If you’ve ventured deep enough into the molten core of your neighborhood big box retailer, you’ve likely seen them. Sitting there in neat little rows next to old standbys like Monopoly and Clue, near the endcap filled with expansions for Cards Against Humanity, is a new and insurgent class of products — the so-called “light hobby board games.” That is, games that look and feel like their heavier cousins from the local game shop or online, but with the rough edges sanded down.
Award-winning independent game designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage) has no issues with them being there, but he thinks that modern consumers deserve more — and perhaps, better. That’s why he pitched Life in Reterra, alongside his co-designer Ken Gruhl, to 100-year-old board game publisher Hasbro.
“My personal point of view as a designer,” Lang told me in a recent interview, “is to prove that the lines between what we call ‘mass market’ and ‘hobby market’ are mostly illusion — illusion and artificial. People are people. Fun is fun. Depth is depth. Of course, everybody has different tolerances, or [wants] different amounts of depth in the game, but there’s no one, weird, single, dividing line between what is in the mass market and what’s not. That’s all been decided by buyers at retail.”
In Life in Reterra, players will draw tiles from a communal pool of resources in the hopes of building a settlement after an apocalypse. But unlike Clue and Monopoly, the box contains so many various components that you’ll likely never play the same game twice. The starting hands of cards alone, Lang said, will have more than 11,000 different variations, which can scale from simple to more complex. Reterra is very purposefully trying to wheedle its way into players’ lives, becoming a pastime that they return to again and again to toy with its complexity. It’s every bit as complex as a traditional hobby board game, it’s just that it’s being presented differently.
Lang spent a good chunk of the last four years consulting with average consumers teaching them new games. The goal of immersing himself with folks who have never heard of Catan or Terraforming Mars was to quite literally unlearn what he has learned over years in the business, and to shake off the vernacular that has begun to proliferate thanks to the hobby’s largest fansite, Board Game Geek (BGG).
“BGG is a taxonomy nerds’ paradise,” Lang said. “Every time a game mechanic is logged, they classify it. So when I say BGG terms: Worker placement? Like, what the hell does that mean? It means something very specific to the BGG crew, to a BGG-enfranchised user. That’s fine, but I consider that term verboten if I’m going to reach [a wider audience]. It doesn’t mean I can’t use a mechanic like that, but I cannot consider it assumed knowledge, and I need to rethink why this mechanic exists.”
“Making things simple is only one route into the mass market,” Lang added. “It’s just making things intuitive, and leveraging knowledge of non-hobby games rather than hobby games. If I ever do comparisons in this [work], I compare to mobile games, or the old Facebook games, or to classic games, and [I’m careful to never make] the assumption that anybody understands anything that would be on BGG.”
That attention to craft extends to Life in Reterra’s manual itself, which at 12 pages is a whole lot longer than what you’d find with many traditional mass-market games — some of which comprise just a single double-sided page.
“There’s a conventional wisdom [that] you’ll lose them after one paragraph,” Lang said. “With this game, if you’re buying a box that in big letters says ‘strategy game’ on it, we can assume people are going to want to play a strategy game. We’re not going to lose them after one paragraph, but lots of white space, lots of illustrations, a little bigger than normal. Just no assumptions. That’s all.”
And the manual doesn’t stop being useful after game one.
“The thing that’s new about this game,” Lang said, “[is that] we guide you through your first three games. We tell you, After your first game, flip two of these [tokens] over and see how much of the game changes. Oh, after that flip all five of them over. See how much it changes. And then we kind of walk them through the discovery curve. […] We say, Here’s a guided journey. Try this for your first few games. And that comes from my video game background. [When] teaching people complex games, [you] play as you learn.”
Life in Reterra is available for pre-order now at Target, with a listed release date of March 31.
