Below you will find an excellent interview with Kai Jensen from Radek Malý at the Czech board game publication Zestolu earlier this month. Radek has kindly translated the interview into English for InsideGMT, but for those of you who would like to read the original version in the Czech language instead, you can find that here. Enjoy! -Rachel
Today we’re talking to Kai Jensen from GMT about the origins of Dominant Species: Marine. Kai is not only a game developer and author, but she also worked alongside her husband Chad Jensen , who created the original Dominant Species. Chad fell ill with cancer during the development of the marine version and sadly passed away in November 2019. Despite this, the game was completed, and as Kai reveals, she is currently working not only on current titles, but also on those from Chad’s drawer.
Radek Malý : Hi Kai, thank you very much for accepting our invitation to our interview on the occasion of the Czech localization of Dominant Species: Marine. What was the origin of this title?
Kai Jensen: Dominant Species: Marine was originally intended to be an expansion to the original Dominant Species game. Chad planned to add a few naval factions and a few new cards to the existing game system, but at the same time, a few things happened that changed that plan.
Digging into research on early marine life, Chad felt that the existing game system wasn’t going to adapt to well to simply adding these particular factions to the mix. He also read back through the negative reviews on the original game to remind himself what players had not enjoyed.
It was clear there were two camps of players who had engaged with DS: those who enjoyed the meaty, thinky, potentially adversarial game and those who were looking for something lighter. Chad generally didn’t like working on expansions to his own work as there was no new design space to explore. So with all that, he decided the marine aspect needed to be its own game.
So how did he proceed?
Armed with the feedback, he tried to account for the things players had said they had wished for from the system, to retain the feel of the original game but, a the same time, to create a new design. The timing of conducting the action associated with action pawn placement became immediate. With no chance of watching an opponent wreck your carefully timed plans, Chad instead created tension by limiting where players could place their subsequent pawns.
Players hadn’t enjoyed the calculations necessary to track dominance, so that was also changed. Another complaint was that the animals were static, having the same abilities from one game to the next. The Trait cards were designed to provide more variety and replayability. As the fight for player order didn’t seem to be a popular mechanic, that was dropped in favor of a set player order.
But that’s not all. Those who played the original Dominant Species and its new variant may have noticed that the dominance event itself has also undergone a change.
Domination, another action many players didn’t like, got an overhaul which also allowed us to get rid of the cone pieces. Chad had always been very careful to watch how players handle the game components and sometimes made changes to the design or components based on what he saw. We had not realized an issue with the cones in the original DS until after the game’s release as none of our playtesters were challenged with manually manipulating the cones. He checked the components in his games to be sure they used large clear fonts, used colors that were easy to tell apart (checked with filters for a range of color-blind settings) or added elements to provide a secondary indicator of player possession, anything he could think of to help increase the ease of play for gamers. But those cones got by us both so we were happy to drop them in the new design.
I must admit that while playing Dominant Species, I was surprised that instead of the classic cylinders, a cone shape was chosen. Why them?
Chad liked them because they were less visually intrusive than cylinders, as they didn’t block the view of what was in the hexes from other players. They were also only used to indicate dominance and were only needed occasionally. Our testers were clearly very skilled.
None of us had any problems with the cones or moving them around during testing, but when the game was released, we realized that we had overlooked the difficulty of the cones being able to grip for anyone with dexterity issues. For me as a developer, this was a failure that I should have discovered before release. That’s why the new design doesn’t include them.
Development continued, but Chad fell ill soon after. Since he didn’t live to see the title’s release, it’s easy to wonder whether he was able to see the finished game before it was released, or whether he wasn’t allowed to.
Dominant Species: Marine was in the illustration and graphics stages when Chad got sick. So he still had a chance to see some of the artwork that Checchu Nieto had created, and Chad was thrilled with what he saw.
After Chad’s death, I had to review the illustrations, so I went through all the files card by card, comparing Chad’s conceptual designs to Checchu’s finished pieces. I was amazed at how well Checchu stuck to Chad’s vision but also exceeded his expectations in the execution of each piece.
I don’t want to get into family matters, but let’s be honest, it’s a dream for most gamers to be able to share gaming, and even game development, with their spouse to such an extent. How long have you been married and how much of a passion for games did you share?
We married in 2001 after knowing each other for ten years. When he passed away, we had been married for 18 years. We connected with GMT in 2005 – more on that below.
Chad and I met when my late first husband Mike and I ran a home convention one weekend in about 1991. We told our gaming friends to bring any other gaming friends they had. We set up tables in almost every room of the house and gamed all weekend. My friend Blake brought Chad to that event.
Chad and I were both passionate gamers before we met but we quickly discovered our shared love of WWII history, complex board games, good food, and Niners football (San Francisco 49ers). When Chad and I started dating, he quickly introduced me to wargaming with Totaler Krieg and then starting teaching me game development so I could help out with his designs. We found we made a very solid team and had a lot of fun working and playing together for nearly two decades.
It sounds like you really enjoyed it. Where and when did your passion for board games start?
My siblings and I played board games on rainy days when we were allowed to stay indoors. (I’m old enough that when I was a kid we all got kicked outdoors all day unless the weather was very bad.)
My oldest sister got into D&D, so I used to draw up maps for her and her friends to use. I have always enjoyed the mental puzzle of gaming but didn’t really get into working on games until I met Chad.
Some of the creative skills came easily. I have always been a writer for as long as I can remember and so writing and editing rules seemed very natural for me. I also do a lot of doodling, sketching, painting… I have a strong urge to create and I’m not fussy about it all being good. Sometimes I just need to get color and lines on paper.
Chad was self-taught in his digital art skills and would teach me anything new he had learned during the day when I got home from my office job. I was almost able to keep up with him working with Illustrator and InDesign files.
How did you and Chad eventually get into game design full-time?
One year, I think it was 2004, Chad was laid off from his job when the company he worked for downsized. He was last in – first out. I looked at our household budget and told him that if we dropped some items off our budget (the second car, cable TV, dinners out, new clothes, travel, etc.) then I could carry us for two years on my current salary.
I gave him two years to find a way to make a living designing games, which was all he really wanted to do from the time he was a kid. The deal was that he made it work or he went back to a day job.
He worked on a design we were calling “Fire For Effect” but he wasn’t quite happy with it. He had about a dozen designs in various stages at that point, but was concentrating on getting one done that he could present to a publisher.
At the beginning of January, he had an idea and he worked on it every day that month but didn’t tell me much about it. He would sometimes ask me questions and we would bounce ideas back and forth, but I didn’t know the full scope of the project.
At the end of that month, I came home from work one day to find a game on the table. He was ready to show me and try it out. So we sat down and played the first game of what he was calling “Company Commander”. When GMT accepted the game for their P500 system later that year, the name was changed to “Combat Commander”. The game was well received when it was printed in 2006 and game design became Chad’s full-time job for the rest of his life.
How did it go?
I learned over the years how to develop a game designed by Chad. I suspect that every designer works in a very unique manner so I don’t know how well my skills would translate over to another designer.
But Chad and I worked well together. I functioned as a sounding board when he was designing. He would talk through a problem, explaining it to me, and often just that process would lead him to the answers he needed. Sometimes I would have to ask questions and poke holes in his thinking before he would work his way around to a solution.
Once he had a stable system, I would help round up playtesters, log their game results, and we would analyze the data looking for weak spots – moves that would break the game, loopholes that needed closing, better wording of rules – anything to improve the game.
When we were both happy with the game after that, he was the one who worked with the GMT artists to get the look he wanted for his games. He did a lot of his own work for counters, booklet layout, player aids, but he knew where his limits were and was delighted to have artists on hand to fill in what he couldn’t do.
What was the hardest part of the process?
I think the hardest part of the process was keeping the playtesters engaged over an extended period of time. Like most of us, they want to move on to the next new thing or go back to their personal favorites. Playing a developing game over and over while keeping up on the changes to rules is hard work!
Judging when a project is done or when to go back for one more round of testing is a difficult task. There is a point of diminishing returns and recognizing when you’ve reached that point is tricky. Chad always made the development process fairly easy for me as he had a very clear vision of what he wanted from his games so he recognized when the work was done.
Can you tell us what you are currently working on?
What am I working on? I have several Combat Commander projects going behind the scenes, getting ready for new P500 announcements. I am doing research on another WWII unit for Fighting Formations. I still have to write the rules for Golden Gate Park, which was finished years ago except the rulebook which Chad never wrote. And my work as in production at GMT keeps me very busy these days as well.
This year, GMT also released a title by Petr Mojžíš. The Bell of Treason: 1938 Munich Crisis in Czechoslovakia deals with the question of whether we should have resisted the Nazi invasion. Since war games are popular in our country too and new designers are emerging who are dedicated to complex and historical titles, is there anything you, as a GMT developer, can advise them on possible collaboration?
For design work, Gene always tells designers to work on what excites them. We don’t give out assignments because that makes what we do “work” and design work doesn’t pay well enough to not enjoy what you do.
Pick a topic, a mechanic, a theme, a moment in history that really grabs you and create the game YOU want to play from that. If you put your passion into it and study game design well, there’s a strong chance lots of other people will enjoy what you create as well.
Chad always created games that he wanted to play. Once we got together, he designed games for the two of us. If anyone else liked them, that was an added blessing and allowed him to keep doing designs instead of being trapped in a job he didn’t have passion for. So I always say, “Design what you like.”
And study game design. There are books on the topic, probably YouTube videos… look around and teach yourself. Play a lot of other people’s games to find out what works, what you enjoy, and to study the interactions in game mechanics that create effects you could use in your own designs.
Can you tell us how it works at GMT, which seems like a really big publishing house?
GMT is a small company (thirty some employees?) and about half of us work remotely. Each of the four principals do multiple jobs, our Marketing team Rachel and Luke don’t just do marketing, Head of Development Jason Carr does way more than just development, I get involved in more than just production, and our office and warehouse staff do pretty much anything that’s needed to keep the team moving.
Since we all have overlapping tasks, we work as a team on most projects – sometimes taking the lead, sometimes lending support – and we communicate constantly. No one has all the answers and we teach and learn as we go.
Our designers are all independent of GMT and they decide what to work on, so the interest and passion they have for their topics is what drives their work. We do have a few staff developers and artists (all working remotely from around the globe) who do a tremendous amount of work, and a lot of work also gets done by volunteer playtesters, proofreaders, and folks willing to teach and play games at conventions.
I think the passion and energy our team puts into the work gives the impression that GMT is a larger company than it really is. In reality, we are a small “family” which you can clearly see on those occasions when we get together at our warehouse for dinner twice a year before kicking off our Weekend at the Warehouse events.
Thank you very much, Kai, it was a real honor.
Author: Radek Malý
