Francesco is one of the three designers of the recent massively popular War of the Rings game, produced by Nexus and Fantasy Flight games. This Italian gamer has also designed several other games, including the popular X-bugs series. Tom: Francesco, you are one of the designers of probably the hottest game of 2004 - War of the Ring. It has ridden on a swell of popularity and is currently in the top five rated games at www.boardgamegeek.com - no small feat. Can you give us a little background about the history of how you and the other designers came about to produce this game design? Francesco: Well, we three of course share the same background as long-time fans of the Lord of the Rings, made even closer by the fact that since our first exposure to the first War of the Ring published by SPI we all dreamed of a new way of portraying the epic struggle contained in the books. So it was quite natural to us to start dreaming about it when a few years ago the hype surrounding the movies by Peter Jackson refueled the possibility of publishing a new game on the subject. Another important push came from our encounter with the brilliant 'Paths of Glory' by Ted Raicer, a game that rekindled our interest in simulation games. This is a genre we thought we could not explore as professional designers since the complexity of such games set them almost completely out of the market for European gamers. We already were familiar with other 'card-driven' games like 'Hannibal' or 'We the People', but it was 'Paths of Glory' that for some reason made us think that the format of such games could be simplified and adapted to create games that were viable on the European market. And what's more important, we found that such an approach to design was a perfect fit for a game based on a story rich in events and elements. To make a long story short, in the first months of 2003 we found ourselves frantically working on a project that was motivated only by our passion for the subject and on the optimistic considerations of Roberto, who, in his position of CEO of Nexus Editrice, was the only one that believed enough in it to actually send a proposal to Sophisticated Games, holder of the license for games based on the Lord of the Rings and to contact John Howe to illustrate it. Luckily, Roberto found himself in good company: Robert Hyde showed an immediate interest in our design but warned us that we had some tough competition by at least three major publishing companies. The weeks that followed saw the most intense part of the design process, a period that ended when a playable prototype was shown to Robert Hyde (Sophisticated Game) in Viareggio, Italy. A few days later, Robert wrote, telling us we had a deal. Tom: I'm always curious as to how two or three designers put a game together. I mean, was one of you the lead designer, and the other two gave input / helped refine the process? How is it to design a game with other people? Francesco: In our case it was really a team effort. For me, working with somebody else is nothing new. Every game I worked on in the past was designed with Marco Maggi and sometimes somebody else (like Leo Colovini, for example). Marco and I are life-long friends, and we started designing games as a concerted effort to see our creativity put to some practical end. So, we always worked like that, bouncing ideas off one another. Adding Roberto to the mix was really smooth; and since our first brainstorming sessions, we found ourselves agreeing without questions on what should end in the game and what should not. Marco and I are based in Venice, and Roberto lives in Tuscany; so he came to visit us often, and we exchanged the favor. It's better not to speak about our telephone bills... To give some additional details on the process, Roberto provided an early map and an organized preliminary sketch of the rules to work out, where Marco and I usually put words to paper only when we were at least 50% sure about them. Then we all worked together for a while on every aspect of the game, laying every mechanic down in its rough form. By the end of the design process Marco and I found ourselves nominally in charge of the Event card decks, and Roberto concerned himself especially with Hunt statistics and the rules text. Looking back at how it went, I think we were quite lucky to find the right mechanics very early on, so that we had the time to refine the rules and playtest them very thoroughly. And again, we had an alchemy between ourselves that let us recognize the good mechanics as soon as somebody proposed them: the Action Dice idea was immediately 'greenlighted', and the same happened for the peculiar Fellowship movement, and so on. Tom: Obviously War of the Ring is your most successful game (outside Italy at least). But you've designed several other games, including the popular X-Bugs series. Which of your games that you've designed is your favorite? Francesco: I didn't design a great number of games (yet!), but I think they are a diverse lot. That's why I have some difficulties in pointing out a favorite. Lex Arcana, for example, is a role-playing game based on a wonderful historical-fantasy world that I hope to revive in one way or another some day. X-bugs is 100% our creature, from the artwork concept to the rules, and it is very close to me (2005 will see a new revamped edition of that!). But War of the Ring is certainly our greatest effort, and it was created without setting any limits to what we wanted in a Tolkien game, so all along the design process we were having a blast in playing the various prototypes, seeing truly a dream of ours coming true. And in the end it sums up quite well what I want in a game: maximum involvement, to the point that winning or losing is almost a secondary issue that comes right after having fun. Tom: When designing War of the Ring, what prior game(s) have had the most influence? Was there a point where you saw a mechanic and thought, "That would fit in well with the Tolkien theme"? Francesco: As I said, an evident influence in the general outlook comes from card-driven games, like 'Paths of Glory' from Ted Raicer. That kind of simulation game showed us the direction to introduce seamlessly the narrative element that is paramount in WotR. We tried to create a game in that vein, Euro-style. And naturally we all played the old SPI game by Richard Berg. It was a revolutionary game experience at the time, but I think that we considered more what we didn't like in it, to avoid the same (inevitable) errors and any comparison. What's funny is that the mechanic that seems taken from another game is the Action dice system, very reminiscent of our very own iconic dice mechanic in X-bugs. The funny part is that it was Roberto that came up first with the idea, and he says that he wasn't thinking about that. Of course, when he pitched the idea to me and Marco, we enthusiastically embraced it right away! Tom: I've read on the internet that you guys are currently working on an expansion for Lord of the Ring. This is pretty impressive to me, because I can't imagine how the game can be expanded on - I feel that it's near-perfect. Can you tell us a little bit about the expansion? Francesco: Well, while we didn't leave out any idea from the game while designing it, there are a few things we thought that we really would love to introduce. The expansion will consist in two main additions. One will be a section on optional rules that will introduce new miniatures, and the way to employ them. We have added things like siege weapons, new troops, and additional characters. We are trying to make the new rules as modular as possible and as simple as possible, to give additional playing options instead of simply additional 'weight'. You can look at this section as an ‘extended cut' of the game, where 'extended' won't necessarily mean a longer game, but a more varied one. The second section will be the 'meatier' one, because it will feature a map, cards and a new rules set that will give you an alternate way to employ your figures and dice to play in Middle-earth... Tom: It sounds extremely interesting - something to look forward to! Do you have a time frame for its release? Also, are there any other games you're currently working on, or is the expansion taking up most of your time? Francesco: The expansion is slated as a third quarter of a 2005 release, a date we feel confident enough about; but no official word is out, so don't take my word for it. Regarding other projects, we're involved in the new Nexus game on the Marvel Universe (a challenging task we are very thrilled about); and the two things together make us rather busy. But we're also trying to put together the time needed to finally wrap up another project long in the making, the new version of X-bugs, that will benefit of years of experience, to be closely followed by a fantasy game using a variation of the same tiddly wink mechanic. And if we feel tired of all that, we can put the finishing touches to a horror card game we presented in rough form here and there during the last Essen fair... well, by the end of 2005 I will probably be glad to have done a couple of the above! Tom: It sounds like you have enough to keep you busy for a while, for sure. Are you a full-time designer, or is it something you do in your spare time? Francesco: It is something in between. I published my first game in 1993 and have been working in forms related to gaming since a couple of years before. It all started when Marco and I first met Leo Colovini, Alex Randolph and Dario De Toffoli, from what was to become Venice Connection. We were hired to playtest and present their games at the Nuremberg game fair of '91, and then became part-time staffers in their game-designing studio. We left the studio two years after that, sometime after we designed our first game together (the role-playing game Lex Arcana). Marco, Leo, Dario, and I continued our business relationship starting to manage a gaming shop, then three shops, until we parted ways: Leo and Dario were dedicated full-time to game design in Venice Connection, while Marco and I chose to take over the property of our shop in Venice and work part-time on games, mainly for Nexus. Tom: Thanks for joining us, Francesco; you've really made a spectacular game with War of the Ring, and I wish you well in future endeavors! Francesco: Thank you, Tom! I can add as a last thing, that the way War of the Ring has been received so far by gamers everywhere has provided me with enough motivation to create new games for years to come: that labor of love has been awarded with so much warmth that I will certainly put in every new title as much passion as in the last one, since it certainly pays off. Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 14 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2005 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com