Tabletop Gaming

FIRST TURN

The Horus Heresy with James M. Hewitt

- Interview by Dan Jolin

“I’ve always dabbled with game design. When I was five I made a board game based on the movie Gremlins. It was dreadful. Needed way more testing. Then I discovered Games Workshop. I had HeroQuest and Space Crusade as a kid, but I was always more into the games than the models. I started working in Games Workshop retail stores when I was 19, and did that for a decade before getting a job at Mantic Games as their community manager. Through that I developed a knowledge of how games are made. Later, in 2013, Games Workshop Design Studio were advertisin­g for a rules writer and I got the job. Initially I was developing games, like the Age of Sigmar relaunch of Warhammer 40,000, but they wanted people within the team who were interested in designing selfcontai­ned games with specific sets of miniatures, and I was given the chance to do that.”

COMPONENTS

“The Horus Heresy: Betrayal at Calth approaches a lot of the ideas you see in Warhammer 40,000, but presents them mechanical­ly in a different way, that is more of a board-game experience. It doesn’t draw a lot from Warhammer 40,000 itself. It draws more from your old chit-and-token, hex-based war games of the ’70s and ’80s. I looked into quite a few of those to see how designers had dealt with things like relative unit strength and line of sight.”

OBJECTIVE

“A big part of working in Games Workshop stores is teaching new people how to play. We used to run a 12week beginner’s course, which tells you how complex these games were. So Betrayal at Calth was a reaction to that. I wanted the game to be as simple as possible. To me, its audience was people who were interested in Games Workshop but, like me, didn’t want to bother with setting up huge tables and armies and all of that stuff.”

SETUP

“The hex grid was a challenge. It haunts me to this day. The board is made up of three or four double-sided pieces that can be assembled in different ways, but it took forever to get to that point. I’d developed a system with small tiles that fit together to make a winding series of tunnels. But when I took it to the artist, John Michelback – who did the Space Hulk boards – he said, ‘It will look a lot better if the pieces are bigger. If you have more hexes you can have cohesive themed areas. Whereas on these small pieces, all I can really do is generic floor’. It was nice being in an environmen­t where I could talk to an artist at that early stage.”

It was nice being in an environmen­t where I could talk to an artist at that early stage.

HOW TO PLAY

“It’s a tactical miniatures game comprising a series of six scenarios that all link together to tell a story. As a player you’re working with limited resources, in that you have a small number of miniatures and there are two slightly asymmetric­al sides. With a hand of cards you are using action points to move your miniatures around on a hex grid and try to complete certain objectives.”

END OF THE GAME

“It flew off the shelves, but I didn’t let myself get too excited about it, as I knew the game would sell because of all the contents that weren’t the game. All the miniatures in there weren’t going to be available separately for about six months. But what was nice was it started getting ratings on BoardGameG­eek, which doesn’t have a big Games Workshop presence. And generally what was being said was, “it’s actually quite good!” I was so chuffed with that.”

STRATEGY TIPS

“The number one piece of advice I’d give a first time designer is stop overthinki­ng it and play your game. For years I would design games by opening a Word document and then writing a rule book without ever getting it to a table. But now what I teach people in my game-design courses is don’t even write anything down until you’ve played something. What is the core beat of your game? Model that. Grab bottle tops, coins, pennies, whatever, then make it and play it and see if there’s fun to be had there. Once you’ve got something solid then you can start writing things.”

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