With the release yesterday by Office Dog of The Two Towers: The Trick-Taking Game, the sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-Taking Game, I reached out to interview their design, Bryan Bornmueller.
What’s your earliest memory of playing a card game?
My earliest memory of playing cards is at my grandmother’s dining room table with an ancient deck of The Game of Authors and asking her repeatedly who Nathaniel Hawthorne was.
What’s the first dedicated-deck card game you fell in love with?
When I started working at Fantasy Flight Games in the 2000s, there were several games in the lunchtime rotation that I played a ton: Mü, Cosmic Eidix, and Tichu where the big standouts.
What was the first card game you ever designed, and what did it teach you about the design process?
While The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is my first published design, my basement is full of boxes of prototypes. The big lesson is when to keep working on a design and when it is a dead end. The processes of taking an idea and making it physical is really important, to find out if it is actually fun and worth pursuing. Pretty much as soon as I got Fellowship to the table, I knew there was something to the game.
Tell us a little about the design journeys for FOTR and Two Towers. What influence, if any, was The Crew?
I was quite excited about the idea of cooperative trick-taking as soon as I played Familiar’s Trouble and Hameln Cave. The popularity of The Crew really showed how popular the genre could be. The big idea that brought the design together was naming the main suits after the world of Middle-earth and giving goals to the characters.
If there was one thing you wish you’d known sooner about game design, what is it?
Strangers at game shops and prototype conventions are more often than not happy to play your prototype. Don’t be afraid to show off your ideas!
What other advice do you have for card-game designers?
Make a prototype as soon as possible using whatever tools you are already familiar with.
Where can readers learn more about you and your games?
Most of my other interviews are linked on my BoardGameGeek designer page. I post publicly on BlueSky. Office Dog has more information about The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game and The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Gameat https://www.officedoggames.com.
Images: Trademarked and copyright by Middle-earth Enterprises. Used for promotional purposes only.
