Interview With Cole Wehrle, Designer of Root, John Company and Pax Pamir
Cole Wehrle is one of the most interesting designers doing work in the industry today.
And if you’ve played board games in the last ten years, there’s a good chance you’ve played one of his games. Whether the immensely popular Root, or one of his critically acclaimed historical games like John Company or Pax Pamir, he makes tightly designed games with epic, sweeping narratives.
With his new science-fiction, space-opera game Arcs hitting store shelves soon, it seemed like an appropriate time to pick his brain and learn a little more about his design process.
Let’s start off by talking a little bit about your history with board games. What games did you play early on in the hobby? Were there any that stood out from the others and really made you want to look more into board games?
I'm the oldest of five kids and grew up in a family that really prioritized play of all kinds. My parents tended to discourage any kind of organized sports or clubs and preferred us to just go outside and make our own fun. When the weather was nice, that meant a lot of tag, kickball, and roller hockey. When the weather was bad, we stayed inside and played games. We all learned chess at a young age and spent a lot of time playing classics like Risk and Stratego.
When I was in 4th or 5th grade an Uncle gave me a stack of old Avalon Hill games he had had when he was young, and I really took to them. Of course, I didn't really understand the rules--imagine trying to make sense of a combat results chart before you understood what a fraction was! But, my ignorance didn't stop me from trying. I loved exploring the maps with the little counters and designing little battles. In middle school, I picked up Warhammer and then started playing games like Catan and newly released Alea games which a friend had access to. This was in the early 00s before game stores reliably stocked those games, so it was pure luck that I encountered these games at all. By the time I was in high school, I was playing Twilight Imperium (2e, then 3e) and Game of Thrones (1e + Clash of Kings) once or twice a week.
When I went to college to study journalism, I brought four games along with me--El Grande, Catan, Age of Steam, and Citadels. Those games got near constant play in the dorms and I remember picking up some babysitting work so I could save up a little extra money for a copy of Command and Colors: Ancients, which had just come out.
Despite all of that playing, I didn't think too seriously about trying to design a game for publication. I liked the process of design, mostly because I liked making things, but I didn't have any ambitions. At the same time, I couldn't help but feel like there were certain kinds of stories that just weren't getting made into games. This feeling led me to explore the stranger corners of the hobby. I loved searching old bookstores for SPI games from the 70s or sending a money order away to get some new titles that looked more like prototypes from a group based in Pittsburgh (Winsome Games).
When I was doing my graduate work in Austin, Texas, I found a big community of players who loved these sorts of odd games. It was here I first found the games of Phil Eklund and started seriously thinking about doing my own design work. Even though I had lots of disagreements with how the games often presented history, the fact that a game could be something that might elicit such strong opinions was a revelation. Games really could say something about the world! I was curious to learn more about how they were made and started finding different in-progress projects that I could help with. The first game I ever worked on was Greenland in 2013 and my own design work followed after.
Many of your games feature asymmetric player roles or powers. When you’re designing a game, how do you approach asymmetry? How do you balance a game when every player’s actions and even goals can be completely different?
I don't worry about balance too much until the end of a game's development. The key is making sure that, in the process of balancing a game, you don't remove all of the interesting design elements in the service of fairness. Instead, I like trying to find ways to balance a high powered position with increased strategic liabilities.
In terms of their production, asymmetric games tend to be very easy to design but hard to develop. It's not difficult to imagine a wide range of roles or even to sketch out a few core mechanisms. The trick is making sure the different roles have a meaningful dynamic that provides players room to witness and understand one another. Without that moment of shared witnessing, it's impossible for the game to tell any kind of story. In a game like Root, this means providing players with a lot of shared game vocabulary.
Your historical line of games, like John Company and Pax Pamir, tackle complicated, real-world themes. What is it about these historical people and places that prompts you to design games around them? And how do you approach such serious themes with respect and sensitivity?
My fantasy games tend to be fundamentally more abstract and philosophical. They allow me to use allegory to put different kinds of subjectivities in conflict with each other without having to contend with any historical record. This can be tremendously liberating! It can also allow me to explore gameplay and narrative dynamics that are driven by the player rather than a specific historical context. But, for all of that, they are still reflections of my own history and thinking. Every work of fantasy is a work of its own period. Lord of the Rings has as much to do with the First World War and the first half of the 20th century as it has to do with the Third Age of Middle Earth. Indeed they are reflections of each other.
All works are bound up in the moment of their creation and the character of their creator. What makes the history games trickier is that they are also bound up in the historical record. Pax Pamir reflects my thinking as a scholar of the British Empire in the 21st century, and it also reflects the historical record of central asia in the early 19th century. In order to do right by that record, you have to put in the legwork. There are no easy shortcuts. You have to take a lot of good notes and read a lot of books by folks who have devoted their lives to the subject they are writing about.
Despite all of this work, the history games are probably the most worthwhile part of my creative life. History games have a tremendous power to transport players to other times and places and help them understand the past. I don't think they are good at teaching specific historical details or even specific historical processes (this is because a game's model is so low-resolution, and simply too much detail is lost in translation). But they are very good at helping players appreciate the sorts of incentives that were swirling around their historical counterparts. This can generate a lot of sympathy for these counterparts, which can be a troublesome thing if you're telling a story where people made decisions that we would criticize today. But, I think it's important to recognize that we share our humanity with the worst and best parts of our collective history.
What’s on your table? What is your favorite game or games to play right now?
Right now I'm playing a lot of Mark Herman's Rebel Fury, which is a breathtaking design that I would recommend to anyone interested in seeing what wargames can do. I'm enjoying Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello's Dune: War for Arrakis, which pretty neatly reworks War of the Ring into a far more approachable package. And, I've been playing some older games as well: Amabel Holland's Trans-Siberian Railroad (a criminally underrated train game) and Claudia Hely and Roman Pelek's Santiago.
A huge thanks to Cole Wehrle for taking time out of his busy schedule for this interview. You can follow his work at Leder Games and Wehrlegig Games.
Buy Root: https://amzn.to/3TKCeJq (Amazon)
Buy Pax Pamir: https://amzn.to/3J9AODo (Amazon)
Buy John Company: https://amzn.to/3TLpjXu (Amazon)
Pre-Order Arcs: https://ledergames.com/products/arcs (Leder Games)
(When available, we use affiliate links and may earn a commission.)
