A board-gaming bio by Richard Caves
Two board games started my lifelong obsession: one where you had to match the right colour balloon token to a picture of Spot the Dog holding a big bunch of balloons and another with cardboard cut-out hens that had to find their chicks by moving around the board — whether their magnetic base attracted or repelled the chicks would determine which hen the chick belonged to. I would take these games to the childminder and invariably get frustrated when my preschool friends didn’t play by the rules.
Soon, I was designing my own board games by drawing “mazes” on pieces of paper, which might have looked like random spirals to the uninitiated, and coming up with rules for movement which changed each turn and tended to favour my own progress. Meanwhile, my dad was teaching me how the pieces moved in chess and draughts.
What is it about board games that captivated me from such an early age? Pretty much everything about them. From lego to the action figures to toy cars, I always enjoyed the tactile sensation of manipulating small components and got a sense of achievement from ordering and categorising them — with a game, this sense of order was “baked in” to the very concept, rather than externally imposed. I also had a pretty active imagination, enjoying tales of adventure and playing out my own stories in my head. Board games were a way to make the realm of imagination more tangible: on the chess board I could be the knight leaping into battle or the monarch commanding their army.
Above all, though, board games for me were — and still are — about other people. They are a shared imaginative space, with each player contributing to an evolving story, even in the most abstract strategy game. They are powerfully intimate: for an hour or two they shrink the world so that it contains only you and the board and the other player (or players).
As I got older, I played all the classic games like Risk, Monopoly, Cluedo, Othello, Backgammon and Escape from Colditz, and some more recent innovations such as Power and Dungeonquest. I entered a few junior chess tournaments and got soundly beaten. By the end of primary school I had designed my first “real” board game with some classmates — a simple game of resource gathering, dice and spaceship battle — that was a hit with family and friends.
I’d got the game design bug for real, now. Games were not just a way to inhabit a fantasy but to create one, building an entire imaginary world from scratch. It was similar to writing a novel: another pursuit that had begun to captivate me. However, making board games also appealed to the other side of personality: the bit that is analytical; that likes to break things down into their component parts and see if there is a better way of putting them back together — the same bent that would later lead me to do a degree in philosophy.
In highschool, I met another founding member of Paper Boat, Marcos, and we set to work on some pretty epic board games of high fantasy and more space battles, with ourselves squarely in mind as the target audience. We also had a go at selling a simple card game at local craft fairs, with modest success. For the first time it was not just playing board games that was an exercise in shared imagination, but designing them too.
Around this time I discovered eurogames, particularly Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, which enhanced the social element of gaming which I love. They were carefully balanced and never cut-throat, requiring cooperation even when in competition. Their rules were crafted with such exquisite precision that they got me thinking more seriously about board game design both as an art and a science.
University exposed me to the wider board game community and all-time favourites such as the co-operative game Pandemic and the self-contained deck builder Dominion. I worked on designing a number of games, often collaborating with Marcos, inspired by all the new ideas and dynamics I had been exposed to. I knew from this point that I wanted to create games that had a strong social element, were tactical but not overly competitive, and thought-provoking without swamping players with too many rules or components.
After graduation I kept on designing and playing games, but when Marcos introduced me to Martin things got serious. I was really impressed by Martin’s passion for designing and his drive to get those designs to a wider audience, not afraid to approach people to playtest games or drill down into the details of what needed to be done to get a business off the ground. For his part, Martin admired my ability to analyse a game and quickly get to the heart of what makes it work and how to improve it. Combined with Marcos’ skill at bringing games to life with fun dynamics, authentic theming and beautiful art, it felt like we had everything we needed to make our favourite hobby more than a hobby.
With the crew assembled, the Paper Boat was ready to set sail into uncharted waters.
Read more about the Paper Boat Games team here: About Us
