Imagine a game of Pandemic like this: the last cure hasn't been discovered yet, but disease cubes are piling up at the other end of the map. Someone is holding a key city card, and another person's pawn is only a few steps from a research station. Everyone has already agreed on the plan for the next round, then an epidemic card is flipped, and the plan has to be rearranged.
No one just played a card specifically designed to sabotage you. Nor has anyone secretly become a traitor.
But that sense of urgency is entirely real. You look across at your friend, and your friend looks back at you; the four actions that just belonged to one person suddenly become an opportunity the whole table is waiting on together.
At this moment, Matt Leacock's most interesting question lands right in front of us: if a game doesn't require us to defeat each other, can it still make people sit up straight, argue seriously, and think about playing again after losing?
His answer gradually moved from a world map, to a sinking island, to a campaign that leaves its marks, and then toward the Earth we all live on.
1. From Communication Products to Cardboard Systems: What He Cares About Is Always How People Act Together
Before becoming a full-time board game designer, Leacock worked in user experience design. The experience listed on his personal website includes Apple, Netscape, AOL, Yahoo!, and Sococo, mainly working on community and communication products. At the same time, designing games had always occupied his spare time.
This résumé is easy to write up as a nice career-change story: leaving the screen and embracing cardboard. But if you look at the design methods he has repeatedly talked about later, there is actually a thin thread between the two jobs.
Writing the rules is one thing; people actually using them is another.
When making communication products, you have to notice where people can't find the button and where they misunderstand the prompts; when making board games, you likewise have to observe where players stop, which card always gets placed wrong, and which actions that should happen naturally require someone to remind others again and again. From his professional experience to the way he later talked about testing, the thread of paying attention to people has never broken.
He began designing board games full-time in July 2014. This timing matters: Pandemic was already published in 2008, and Forbidden Island came out in 2010. Full-time status was not the starting line of a fame story, but a change that happened after years of amateur creation.
The work accumulated slowly first, and life arrangements adjusted afterward. Between 2008 and 2014 there are six years, and also the weight of moving from a hobby to a livelihood. Development, testing, and working with publishers—the work that happens behind the box—gradually supported his new life.
His personal bio also states a very plain preference: he likes games that can be completed in a relatively short time and keep everyone engaged until the end. Bring that sentence back to the table, and you'll find it isn't only about playtime.
It is also asking: are the people sitting here truly still inside this game?
2. A Common Enemy: First Moved by Cooperation, Then Learning to Hand the Challenge to the Deck
In his own interviews, Leacock mentioned that Reiner Knizia's The Lord of the Rings showed him the power of cooperative games. When he played it with his wife, he felt that shared victory and defeat could also produce strong emotions. Later, he began trying to make cooperative works of his own.
In a 2020 retrospective, he placed the starting point of Pandemic in 2004, and mentioned that SARS in the news at the time made disease a suitable common opponent.
What is most worth noting here is not that the theme happened to be close to reality, but that the design task had changed. In competitive games, the opponent observes your choices, competes for your resources, and actively creates difficulties for you. Cooperative games, however, have to let the cardboard and cards do that work.
It cannot just deduct points on a timer, nor can it rely only on unpredictable punishments. Players need to see the danger in order to discuss it; yet they cannot fully see through the future, or the discussion will quickly shrink into a problem that has already been calculated.
The epidemic handling in Pandemic gives this tension a concrete shape. After an epidemic occurs, the already discarded infection cards are shuffled and placed back on top of the infection deck. Cities that just appeared may therefore quickly come into view again.
The beauty of this rule is that it gives memory a use. You are not worrying about pure unknown; you remember where it is dangerous, you know which troubles may return, and yet you still cannot guarantee you have time to deal with them.
When I read this system, the most moving part is exactly here: it takes away half the meaning of "I knew something would happen." Knowing the risk does not mean you alone can solve the risk. You have to hand your judgment to others, and let their positions, hands, and abilities become part of the plan.
However, Leacock has also clearly said that what Pandemic pursues is engagement, tension, and a game experience where people feel they can act—not a rigorous scientific simulation of disease. The world map and disease cubes provide a playable abstraction, and we should not misread it as a complete model of real epidemic prevention.
Making the boundary clear actually lets us see his craft more clearly: what he wants to solve first is how people can bear pressure together around a set of rules.
3. The Change of the Gray Pawns: Cooperation Also Needs a Place for "Me"
A detail that says a lot about the development process is hidden in Leacock's memories of the early prototype.
At that time, players jointly controlled three gray pawns, without the clear individual roles of today. After people at Days of Wonder tried the prototype, they suggested letting players each correspond to their own pawn. An even earlier version had also let the same deck serve as both player cards and infection cards, and the two discard piles constantly caused operational errors.
These memories do not have the grand scenes common in legendary stories. They are simply a game that was not yet smooth enough meeting the reactions of other people actually playing it.
Yet from jointly moving a few tools to having your own role, the relationship at the table changes.
You are no longer just looking for answers on behalf of the system; you also care about what you can contribute. When others' suggestions land in your turn, they need to pass through your understanding; your special ability also gives the whole table a fulcrum around which to arrange plans.
This does not mean cooperative games have since solved all problems. Skilled players taking over the discussion, and others gradually becoming unwilling to speak, can still happen. We can even read a reminder from this prototype change: a common goal does not automatically bring shared participation.
Letting everyone win is a promise at the level of outcome; letting everyone feel they have a role in the process is another problem that needs serious design.
When Leacock talked to League of Gamemakers about testing, he emphasized the value of observing players' actual behavior. Whether they keep communicating, when they are confused, and when they make operational mistakes often carry more information than a vague "is it fun?"
This makes the designer's work seem especially quiet. He needs to hold back explanations, notice when a face leaves the table, and also admit that a rule he is already familiar with is not natural to someone encountering it for the first time.
The publication of Pandemic also did not happen immediately after the prototype was completed. Leacock brought it to Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends for several consecutive years, continuously revising it and introducing it to publishers. The final product contains the core he built, as well as the traces left by testing and communication.
A game about helping one another thus found a clearer shape through repeatedly listening to others' opinions.
4. The Island Sinks, the World Remembers: Cooperation Begins to Have Different Kinds of Time
After Pandemic, Leacock did not just keep adding diseases to the same map.
Forbidden Island puts players into a tighter adventure: everyone needs to collect treasures and escape together before the island sinks. For people encountering cooperative games for the first time, this goal has a very direct power. The danger is no longer just numbers in distant cities; it is also the ground disappearing beneath your feet.
From the player experience, the shrinking space changes the tone of discussion. We care about which places must be kept and which can only be abandoned, and we also begin to factor the escape route into the choices in front of us. So-called adventure is then not just getting the thing, but leaving together with your companions and the results.
Lowering the barrier to entry requires the designer to judge anew: which rules support the emotion, and which burdens can be removed? Making people new to board games willing to sit down, understand the goal, and actively say what they plan to do also requires solid craft.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, co-designed with Rob Daviau, removes another condition usually taken for granted: after the game ends, must everything return to how it was?
In this work, actions in the previous game affect later games, and the team's choices permanently change their world. We will not unfold the plot here, lest we spoil the surprise of first encountering it. Just looking at this premise, one can already feel that the center of gravity of cooperation has shifted.
A single failed game can be put away with the components packed up and reshuffled next time; an ongoing campaign, however, lets a group of people jointly own a history. Past choices become the background of later discussions, and your concern for a certain location may also come from an experience others cannot replicate.
The designer must therefore care for both the tension of the evening and the mood of reopening the box at the next gathering. Whether players are willing to come back no longer depends only on whether they won a single game, but also on whether they want to know where this shared experience will go.
From the sinking island to the world that retains marks, Leacock is changing the container that carries emotion in cooperative games. Some people like a short and clear rescue; some are willing to let a group of friends' time slowly accumulate in the box.
5. From Extinguishing Crisis to Building Possibility: Making Hope Something You Can Operate
When Leacock co-designed Daybreak with Matteo Menapace, the object of cooperation moved toward climate change.
The official introduction does not write it only as a replay of disaster, but emphasizes building technology and resilient societies, presenting a perspective of hope for the future. Its connection with Pandemic is clear: the problem is bigger than any single person, and players need to act together.
But the imagination the two leave readers also differs. Firefighting-style cooperation makes us ask what can still be blocked before the next bad thing arrives; building-style cooperation makes us ask what can be built now so that the future has more room.
This is the step where I am most willing to linger when understanding his creative path. Crisis themes easily make people remember only the pressure. Games can also offer another feeling: the situation in front of you is not easy, but action can change it, and others can also become part of the action.
Of course, a board game cannot replace real science, institutions, and long negotiations. What it can leave behind may be a smaller and more concrete experience: when it is your turn, first look at what your companions need; when proposing a plan, also leave others room to contribute their judgment.
There is also a detail worth leaving to ordinary players: the joy of cooperation often happens when the plan is being revised. The action that originally seemed most effective may become something that can be postponed because a companion proposes another route. The attention you spent is not wasted; it becomes material for others' thinking; the small step others add also gives your judgment new use.
In competitive games we practice seeing the opponent; in cooperative games, we also need to practice letting companions see us. Say why you hesitate, admit where you haven't figured things out, and understand that others do not stand in the same position as you. None of this is written as extra victory points, but it may determine the experience of the whole table.
Put these feelings back into his career path, and that designer who moved from communication products to board games seems always to be dealing with one concrete thing: giving people a system they can understand, use, and thereby connect through. The "connection" here does not rely on a warm slogan; it has to be carried out in every turn of action, every handover of the plan, and whether everyone is still willing to speak.
This is also why I think Matt Leacock's story is best told starting from a moment of looking at each other across the table.
Making the whole table lose together is not clever in itself. What is truly difficult is that after failure everyone can still recognize the effort they made, remember how friends caught them, and see the ways they can try together next time.
So the box is not immediately pushed back into the cabinet. Someone starts gathering the cards, and another person is already looking at the map again. What the game gives this table is not just an answer, but also a reason to keep cooperating.
【chengcheng's Discussion Topic】
When you play cooperative games, do you prefer everyone laying all information completely open and working through it together, or do you prefer each person keeping some space for their own decisions? Has there ever been a game where you clearly lost, yet it made you remember your companions more than a victory would?
Welcome to share your cooperative game experiences in the comments. I'm chengcheng, and I'll see you next time in Creator Story!
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