Hi Geoff! Thanks for coming. Could you briefly tell the readers who you are?

Thanks for inviting me to do this! I’ve been a gamer all my life - board games, RPGs, computer games, really everything. But my foray into the public world of gaming was about ten years ago, when I joined the Dice Tower podcast with my GameTek segment, about math and science in games. About 7 years ago I started the Ludology podcast with Ryan Sturm, to do deep dives into board game design.

A portrait of the designer.

In 2011 my first board game design was released - The Ares Project, with Z-Man games. Since then I’ve had about ten published games, including Space Cadets, Survive: Space Attack, and The Dragon & Flagon.

I will always love any game where one of the factions is ‘One Giant Robot.’

Your newest title The Expanse has just been announced, with the official description comparing it to Twilight Struggle. Could you expand a little on this?

“Expand a little”? I see what you did there…

Oh god. I swear that wasn’t intentional.

The Expanse is for 2-4 players, battling for supremacy in the solar system. It was an interesting design challenge, because the situation is about being on the brink of war. There really aren’t any battles in the TV series, so it can’t just be flying armies and navies around and beating up on each other. It needs to be about politics and influence and brinksmanship. Twilight Struggle, with its Cold War theme, seemed like a natural place to start.

The challenge was to take that system and extend it beyond just a two-player game. I am pleased with the simple Action/Event system that we developed, where multiple factions are eligible to perform each event, and who gets first shot is a simple initiative system. But if you choose to trigger an event you get last pick next time, so you need to judge your spots.

There’s also a lot of individual flavor for each of the factions, with different abilities that escalate over the course of the game. And we hit the target goal of a light-to-midweight game that finishes in about an hour.

How much of a fan of the TV show are you?

I enjoy the show, but I was a fan of the books first. That’s why I was so excited to get the opportunity to work on this license. Whenever you read a book first, and then see the TV series, there’s always a gap between what’s in your head and what you imagined. But overall I think they’ve done a great job with it, and it’s nice to see the science and engineering accurately reflected in the show.

I’m sad because no spaceship battles but also intrigued because a space game with no spaceship battles sounds like it adds just the right twist to scifi.

Well, you can blow up fleets from other factions in a variety of ways (attacking, sabotage, etc). But it’s not a centerpiece of the game, and it’s simply an effect - “Remove a fleet”. There’s no dice rolling, or missiles and shields or anything like that.

Space Cadets: Dice Duel has dice rolling, missiles, AND shields.

Your previous game Fog of War is on my to-review pile, and ALSO has some similarities to Twilight Struggle in that it’s a two player card-driven war game. These two titles are actually your first solo designs, is that correct?

Correct. Before that I did my design work with my son and daughter. My son actually had a lot of input on The Fog of War, but I did the bulk of the design after he went off to college. But it’s great to have both of them as sounding boards.

I am very, very proud of The Fog of War. It really has very little in common with Twilight Struggle other than what you’ve stated. It’s a really innovative design that tries to do something no one else has done before - capture the planning and intelligence that were so key to the conduct of World War II. I went down so many blind alleys it took 14 years to get it done! But it was really worth it.

Get it off that pile and onto the table!

I’m trying! It is literally next on my pile!

The Ludology podcast may be your best known work - a weekly thing where you talk about the myriad aspects of game design in significant detail. As someone who’s tried to keep a weekly schedule - oh dear lord is it hard. How do you find the material to mine for the podcast?

Thanks for the kind words! We do put a lot of thought into each episode. The full length episodes are actually only every two weeks. In between I re-air the old GameTek segments. I think that keeps me sane.

Amazingly we have yet to run out of material. I think game design has so many facets, and there are so many interesting people to talk to. In addition to those from the board game world, last year we had interviews with a slot machine designer and pinball designer.

Any sneak peeks of upcoming topics that keen listeners should look forward to?

We’re looking forward to a bunch of our upcoming guests. Justin Jacobsen from Restoration Games will be joining us to talk about bringing mass market games from the 80’s to a new audience, and Eric Lang will be joining us to talk about the discipline of his design process.

To get away from geekery for a moment, what is your favorite thing to cook?

I have a balsamic chicken dish that is my specialty. That, and a mean PB&J sandwich.

I like balsamic, chicken, AND dishes! How does one make this thing? (also, what is the preferred ratio of bread to PB to J?

The margins of this interview are too small to contain the chicken recipe. But I will go on record that a 2:1 PB:J ratio is the correct answer. Bread is a bit of a wildcard, depending on the type, thickness, etc.

I interviewed your daughter Sydney a little while ago, and she struck me as affably weird and very sharp. How much of the former is from you?

The weirdness is pretty much from me, and affable is from my wife Susan. And both our kids are scarily sharp. I can’t get away with hardly anything anymore.

An early picture of Sydney. (not really)

Now that you’ve designed quite a few games, what would you say is the G. Engelstein brand, exactly? If someone opens up one of your boxes, what are they going to find?

I like to do different types of things - although I often end up in outer space.

Same tbh.

But the core thing that drives me in a design is a strong player experience. I have a specific emotion and experience in mind when I design, and both the mechanics and theme serve that end. In The Fog of War I wanted tension and commitment and paranoia. In Space Cadets: Dice Duel I wanted teamwork and communication and leadership.

I hope that I deliver on that promise with all of my games!

What’s a player experience you haven’t done yet that you’d love to explore?

I’d like to try my hand at telling more of a story. Whether that takes the form of a legacy game, or something different I’m not sure about. But I’d love to be able to lead players on that journey.

Geoff, thank you so much for your time. How can our readers find you on the web? (I think that’s what the kids are saying, right? Is it webs? Web-bos? Internetz? I’m 31 this year I’m super out of touch.)

I’m on twitter as @gengelstein, and Board Game Geek as engelstein. You can also email me at geoff@ludology.net

Thank you for reading Ding & Dent! Here is a never-before released image from Geoff’s upcoming real time release Pit Crew:

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