me a letter. And I know from interactions and experiences that I have with people that I've become like that, which is weirdly humbling.

1:14:40Speaker 3:And I take great pleasure in, basically. I just feel blessed and lucky. Not all of it has been great. You know, I still stress. I'm an anxious person anyway, and there's nothing quite like bringing a game out to trigger your anxiety because there will be mistakes in it and you feel like a total failure. And I think that I was lucky in the way in my character. It allowed me to work well with people over the years while still being quite passionate about what I do.

1:15:15Speaker 3:there are dangers in making your hobby your job. You can lose your hobby. I managed to be schizophrenic enough to be able to keep my hobby to one side and use it to inform what I did as a job. And it can be very frustrating if you're sure that you're right about something and you can't convince the people that you're working with that you're right, they're wrong. And that's the nature of being a professional games designer. You're working for a client. Basically, you're giving them what they want, not what you want. which is why I'm looking forward to, you know, like such a pleasure working with the Perrys.

1:15:50Speaker 3:And I'm looking forward to kind of like doing some more of my own stuff in that I can just do stuff for me. The only client is myself. And that's not the nature of professional games design. So it's definitely not for everybody. So there are downsides to it, but I would never have done anything else. I just, I'm so, so lucky. And again, another little story I mentioned that, that my first job was at Game Centre and that there was an advert in Games and Puzzles magazine.

1:16:22Speaker 3:I've still got the issue of Games and Puzzles magazine. Now, I think that there are strange things that happen in your life where you get kind of like a fork in the road. And that was definitely one of those moments for me. I was looking at that and my mum hadn't said, you should, why don't you just apply for the job? The worst they can say is say no. Then I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now. You know, it comes down, and that's a roll of the dice. You know, I rolled a six, and I kept on rolling sixes. You know, I was lucky in getting the job at which I was lucky coming up with the idea for Blood Bowl. I have a skill involved too, but being in the right place at the right time and having the right kind of character to get along with people and things like that were all just like random kind of like bits and pieces.

1:17:12Speaker 2:So, yeah, I feel very lucky.

1:17:15Speaker 1:So your last game, then, is Imperium Horizons. So how impactful as a mechanism was deck building?

1:17:23Speaker 2:I think it was huge. It was probably.

1:17:30Speaker 3:One of the most important innovations in games design over the last 20-odd years, I would say. So I was stuck a little bit as to whether I'd take Dominion or Imperium Horizons. I haven't played a lot of Imperium Horizons. It's quite complex for me. But I was thinking that it's, you know, so when I was thinking about the games, I was thinking also about the kind of legacy aspects of them, if you know what I mean. It's something good to bring along. And Empyrean Horizons definitely fulfills that.

1:18:06Speaker 3:It's state-of-the-art, kind of like a buildable card deck design, I would say. And very, very deep. And so it's got a good solo mode. sort of like Foraging or something like that, then I can play Imperium Horizons quite cheerfully and try and delve into it. So I think it's a great example of that kind of stuff. But Dominion, yeah, I love Dominion. But it's, yeah, it doesn't have quite as many things there to kind of tick those boxes. But it was the most difficult one, picking out a Euro game or something like that, because I tend to play the games once or twice in my games club where we play card games and board games.

1:19:03Speaker 2:It's very rare.

1:19:05Speaker 3:That i'll play a game more than three or four times so getting that kind of attachment and it's the hobby of playing you know like gamers games you know board game geek style games as it were is it that's the hobby for me i collect them and i buy new ones and like you know and my friends do the same and we bring them along on our when we meet up and we'll play the latest one uh and maybe get out a popular one from back in the day and stuff but um So it was the most difficult one for me to pick. But I think that Empyrean Horizons is a good choice. It is a fantastic piece of games design. It'd be something nice to drill into and try to understand a bit better.

1:19:46Speaker 3:And I think it would stand up to repeated plays and trying to keep on kind of like.

1:19:51Speaker 2:Working at it.

1:19:52Speaker 3:We wouldn't just put it on the shelf and saying, yeah, let's forget about that and move on to something different.

1:20:00Speaker 1:So I've got one more question for you. So you're heading out to the cabin, and you go around a corner and the back door of the car flies open. Four of the games fly out down a ravine into a river and are swept away to posterity. Which game do you hope is sitting on the back seat of the car?

1:20:15Speaker 3:Gosh, I knew you were going to ask that. It's a very difficult question. I think, to be honest, it would have to be the games compendium. Yeah, it's got a variety of little games in there for a start, so it's cheating. I'm cheating on my answer to the final question, too. But, you know, as I say, I never grow tired of backgammon. I've never grown tired of bridge. You know, I'd love to get better at chess and learn how to play it better. So I think it would probably be my venerable games compendium, really.

1:20:52Speaker 1:So if people want to see what you're up to and what, when you've got games coming out, how can they go about doing that?

1:20:58Speaker 3:Uh, I, I, I'm not very good with social media. So the, uh, what I'd say is that, uh, you can see what I'm doing with the Perry's on the Perry miniatures website, which is, uh, uh, Perry miniatures.com. I think, but if you just search Perry miniatures, then you'll find it. Um, uh, And you can see what I'm doing at Factory Fortress by going to the Trench Crusade website. There's loads of cool stuff going on there if you're into miniatures games. I would highly recommend you check it out. They've just got a new supplement coming out. So it's a good time to go. And again, the rules are available for free.

1:21:34Speaker 3:So both of those places have got rules that I've worked on that are available for free. And the other things are, I mean, I don't have a publisher or anything like that yet. So I guess the word will get out. I have a Facebook page, but I'm very bad at using it. I really only use it to answer questions about power and fortitude. So I'm afraid I'm going to be a bit useless in that kind of way. And so you just have to keep your eye on the internet and watch out for announcements and stuff.

1:22:01Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, Jervis Johnson, thank you very much.

1:22:04Speaker 3:Okay, thank you.

1:22:05Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure to be here.

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