Hello board gamers of the community, I'm chengcheng~
I wonder if you've ever had the same experience as me: after finishing a thrilling game and carefully putting the heavy components back into the box, your eyes always drift unconsciously to that inconspicuous little corner on the side of the box—where the name of the game's designer is printed.
In today's world flooded with mass-produced industrial goods, board games may be one of the very few cultural media that still retain a strong "personal author's imprint."
Behind every mechanism that makes you slap the table in admiration, there is often an obsessive perfectionist's years—even over a decade—of sitting alone and struggling.
Today, as the first installment of chengcheng's designer column, I want to talk with you about an almost mythical legend in the history of modern board games:
How did a 40-year-old unknown programmer who had never designed any game, all by himself, in a dim basement in Germany, overturn the ceiling of heavy board games worldwide?
1. The 40-year-old German engineer who had never made a board game
The protagonist of our story is named Mathias Wigge.
Before 2021, if you searched for this name in the major board game databases, convention rosters, or design award lists, the search results would be completely blank.
Because his real identity was an ordinary systems development engineer at a German software company.
By day, he wore an inconspicuous hoodie and typed rigorous, dull medical data code in the office; when he got home at night, he changed into old clothes and plunged headfirst into his own basement.
In the European and American board game circles, the vast majority of timeless masterpieces come from hall-of-fame masters of world renown like Reiner Knizia and Uwe Rosenberg. But Wigge was a complete "wild card."
His only capital was his extremely obsessive love for zoos, plus thousands of games' worth of experience accumulated since childhood as a hardcore board game geek.
Back on a winter night in 2014, after playing several popular animal-themed board games on the market, Wigge felt a strong sense of disappointment welling up: "The animal board games on the market are either catch-the-piglet, feed-the-lamb stuff for little kids, or crude reskins of area-control and house-building. There isn't even a single game that can capture the truly serious, noble scientific and ecological core of a modern zoo."
The essence of a modern zoo is absolutely not a freak-show circus selling rare beasts, but a Noah's Ark fighting against species extinction. It needs to breed endangered species in captivity, needs cross-border scientific research cooperation with conservation areas around the world, needs rewilding and release into nature, and at the same time must balance expensive ticket revenue and expenses.
Since no one in the world was making one, Wigge pushed up his glasses and wrote a sentence in his notebook: "Then I'll make one myself."
That night was the end of 2014. He had no idea at all that this decision would steal all of his spare time for the next seven whole years.
2. Seven years of solitary courage: hand-making 255 blank cards in the days when big publishers shut their doors on him
Making a light party board game might take only a few months, but making an ultra-heavy Eurogame with 255 unique cards and multi-dimensional interlocking variables is no less complex than independently writing a miniature operating system by hand.
From 2014 to 2021, Wigge locked almost every weekend, holiday, and late night in the basement:
1. [1,000 hand-written, hand-cut test blank cards] In the first four years, without any sponsorship or art budget, Wigge relied on a printer and a paper cutter to purely hand-cut over a thousand blank cards. The animal size, required enclosure, water requirements, climbing needs, and continent tags on every single card were all hand-written and annotated by him after consulting dozens of animal encyclopedias and ecological annual reports.
2. [Thousands of blind tests that drove his friends crazy] There's a famous saying in board game designer circles: "Design is only 10%; testing is the other 90%." To adjust a 1-dollar difference in the cost of a single card, Wigge dragged his close friends, colleagues, and even family into the basement for hundreds of extreme numerical blind tests that were almost entirely devoid of fun. Sometimes a card's effect only exposed a balance loophole in the 15th game, and he would have to tear down the entire correlation formula for two continent tags.
3. [Cold rejection letters from big publishers] When he finally brought his thick wooden prototype to submit to several mainstream European large publishers in 2018, what he got was bucket after bucket of icy cold water in the face: "The rulebook is too thick; modern people don't have the patience to read it." "Heavy Eurogames are already out of fashion; nowadays everyone only likes fast-paced party unboxings." "You're a newcomer with no industry credentials, and right off the bat you want to make a giant game with hundreds of illustrations—no publisher would dare take on that kind of risk of a flop for you."
An ordinary person, faced with a thick stack of rejection letters, would probably have packed the prototype into a storage room long ago. But Wigge had a kind of stubborn persistence unique to German engineers: "You think it's complicated because you haven't yet seen how beautiful it is when it starts turning."
3. The soul of the mechanisms: why do we say he wrote the philosophy of the modern zoo to perfection?
Finally, in 2020, Ralph Bienert, chief editor of Feuerland Spiele—the benchmark of hardcore German-style publishers in Germany (publisher of Terra Mystica and Gaia Project)—playtested this seemingly unremarkable hand-drawn prototype.
After just two rounds, this veteran editor who had seen countless games was completely stunned by the self-consistency and elegance of the gears meshing on the board.
What exactly did Wigge inject into this game that left the old hands breathless?
1. [Sliding conveyor belt: using the simplest, most restrained operations to resolve massive computational load] Many heavy board games intimidate people because there are dozens of possible actions in a single turn, and the brain simply crashes. Wigge came up with a brilliant invention: no matter how grand the situation, the player always has only 5 action cards in front of them, arranged on a sliding rack in slots 1 through 5. Whichever one you execute, its power is equal to its slot number, and after execution it is immediately kicked back to slot 1. This minimalist physical slide track perfectly simulates the "scheduling rhythm" of real project management—you can't always just grab the big projects; you must constantly intersperse light, small actions to build up steps and charge power for your core ace.
2. [Dual-track collision: the two-way convergence of ecological conservation and commercial operation] This is the most philosophically profound stroke of genius in the entire game. In past games, it was either a contest of who had more money or who had more points. But in "Ark Nova," Wigge designed two scoring tracks that run in completely opposite directions, racing away from each other: One is the "coffee-brown ambition track" representing commercial tickets and reputation; the other is the "green conservation track" representing ecological breeding and release into nature. When does the endgame arrive? At the moment when one player's two markers meet and cross on the tracks, the game instantly ends! This is not only stunning in terms of mechanisms, but also the deepest metaphor for the spirit of the modern zoo: Relying purely on capital to rake in money without conservation projects, your ceiling is doomed to be locked; yet without healthy cash-generating capacity, noble ecological conservation can hardly take a single step. Only when the two run neck and neck can the Noah's Ark of civilization set sail.
4. The Essen miracle: how did an unknown outsider break the global board game ceiling?
In the autumn of 2021, the German Essen board game fair (SPIEL '21) officially opened.
It was a legendary event recorded in the annals of board gaming by veteran gamers around the world. Without any overwhelming marketing hype, the few "Ark Nova" demo tables that Feuerland set up in a corner were packed to the brim from 9 a.m. on the first day of the fair.
Players who finished their first game stood up from their seats and rushed to the sales counter with flushed faces. Word spread from one to ten, from ten to a hundred. Within just a few hours, the thousands of copies prepared on site were swept clean by the frenzied crowd, and even on second-hand platforms they were scalped at three times the release price and still impossible to get a single box.
Over the following months, the miracle fermented at storm speed on the internet: In the more than twenty-year history of the rankings of BoardGameGeek (BGG), the world's largest board game community, the top ten has always been an iron wall built by long-famous super masterpieces such as Gloomhaven, Twilight Struggle, and Terraforming Mars.
But "Ark Nova" was like a starship appearing out of nowhere without warning, and with an astonishing overall score of BGG 8.5+, it cut through the entire ranking like a hot knife through butter, charging straight into the global all-time top five!
It won countless awards from the top international board game juries, and the jury of the German Game of the Year award wrote in its recommendation: "This is an epoch-making masterpiece that is almost impossible to fault in terms of mechanical maturity, thematic fit, and replayability."
That year, Mathias Wigge, already past forty, stood under the spotlight facing the long lenses and cameras of countless reporters; he was still wearing that plain pullover, looking nervous and reserved. When asked "how did a newcomer make such a masterpiece," he just smiled calmly: "I actually never thought about any awards. I just sealed all the insomnia, love, and obsession of an ordinary programmer over seven years into these 255 cards."
5. Behind every great board game lives an obsessive dreamer
Late at night as I type this article, I look at the shelves of heavy board games: Not only Wigge's "Ark Nova"; But also that ordinary music teacher Klaus-Jürgen Wrede (designer of Carcassonne), who, while vacationing in a medieval town in southern France, sketched the first crossing roads on a napkin and thereby founded a global empire of tile-laying and meeples; And the Japanese designer Katsura Kajino (designer of Circus Flohcati), who after many sleepless days suddenly had an epiphany about the reverse-thinking idea of "never shuffling the cards"...
Board games are an extremely wondrous art. They don't have the dazzling light-and-shadow special effects of console games, nor the hundreds-of-millions industrial investment of movies. What they rely on is nothing more than a piece of cardboard, a few wooden bits, a set of rules, and the tiny yet firm universe inside the brain of one person or a few people.
Whenever we gather friends around the table and push open a game box, we are in fact pushing open a fragment of several years of the designer's life.
[chengcheng's interactive topic]
In your usual board gaming, has there ever been a game that made you, at the moment you finished playing, unable to resist exclaiming from the bottom of your heart: "Just how is this designer's brain wired?!" In your hearts, which board game designer's design philosophy do you admire most?
Welcome to leave your stories and thoughts in the comments section; chengcheng will be waiting there to chat with everyone! See you next time in the next installment of Designer Stories~
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