Welcome to Spotlight. Under the heat this week is Jonathan Ying; game designer at Fantasy Flight Games. He was co-designer on Imperial Assault, and his newest release DOOM is now on shelves.

We spoke to Jonathan in a fair amount of depth about his work on design, and what cool things we can expect from him in the future.

Hi Jonathan! Welcome to Spotlight! Please tell us who you are.

Hi! It’s really cool to be here! Well, I’m a game designer and author currently living in New Jersey. I’ve been working in board games for about four years now and before that I had a background in storyboarding for animation and screenwriting. I also write children’s books when I find the time.

Your most recent game just came out: Doom! (or is it DOOM? What’s the internal style guide say?) How do you feel about getting it out into the wild?

Go to Hell. Go directly to Hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Pretty sure it’s officially DOOM but I kept getting it wrong early in development so I’m always second guessing myself now. I’m tremendously excited for people to finally get their hands on the game. It’s a bit surreal since there’s such a long time between finalizing the game and shipping. I remember this time last year we were in the process of finalizing the mechanics and getting our first art pieces in.

Doom is a venerable system - it is the basis on which Descent First and Second Edition, as well as Imperial Assault were founded. It was the 2nd board game I ever bought. What were your objectives when redesigning Doom for 2016 - compared to the original edition, and as a standalone 1 Vs. many title?

So we’ve learned a lot of things since the original DOOM game. Each iteration of the system was made stronger and more clean. In some ways Imperial Assault was built as my ideal and polished version of the Descent system. So for DOOM I wanted to try to push forward and experiment with the formula a bit. Hopefully making it different enough to earn its shelf space next to the venerable titans of the genre.

The first Doom board game was based on DOOM 3, which was a very different animal from all the other games in the Doom franchise. It was more horror themed, with darkness and ambushes playing a stronger role in the game’s framework. The marines were meant to feel more desperate and scared as they moved carefully through the facility, checking corners and being very careful about line of sight.

The latest iteration of Doom heavily emphasized the ideals of high-octane action and what Id has described as “Push-Forward Combat”, and we did our best to represent that in the board game as fully as possible.

As an example, in Imperial Assault at the start of each round the heroes could discuss who would go first and could often spend upwards of five minutes deciding on the optimal play before even touching a miniature. In DOOM the initiative deck forces the marines to adapt their strategy and make decisions on the fly. The action deck focuses a marine’s combat options to a series of immediate and discrete choices. The Glory Kill mechanic makes cleaning up weakened enemies fun and fast, no need to waste more attacks on them, just stomp them off the board. Pretty much every decision in the board game went towards making the game faster and more action-packed.

At any stage in the design, was parkour / free running considered as a marine ability just to get them moving around the board faster?

Movement was certainly a big discussion during the development of Doom, since they added a lot of verticality such as double-jumping and mantling into the game. Unfortunately board games have a tricky time with verticality. We tested a few versions that had a few rules for parkour style movement and a lot of it served to create more rules designed to ignore other rules, at which point, we were worried about over complicating an already intimidating rulebook. So we limited the freerunning to a few specific marine classes whose special ability is to avoid movement penalties for special terrain.

Which is your favorite Doom monster? (let’s say each game’s menagerie counts as different monsters). What about weapon?

It’s a toss-up between the Cacodemon and the Pinky, I’m a sucker for big toothy maws on my monsters. Also I love the way the redesign of the Pinky in the 2016 game, I have no idea how they managed to stay true to the wonderfully doofy early-nineties design and make it look great in a modern title but they pulled it off.

For weapons, I’ve gotta give it to the Super Shotgun, there’s something about fighting the legions of hell on mars with a cowboy weapon that I just can’t get enough of. I’ve also been getting some pretty amazing mileage out of the Static Rifle in the new Doom. I love how every design decision in the new game reinforces the sheer non-stop speed of combat.

The super shotgun may actually be my favorite video game weapon of all time. It’s so incredibly satisfying to use.

Double the barrels, double the fun!

Apart from Doom, your design credits include Imperial Assault, the Game of Thrones Trivia Game, and one of the Battlelore Undead Army Packs. We’ll come back to the others, but first: ONE of the army packs?

Haha, actually it was both army packs! Not sure where you got that information, but they were designed together. I had an amazing time with designing that whole faction.

Ahhh I see. BGG lists Terror of the Mists’ designer as N/A and my copy currently lives in my girlfriend’s house. My bad.

By Derrick Fuchs, Jonathan Ying, and the highly prolific N/A

Let’s talk about the faction: What were your goals when creating Undead for Battlelore? Also: why Undead (sorry, I meant Waiqar the Undying) instead of Latari Elves/Dwarves of Dunwarr/Orcs of the Broken Plains? Not that I don’t love gibbering skeleton hordes...

I suppose part of it was a bit of cross-marketing. We were making the Undead Packs around the same time as The Chains that Rust (an expansion for Descent 2nd Edition) was in development, which also heavily featured the undead. Also myself and Christian T. Petersen (CEO of Fantasy Flight Games) both ran very undead heavy D&D campaigns in our respective youths so that probably played a role in our particular enthusiasm.

To take a break from the nerdy stuff: What non-gaming things are you into and enjoy at the moment? I just realized I asked you to get nerdy on things in a question where the preamble was to take a break from being nerdy. Worst interviewer 2016.

I’ve recently published the first in a series of early reader picture books with my sister through Harper Collins. With a few longer fiction projects in the works. I also do some freelance illustration when I find the time. It’s funny, I used to have game design as a hobby and art/writing was work, but now it’s the other way around. Otherwise I’m a huge fan of fantasy and mystery novels and I read more webcomics than healthy or reasonable.

I love webcomics! What are you super into that our readers should also be reading?

I’m an enormous fan of Evan Dahm’s Vattu, I’ve been following him since his comic Rice Boy and he’s one of the most impressive and interesting storytellers in webcomics. Zack Morrison’s Paranatural never fails to bring a smile to my face. More recently I’ve been having an amazing time with Kill Six Billion Demons (which has recently been put in print by Image comics!). The Continuing Adventures of Kindling East by Kelsey Liggett and Jake Wyatt’s Necropolis are both visually stunning worlds. I gotta mention Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener’s Atomic Robo and- ahhh, I could go on! There’s so many good ones right now!

What were some of your inspirations for getting into design? Feel free to be as long winded as you want on this one. Life story plz.

Hoo boy, strap in.

So aside from a series of short-lived dives into Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh my interest in tabletop games truly started in high school; when I found this strange book with an eyeball on the cover that was full of beautiful illustrations of goblins and dragons with elaborate descriptions of their societies and traits. It turned out to be the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Monster Manual. I was soon informed that there was a game associated with this weird book that led me to my first tabletop love: Pen & Paper Roleplaying games. I eventually branched out into other RPG systems with some Magic the Gathering sprinkled here and there. (Ravnica forever.)

In particular, a several years long period of DMing the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons may have prepared me more for game design than almost anything else. That system was unique in that it provided a number of online tools for GMs to craft relatively balanced combat encounters with a huge plethora of mechanics. I was able to craft unique and weird combat encounters in that system that I never would have dreamed of trying in 3.5. Indeed it was a lot of the design choices I saw in 4th edition and considering the reasons for the changes that really got me interested in design and intention.

RPGs sustained me as I studied screenwriting at Sarah Lawrence College and storyboarding at CalArts. It wasn’t until after leaving undergrad that I became aware of modern board gaming through Shut Up & Sit Down (At the time hosted on Penny Arcade). From there I picked up a copy of Pandemic and Cosmic Encounter and then I was off to the races. You see, I used to play a lot of Smash Bros and Halo split-screen with my buddies but as the videogame industry slowly pushed online play over split-screen we found more and more of our game nights dominated by the likes of Dominion and 7 Wonders.

Breaking: Shut Up & Sit Down directly responsible for Imperial Assault, DOOM. More at 11.

In that time I toyed with making a few of my own designs, while also pursuing writing and art as my primary career. I had a brief stint at Dreamworks Studios before layoffs left me to my own devices. Having not much better to do, myself and my long distance partner decided to go on a road trip from my house in Los Angeles to hers in New York. On the way we made it a point to stop at every FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store) in every town we passed through. I made it a point to purchase a set of dice from each store we visited and I accumulated quite the collection of dice (and memories) over the course of that trip.

On one particularly fateful evening we got to playing Zombicide with a bunch of strangers and I found the game both astonishing in its scope and frustrating in a few of its mechanics. It was so close to being perfect that I chafed at the few design decisions I disagreed with.

Thus, with immense hubris I began pondering how I would design something better. What I might do with the systems and the resources. I built up a number of little prototypes some of which have seen their mechanics reimplemented in my other projects and others still percolating in the back of my mind waiting to be unleashed. At the time however this was all pretty casual flight-of-fancy stuff. It wasn’t until I stumbled onto a Reddit post on r/boardgames that said Fantasy Flight Games was hiring that I even considered the idea of a career in game design.

The job market being what it was I was braced to see the entry level application requiring 8-27 years of previous experience and five shipped titles, but I was shocked to find that it simply asked for experience with the Adobe Suite and a design test to be submitted.

In a stunning turn of events I found myself hired a few months later! Soon my prodigious knowledge of a particular galaxy far far away (To the point where I have strong opinions about YT-2400 Corellian freighters) led me to work alongside Justin Kemppainen and Corey Konieczka on a project that was tentatively titled: Star Wars: Imperial Assault.

The rest, I suppose, is history.

I hope that your opinion on YT-2400s is that they’re flipping awesome, otherwise this interview is over, sir! Over!

Anyone who dare says otherwise can fight me.

Has your perfect board game been designed? Has any box come into your life stamped ‘Please Insert Jonathan Ying’s Heart’.

I think if I ever encounter my perfect board game I may have to retire! All of my favorite games tend to be pretty context sensitive. My favorite game in a party is certainly not my favorite game for a long game-night with close friends. Naturally, my opinions change as I gain new experiences and tire of old ones. Above all things however, I like to be surprised. This usually leads me towards games that emphasize bluffing or party games, but if I had to give my top dollar to any one box, at the moment it would have to be Pandemic Legacy. That game continuously surprised me with its design choices and the way it unspooled its story was fascinating in a way I had never seen before.

Boxes of possibility.

Finally: I know that FFG does not comment on unreleased product, but what sort of thing would you love to work on in the future?

For all my heavy tactics and miniatures I’m a tremendous fan of dexterity games; Catacombs, Terror in Meeple City, Tok Tok Woodman and the like. I think I’d love to get a crack at designing one someday.

I can play Netrunner at a national level but I cannot play Tok Tok Woodman to save my life. It’s a lot of fun though! ...if loud, because I’m always making that damn tree fall over.

We actually had a Tok Tok Woodman league at FFG for a while. With tournaments and a little golden axe keychain as a trophy.

Thanks for your time Jonathan. Where can our audience find you? And what should they be looking out for from you in the near future?

You can find me on my twitter @Fancymancer and at my website www.jonathanying.com, and I’ve got a very exciting kickstarter project in the works that should be launching in February of 2017. Stay tuned!

Spotlight - Jonathan Ying

Calvin Wong

Raf Reviews - Cthulhu Wars

Calvin's Corner - Putting the Cape in Caper: Age of Thieves

Calvin's Corner - Fog of War: the Twilight Struggle Killer

Episode 47 - Other People's Fun

Charlie's Take - Gloom of Kilforth

Episode 46 - Wasteland Express Delivery Service Review

Raf Reviews - Spoils of War

Raf Reviews - Oaxaca

Bonus Episode - Warhammer 40k Dark Imperium