Archive for Piotr Silka
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Piotr Silka
Poland
Warszawa
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Piotr Siłka: First, please introduce yourself: what you do for life, and how your adventure with board games started?
Konstantinos Kokkinis: My name is Konstantinos Kokkinis. I am a 3D designer/animator. I also own a hotel on a Greek island. I started getting more into board games around 12 years ago, and I have been playing as much as I can ever since.
PS: Drum Roll is your first game that was released, but is this also your first prototype that you made together or alone?
KK: Yes. This is also my first prototype. Hopefully more will come in the future.
PS: What was the inspiration – I mean primarily theme but also mechanisms – for Drum Roll?
KK: Back in 2009 I was seriously considering designing my first game. The circus theme always excited me and I saw that even though it is a nice theme, there was a big gap in the board game market with few circus-themed games. This was ideal since I wanted to make something fresh.
The opportunity came when BGG's Greek Guild community announced its "2011 board game design competition". I invited my good friend Dimitris Drakopoulos to join me in participating in the contest and gave him a rough description of Drum Roll's theme. He was also excited and together we started working on Drum Roll.
We needed a mechanism to represent the evolution of an artist's performance. This determined right away that our resources in this game could not be wood and stone and bricks as the concept was not to build a circus but to manage it and make it evolve. This is why we adopted Rehearsals, Costumes, Promotion, Supplies and Equipment as our game's resources since those where the tools that would make an artist's performer improve. In the end, the game was ready for the competition and we managed to win the first place in both jury's and public's awards.
The designers of Drum Roll – Mr. Kokkinis and Mr. Drakopoulos – at Spiel 2011 (Image: Babis Tsimoris)
PS: When did you start to work on Drum Roll? What was the hardest thing during design work?
KK: The design of Drum Roll's mechanisms started in September 2010. Development was smooth and we didn't encounter any major issues at the time. Our biggest problem was when we started working on publishing the game. The initial version had lots of English text in it. We wanted to publish the game in most major languages, but the cost was too high to produce individual versions. This brings us to the hardest thing during design, which was converting the game to be language independent. Rules needed to be changed, balancing needed to be redone, more illustrations and symbols needed to be done, etc.
PS: I have to admit that I love the artwork in this game. How did you find Antonis Papantoniou? Is this the his first realization of this kind?
KK: I have known Antonis since my college days and he was actually my illustration teacher by that time. We remained friends. A few years back he was the my best man at my wedding. Antonis has worked in many fields of digital illustration, but Drum Roll was the first board game he has illustrated.
Draft of the cover
PS: Why did you decide to publish the game by yourself? Is it hard to find a publisher? Did you want to challenge yourself. (Maybe you thought about company a lot earlier and the game was only a good occasion to start a business?)
KK: Publishing always excited me and having full control over your project is something that everyone likes. I really believe in Drum Roll's potential, so I decided to invest in it and undertake the risks and benefits of self-publishing. There is much interest from larger publishers for a reprint of Drum Roll after Spiel 2011 as we have published only 2,000 copies for now.
We already have other projects coming up and of course if their cost goes above our production budget, we will present them to larger publishers from the start.
PS: Do you have favorite games from Polish authors, or maybe something that's made a good impression on you in recent years?
KK: Poland is a country that got a lot of publicity during the past few years. From board games to miniatures and wargaming products, there is much artistic talent which I really admire. During Spiel 2010 I had the opportunity to acquire a copy of Magnum Sal signed by the designers, Marcin Krupiński & Filip Miłuński. I believe Dimitris bought all games that were introduced by Polish designers in 2010.
Eclipse designer Touko Tahkokallio looks pained (Image: Antti Koskinen)
(The next two questions were asked prior to the opening of Spiel 2011, with follow-up questions after the show closed.)
PS: How are the preorders going, along with the organization of the worldwide shipping?
KK: Preordering is going really great. We are very happy with the warm welcome the game has received from hundreds of people who have truly honored us by supporting the game before it has even been released.
PS: What are your expectations of the coming fair in Essen?
KK: Dimitris will arrive on Friday at Spiel 2011 and along with some friends offering help, we will be able to run our booth. I am very excited and anxious at the same time since this is my first time as an exhibitor. I am pretty sure it will be a great experience, and I hope many people will want to play the game.
PS: What are your impressions of the show and the game's reception after Spiel? Where your expectations met – or perhaps even exceeded?
KK: We are very satisfied with how well Drum Roll did at Spiel 2011. The game sold really well, and we received a lot of buzz. Almost all people who played the game seemed to enjoy it and that was reflected in the percentage of people buying the game after playing it.
We are already looking towards Spiel 2012 where we hope we can do even better after learning so much from this year's experience.
PS: How will Drum Roll be distributed in the future?
KK: We had many proposals for distribution and publication. We are currently in communication with a large publisher who has shown interest in taking over English and French versions of the game. Since our first print run is almost gone, we are scheduling a larger print run soon.
PS: Thank you very much, and good luck at Spiel 2012!
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Piotr Silka
Poland
Warszawa
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Piotr Siłka: Thanks to the user records on BGG, I see that you have quite a large collection of games. When did you become interested in modern games? Do you play a lot? And, be honest, how many of these games have you not yet played?
Matthias Cramer: I started in the early 1990s, mostly with old Avalon Hill games. Later there came El Grande and the Euro Games, so there was plenty to be played. I had one or two gaming groups through all of the years, but right now, I am spending much more time with playtesting than with gaming myself. So I think that I've played most of my games, but there are still some sealed ones on my shelf.
PS: Which games have made a big impression on you lately? And now that you are designing games, do you still have time for playing the new ones?
MC: With around 1,000 new games each year, I have no chance to play them all, so I pick a few that look interesting and I try to pick the ones that promise to have some new mechanisms or the ones that are really telling a story.
PS: How did you start designing games, and how do you manage this with your job as an IT project manager? Most of all, what does your wife say about this when instead of spending time with her, you play with cards, chips, and meeples...
MC: The secret is to have a good life-work balance. I work to live and do not live to work, so there is a place for other passions like making games or going diving. My wife also likes board games and she joins most of the gaming events anywhere, so she knows the guy in her living room quite well ;-)
PS: Okay, on the subject of your first game Glen More, which was welcomed by players in Poland, you mentioned that the circular layout and the tiles were in place from the beginning. I understand that you then started to look for a theme which would be right for tiles? What main changes occurred during the development phase? Is this one of your first designs and how much time did it take you to get from idea to a design ready to be presented to alea?
MC: Glen More had a very short development process as the path was quite clear from the beginning. I tried to maximize the effect of the circular layout and movement mechanism. Everything had to be built around the dilemma of "Which tile should I take?" I started with many resources and a lot of rivers and streets. All of this was reduced at a middle stage, because less is more. It also became clear quickly that the tiles should have large differences in their power. Therefore, I created the special places like Loch Ness and the Castles. After nearly a year, I presented the game to Stefan Brück from alea and he liked it from the beginning.
PS: Your next game, Mieses Karma, was based on a book. How many mechanisms did you try to get to the right one?
MC: Developing a game based on a book takes a special approach because you have to follow the book. For Mieses Karma it was clear that the players "travel" through different animal incarnations, and I wanted to have a kind of life line as a representation of life itself, so I played around with a bunch of mechanisms and went for an easy and interactive one in the end.
PS: Lancaster hasn't been on the market long, but it's already been nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres – congratulations by the way – and has been highly praised. I've only read the rules so far, but I liked very much the twist with worker placement which seems a little bit like a auction. How did you came with this idea?
You mentioned also that inspiration came from The Republic of Rome, and I understand that it applies to the voting procedure. But from where came the idea of laws and different conditions to get victory points?
MC: In the first version of Lancaster, players were setting their knights from the victory point track into the different counties. To make it short: It didn't work at all, so I went for something else.
To be honest, I don't remember at which stage the bidding came into the game. (It was quite early.) Maybe I didn't recognize it. The knights and the counties were there from the beginning; even the distribution of the knights – 4-3-2-2-1-1-1 – never changed through all of the years. In the beginning, there was a big tournament at the end of each round during which players fought each other. This mechanism disappeared and was replaced by the conflicts in France.
The laws are also an old mechanism because I wanted to have a game in which laws can change rules. These rule-changing laws didn't make it to the basic version, but you'll see some of them appear in the New Laws expansion.
PS: Your most recent game, which will be on display at Spiel 2011, is called Helvetia. Beyond a few sentences about the theme and one picture – I see that there are three ways of using a meeple? Am i correct? – there is no more information. Can you describe the game mechanisms and the ideas of which you are most proud? Was the game thematically inspired, or did the mechanisms arise first?
MC: The meeples just show heads and shoulders, but there are women and men. They have three positions: as a baby (lying on the side), awake (standing) and sleeping (lying). There are 16 resources in the games, but no counters or cubes to represent them, so you have to use directly what you produce – there is no storage at all.
The basic idea is that you have to produce so many different things that you have no chance to do it all on your own, so you marry, say, your neighbor's butcher in order to get some nice steaks out of your cow. He will be quite happy about this marriage as he can then get children to work in his butchery. It's a strategy game, but most family game players have a lot of fun with all of these marriages.
PS: Can you tell a little bit about the games you are designing now?
MC: I do not talk much about ongoing projects. In my ongoing games, I am caring more and more for a density of the game and its suspense arc – and I believe that storytelling will become much more important for me in the future.
PS: Do you want game designing to be your full-time job, or would you rather keep the situation like it is now?
MC: Never ever :-) Making games is one of my hobbies and I don't want to have a feeling of work when designing new games. I am testing a lot with friends and with people who I like. That is leisure time for me and them, and it should stay that way.
PS: Thank you very much.
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Editor's note: This interview originally appeared in Polish on GamesFanatic.pl.
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The designers of Drum Roll – Mr. Kokkinis and Mr. Drakopoulos – at Spiel 2011 (Image: Babis Tsimoris)
Draft of the cover
Eclipse designer Touko Tahkokallio looks pained (Image: Antti Koskinen)
