I understand that you were part of the Citadel team that worked with MB Games on HeroQuest, could you share a little about that experience? How did it inform your subsequent work on Advanced Heroquest?

I did help out a tiny bit with HeroQuest, mainly by doing some playtesting I think, but really the game was all Stephen Baker’s work and I had very little to do with it. My main inspiration for Advanced Heroquest was D&D, especially the games of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons that I played with Albie Fiorie as the DM. As an aside, you can see a little bit of Albie DMing and me playing on this clip from 1984(!). Albie was a brilliant DM, and I channelled as much of the experience of playing in his games as I could into AHQ. This resulted in a game that is quite old-school in the way it plays, with rewards being limited and survival by no means assured. As another aside, I recently met someone who is still playing and enjoying AHQ, and even had a question for me about the rules!

I recently played some Doom of the Eldar again and remembered just how good the Wargame Series was; do you have any reflections on that short-lived series of token based games?

I’ve been playing board wargames since I was a teenager, and so getting to design some board wargames for 40K was fun. I think it was Bryan Ansell who decided he wanted some games like this in the range, and he and Rick Priestly made it very clear that I wasn’t under any circumstances to use hexes on the maps – the games had to use area movement, which they felt was more accessible. I wasn’t too perturbed by this, and as I remember I came up with the idea of basing the first game on The Battle For Armageddon.

At that time there wasn’t much background written about the campaign, so I decided to base it on the German invasion of Russia in 1941, with the Orks taking the place of the Germans and the Imperium being the Russians. If you check out the map for the game and compare to a map of Russia at that time you’ll see the similarities pretty quickly!

I picked different inspirations for the following games, so Horus Heresy was a combination of the parachute drops at Normandy and a siege, while Doom of the Eldar was about naval warfare and amphibious assaults. I found that have the games grounded in something that was real gave me a great foundation to work on, and I could then incorporate things from the 40K background on top of the ‘real-world’ theme to make the games feel different an unique.

I was chatting with a friend recently about your Battle for Armageddon game and he mentioned that in the designer notes you say that the game is based on three real battles, but that you don't say which battles they were! His suggestion was that it might be Barbarossa (as the initial ork attack), Moscow (Imperials holding Hades Hive), and Stalingrad (Helsreach being a horrible grind in a port city). I'd love to be able to tell him how close he was, if you recall the original inspirations?

I’ve inadvertently answered this question above, but yes, your friend was absolutely correct about the game being based on the German invasion of Russia in 1941 (Barbarossa was the German code-name for the attack), but he was slightly out for the cities. The starting point for Hades Hive was the epic siege of Leningrad, and the battle for Helsreach was based on the battles for Sevastapol. For the record, Acheron is Moscow, and Tartarus is Stalingrad.

You worked closely with Rick Priestley on the creation of Necromunda, which I believe drew some inspiration from the early Confrontation rules. Could you talk a little about your experience creating the game?

As I recall the inspiration for both Necromunda and the Confrontation rules was the Wild West gunfight skirmish games that Rick, Bryan and I had played when we were younger. Bryan had always been keen for there to be a skirmish game like this in the range, and his first stab at it had been the Confrontation rules, that were really an updated version of the Laserburn rules Bryan had created back in the early eighties. Both Laserburn and Confrontation involved some quite complicated mechanics, which put some players off, and so with Necromunda the aim was to create a skirmish game that was based pretty closely on the 40K rules at that time (2nd edition 40K, to be precise) and which didn’t have such complicated math.

Rick was in overall charge of the game and the rules and created the background for the game (which is brilliant by the way, and definitely some of Rick’s best work). Andy work mainly on the core game rules, while I worked away on the campaign system, which was based on the system I’d come up with for the 3rd edition of Blood Bowl. I should also mention Alan Merrett, who came up with the way of creating the wonderful ‘card and plastic’ gantry terrain that came with the game. As I think you can see, game design is a team effort, and nowhere was this truer than with Necromunda. Just about the whole of the Studio was involved in one way or another, whether it was writing the rules, designing the miniatures, creating the artwork, of helping playtest the game at lunchtimes and after work in the Studio Necromunda campaign we set up. It really was a great experience and a wonderful thing to be a part of.

The 3rd edition of 40K was a significant shift and simplification in rules making the game far more accessible and laying the foundations for its continued dominance in the wargames market: I’m curious to know if you’d set out to make such drastic changes or if they emerged organically through the development process? Were there any specific briefs that you were instructed to meet for that edition?

As I remember things, it was John Stallard, who was then head of sales and retail and who now runs Warlord Games, that was the main driving force behind the direction we went with the 3rd edition 40K rules. John and Rick are old friends, and John was instrumental in convincing Rick to come up with the more accessible version of the rules that were the basis of the 3rd edition game.

Blackstone Fortress was an incredibly successful execution of the Warhammer Quest concept in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, one that drew heavily from the forgotten corners of early 40k lore. What was the process like for creating and populating the game?

By the time we were working on Blackstone Fortress, the Studio was organised very differently from the way it had been back in the 90’s and Noughties. Instead of being one Studio it was (and still is) split into two separate Studios, located in completely different sets of offices, one that designs the miniatures and one that designs the games. The design process starts in the Miniatures Studio, which is working roughly 12-24 months ahead of Books and Publications. Only when the miniatures are ready does the Books and Publications team get involved.

On top of that, within Books & Publications the writers are more specialised too, either being rules writers, or background writers; for example, I was a rules writer, and Phil Kelly was (and is!) a background writer. When we got involved on Blackstone, all of the miniatures for the game had been designed, and a very rough set of background notes had been come up with for them. It was mainly Phil and the rest of the background writers that took these ideas and developed them up into the background for Blackstone Fortress, with my main contribution being to ask for certain things to be included in the background to reflect mechanics I wanted to use in the game. Blackstone was still very much a team effort, but in this case the teams were subdivided into separate groups with different sets of deadlines, rather than all working together on the project at the same time.

There are innumerable other boxed games you’ve worked on over the years, but I wondered if you had any reflections about working in particular on the early Space Hulk supplements or on Space Fleet?

Space Hulk was a great project to work on. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the brief for Space Hulk was to come up with a game that had the feel and tension of the Alien and (especially) Aliens movies. Richard ‘Hal’ Halliwell was the game designer, and I helped with playtesting. Hal a good friend of mine, and easily one of the most talented game designers I’ve worked with. The Studio back then was tiny and based in a rabbit-run of little offices. Hal had his own office, and I can remember the floor being covered with cut out pieces of paper as he designed the floor plans for the game. Hal did a terrific job with the rules for Space Hulk, one of the best examples being his decision to limit the Marine players moves to 2 minutes in ‘real time’. It makes every turn a desperate race against time for the Marine player; it was just a wonderful bit of game design, and a great example of Hal’s ability to think outside the box. Over the years I’ve been the lead on a number of new editions of Space Hulk, but it will always be Hal’s game to me.

Space Fleet was fun too, though I was really only involved at the start, with the rules that came in the boxed game. I remember that the ship movement system was inspired by some of the WW1 aerial combat games I have played over the years, and I know that a lot of people really hate the way that dropping dice into the box lid is used to determine whether attacks hit or miss, but I really liked the mechanic and found it great fun! Andy Jones helped come up with the rules, and then took the project on and greatly expanded the system. A lot of the ideas and background he came up with later became incorporated in Battlefleet Gothic.

You helped develop or playtest several editions of Warhammer Fantasy over the years, what are your reflections on how the game evolved and changed from the early days to where it ended up?

The first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles (WFB) I worked on was the 3rd edition of the game, but that was just a bit of playtesting really, and it wasn’t until 4th edition that I become properly involved. I think all of the different editions of WFB, from 1st to 8th, had their own strengths and weaknesses, but if I had to pick one version I think I’d go for 5th edition. I really liked the card based magic system that Rick came up with, and I really enjoyed playing all the games that ended up in the battle reports in White Dwarf magazine. That said, I really did enjoy playing games with each of the different editions, and to be honest, from 4th to 8th edition there is very little difference between them in terms of game mechanics and game play.

Age of Sigmar (AoS) I’d consider to be a completely different game, and I don’t think you can really compare it to WFB. I’ve grown really fond of AoS over the years. It’s a great game in its own right, and I consider the current rulebook (3rd edition) to be one of the best rulebooks I’ve written. In particular, the development of the idea of there being ‘Three Ways To Play’ really helped to write rules which had their own specific focus. In WFB, there was one set of rules that needed to try and cater for all types of play, be it friendly garage games, prolonged campaigns, or competitive tournaments. The result was that the rules that were a bit of a mishmash. In AoS, there’s a set of core rules that are used in all the games you play (how do you move, fight and cast spells), and then dedicated sections that layer on top of that to fine-tune the game to suit the way you want to play.  

Did you have any misgivings at the time, or indeed since, about the decision that was taken to end the Warhammer world? Is there anything you’d have done differently given the chance?

I think we all had concerns, you can’t spend thousands of hours creating something and not do, but all of the data showed that something drastic needed to be done to save Warhammer. That said, I’d say that it’s clear that the execution of the change over from WFB to AoS could have been handled much, much better. The changes were so drastic, literally cataclysmic, and the message about what was happening and why so vague, that it all seemed very arbitrary and callous. As to whether there are things I’d do differently given a chance, well, yes, of course there are! But to be honest, I’m not sure if whatever I came up with would really make any difference to the outcome. After all, AoS has gone on to become a hugely successful game and more popular than WFB ever was, and it quickly changed the downward trajectory of WFB into an upward one.  

You mention in the Talking Miniatures book that Bryan Ansell’s invention of the Slotta Base and the blister pack were revolutionary, both eventually becoming industry standards. Are there any other such innovations or particular moments that you feel marked an inflection point in the industry during your career?

There are quite a few! Here are some:

The release of 4th edition Warhammer as a boxed game that included all of the rules and miniatures and other things you needed to start playing was revolutionary and set the template for just about every GW game release since then.

The release of the first army book (for The Empire I think), was incredibly important in terms of creating the format for the way that the background and rules for the different miniatures in the range were presented. It allowed us to really dig into the background and come up with fun special rules for unis in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.

More recently, the creation of the Contrast Paint ranges has made painting miniatures so much easier. I think it’s been the most important thing to happen in the hobby in the last decade.

November 2023