In Memoriam: Kory Heath | BoardGameGeek News

Alan Moon, Stephen Glenn, and a few other folks were hanging out at table chatting, so I joined them. I figured I was going to have to wait a while before I got a chance to pull out my game, but, amazingly, when we discussed what we should do next, no one else seemed to have any particular agenda. So I mentioned that I had something we could try, and before I knew it, we were playing.

Things went even better than I’d hoped. The game moved along at a terrific pace, and everyone was smiling and having fun. Because the game was so quick, we were able to play it a couple of times in a row. Stephen loved it, and Alan said that he enjoyed it in spite of his usual dislike of abstract games. Over the course of the weekend, they and many others were generous enough to spend extra time working on the game with me.

Despite its positive reception, it was still clear that the game had some problems…

I played a prototype of Uptown back in 2004 and again in 2005, and while I enjoyed the game greatly both times, Heath was focused more on this beauty’s defects. “I believe that my unflinching perfectionism is by far my strongest trait as a designer”, he says. “I don’t have any magical ability to come up with great ideas and mechanisms — but I do eventually come up with them because I’m so ruthless about rejecting the ones that are ‘just okay’. My perfectionism actually functions as an engine of creativity because it forces me to more fully explore the design-space around the ruleset I’m working on. And it makes creativity easier because I have a direction. I’m not just sitting around trying to come up with brilliant mechanisms out of nowhere. I’m trying to solve specific design problems and that helps me sniff out promising trails in design-space. Without problems driving me, that design-space just seems overwhelmingly vast.”

“So let’s talk about Uptown in this context,” Heath continues. “When we first played it at PowWow in 2004, it was hardly more than a week old. I was already sure that it would turn out to be a good game. I felt a deep sense of ‘rightness’ about the basic mechanism. However, it was also clear to me that the game wasn’t quite working yet. There were several problems, but to me the biggest one was that as the board began to fill up, players’ hands became more and more clogged with unplayable tiles. We did a lot of brainstorming that weekend, and of course we tried many of the ‘obvious’ solutions, like discarding and replacing unplayable tiles from your hand, and so on. But — and here comes my perfectionism! — those solutions felt like they were attacking the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause.”

As Heath suggests, many games of the Uptown prototype were played at PowWow, and everyone who played it threw out all sorts of suggestions for how to score, how to handle discards, how many tiles to start with, and so on. The basic elements of the game in terms of tiles that match rows, columns and blocks were in place, as was the concept of scoring groups, but the details weren’t yet set. All of the suggestions offered were possible solutions, and I think we all played Kory’s prototype far more often than any other design at PowWow that year. We all saw something and wanted to help him set it in concrete, but after each play with a rules alteration, Kory would screw up his face and say, “Yeah, well, I don’t know…” before launching into what he did know: the offered solution didn’t work or pushed down the problem only to cause a new one to spring up elsewhere.

Heath continues the story: “After thinking about it for many weeks, I finally decided that the root cause was the static nature of the tile-play. Once a tile was placed, that space was locked up forever, which caused other tiles to eventually become unplayable. Therefore, we began experimenting with different ways to allow pieces to be removed from the board. Again, we did a lot of brainstorming and tried a bunch of different ideas. The one we finally hit on was that you could replace an opponent’s tile with your own, as long as you didn’t split a group into multiple groups. That fixed the ‘hand clogging’ problem — but as an unforeseen bonus, it also made the game itself much more dynamic and interesting. I’ve found that this almost always happens when you attack problems at their root rather than patching the symptoms.”

“Anyway, this should give you a general idea of what I mean by ‘aiming for perfection’ in game design”, he says. “It entails ruthlessly acknowledging anything that’s not quite right about a ruleset, stubbornly rejecting inelegant solutions that don’t strike at the root of the problem, and continuing that process until there’s nothing left to fix.”

I’m sure you’ve already recognized this screenshot as the “block slides until it hits something, then you slide it again” variety of puzzle. And that’s what Blockhouse is. But seriously. In buckets. In spades. Buckets and buckets of spades.

See, you play through a few of these levels, and the little block goes zipping around, and you figure you’re done with Blockhouse. Except then you hit the level with two blocks. Then you hit the level with two L-shaped blocks. And they’re getting harder. The blocks are turning into zig-zag polyominoes and getting stuck on each other. Occasionally blocks contain other blocks.

And then you realize that there are one hundred of these levels, and none of them suck. No filler. One simple game mechanic, in a frankly astonishing spread of variations: wide-open levels, divided levels, levels where you have to get the blocks wedged together, levels where you have to get the blocks knocked apart…

Kory Heath’s list of published games is an eclectic one: the party game Why Did The Chicken…?, in which players create punchlines for randomly generated situations; the inductive logic game Zendo, in which players try to determine rules for constructing figures; the bluffing game Criminals; and the abstract game Uptown.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Heath’s gaming background is similarly spotty. “I almost don’t consider myself a boardgamer, in the past or now”, he says. “Of course, I played the standards as a kid: Monopoly, Battleship, Hungry Hungry Hippos — you know the drill.” His parents taught him various rummy games, trick-taking games, and push-your-luck dice games, while high school brought experience in chess.

“I’ve never played Risk or Axis & Allies (and probably never will). Somehow I even managed to miss D&D and Magic“, says Heath. “I did, however, play tons of computer games. One of my favorites was (and still is) M.U.L.E., a strategy game about settling a colony on a new planet. And one day I saw this game called Settlers of Catan on the shelf of a hobby store, and I thought to myself, ‘That looks like a board game version of M.U.L.E.!’ That’s how I discovered Eurogames.”

Heath remains a Eurogame fan, although he says that some of the games he likes are harder to categorize. “Mostly I’m looking for games that are easy to learn, don’t take too long to play, but present lots of juicy decisions”, he says.

Heath’s favorite game these days? “Although I know it’s trendy, I have to rank No Limit Texas Hold’em as my favorite game“, he says. “It has so many elements that I like: analysis, intrigue, excitement, and wild swings of fortune. But poker is kind of a world unto itself, and in some ways it’s difficult to compare it to other games. In the realm of ‘normal’ games, it’s hard to pick a favorite. For some reason, a game that’s coming to mind at the moment is Kramer‘s Daytona 500. It has the perfect level of ‘juiciness’ for my taste. Every time I play it, I immediately want to play again.”

Hold on to that notion of juiciness because we’ll come back to it later…

Player to Creator

As with many gamers, Heath’s discovery soon led him down the path of creation: “Whenever I find something I like, I always have this urge to create more instances of it. When I read books as a kid, I wanted to write them. When I played computer games, I wanted to design them. When I heard music, I wanted to compose it. So when I got into board games in the late 1990s, I immediately wanted to design my own.”

As for his range in game design, Heath says that results from his attempts to work within a pre-existing genre. “For instance, Zendo was an attempt to create an induction game that was more to my taste than the classic Eleusis“, he says. “RAMBots was an attempt to create a robot-programming game for the Icehouse pieces which focuses more on player interaction than RoboRally does. Why Did the Chicken…? was an attempt to create a Balderdash-like game in which funny answers win. And Criminals was an attempt to create a Werewolf-style game that could be played with just a handful of people and no moderator.”

“Stylistically, they’re all over the map”, he acknowledges. “In hindsight, I find that pleasing, but it certainly wasn’t intentional.”

RAMBots is one of three games that Heath created using the <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/20/components-looney-pyramid-games“>Icehouse game system from Looney Labs; Zagami and Zendo are the other two. Says Heath, “Icehouse has the same appeal that a deck of playing cards has: a simple set of components with so many possibilities. It gives you a framework within which to design, which can be more inspiring than a blank canvas. And the Icehouse pieces are so pretty and tactile.”

A simple set of components with many possibilities — that’s a decent summary of game design à la Heath, who says that his style is influenced by “the simplicity and elegance I find in some of the games designed by Sid Sackson, Alex Randolph, Reiner Knizia, et. al. Of my own published designs, Zagami, RAMBots, and even Criminals turned out a bit too complex for my taste. Zendo, WDtC, and Uptown fully exemplify the kind of simplicity I’m shooting for.”

Mining for Gold

“I want to create a game that has roughly the same level of simplicity and elegance as Cartagena or TransAmerica, but also has that extra level of juiciness that makes it truly great”, Heath says. “That’s not easy to do when you’re working in such a rarefied domain.”

In a column about Heath, designer Andy Looney noted that “I’ve created many of my best games in very short order, overnight in some cases, in days or weeks in others. On the other hand, Kory designs games very slowly, like a slow methodical craftsman, tinkering away in his workshop for months or years before finishing something (an analogy Kory once used to describe himself, as I recall, describing me, by comparison, as a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ style inventor).”

As Heath elaborates, “Although some may view this as hubris, I actually do aim for a kind of ‘perfection’ in my designs. There’s probably no such thing as a truly perfect game, but I do have a strong internal sense of when a rule or a design-solution is deeply ‘right’. Basically, I refuse to stop working on a game until there’s absolutely nothing about the ruleset that bugs me — and I’m very easily bugged!”