077 – The Design of Radlands with Daniel Piechnick

Please take a look at Radlands on Kickstarter. I honestly think the game looks amazing. And I don’t only mean the astonishing art, but also the gameplay and mechanics. I just backed it myself and am looking forward to adding it to my collection. (and no, I don’t get paid for saying that (unfortunately not 🙂 )

Today we have a very interesting guest in the Nerdlab. He is not only a former winner of the Australian Scrabble Championship. In 2005 he also placed third in the Magic the Gathering Australian National Championship and represented Australia in the World Championship. And while that’s pretty impressive already, that’s not why he’s here on the show today. I invited him to the show because he is also a fellow game designer. He is a former Magic the Gathering external developer and the designer of Radlands, one of the hottest games currently on Kickstarter. At the time we speak, the game has reached almost 240k euros on Kickstarter and I am pretty confident that this number will go up over the next couple of days. I am very happy to have Daniel Piechnick on board for today’s show. So please welcome with me, the Designer of Radlands.

Here are some of the topics we talked about in the show:

• Why is the game design process so hard? Why isn’t there a blueprint for it?
• Why it took Daniel 17 games until he got published
• The learning curve of a game designer and
• …how to stay motivated even when you get rejected
• The design process of Radlands
• The difference between a game of numbers (like Magic) and a game of combos (like Radlands)
• What it needs to design games in an elegant way