It’s always fun to get in touch with someone from the board game world, especially if this is the creator of one of your favorite board games. We got in touch with Andreas Steiger, the creator of Targi, and he took the time to answer some questions for us.
1) Let’s start with the easiest question, can you tell something about yourself.
My name is Andreas Steiger I am 47 years old and I live in South Germany near the city of Stuttgart. I am married to a wonderful Italian wife and have two lively sons who are eleven and forteen years old. I work full time as a kindergarten teacher in a small private kindergarten with kids aged three to six.
From a very young age on I already had contact with board games, cause it is not uncommon in Germany to play board games with your family or your friends.
So I had already played games like Memory, Pachisi and Trap the Cap as child, playing with my mother on Sunday afternoons. Later as a teenager I played Uno and Settlers of Catan sometimes with my friends, but none of that turned me into a real hobby gamer.
Actually, no special game did that, but the fact that my wife got pregnant with our first son .
Before my wife’s pregnancy, we went out to the cinema and the theatre very often. But this became too exhausting for her, so we stayed more at home and began to start playing some games we had laying around. Somehow this was so enjoyable that I went out to a game store and bought some more games. We were astonished how many different fascinating games and mechanics were out there and got hooked. Since then we are game fans that play regularly as a couple at least two or three times a week. This is very precious quality time for us.
Besides board games I play improv comedy theater on stage once a month. We play a improvised comedy thriller. You could compare it a little to an improvised version of a Pink Panther movie. This is a lot of fun. And since I get not younger I started to do Modern Arnis which is a martial artes form where you fight with two bamboo sticks, to stay a little bit in shape (which not as much impact on my weight as I would like 🙂 )
2) How did you start making games, has this always been a childhood dream?
Like many gamers I always thought, it would be very cool to design an own game. But I never really get started into designing for some time. But then two things happend.
I bought the game Dominion and was totally fascinated by it. Nowadays there are a lot of expansions for it, but back then there weren,t any and the fans, including me, longed for new cards. Then I found a website where Dominion fans could upload there own designs. I gave it a try myselfe and designed around 30 to 40 own cards in a very short amount of time. I had so much fun in doing so, and the idea that maybe someone would download my card ideas and try them was very thrilling. One thought I had was that I had enough cards to publish my own expansion, if this would be my game.
Shortly after that our second son was born, and my wife was very exhausted with having a newborn baby and a three year old to take care for, so in the evenings she was to tired to play games with me for a while. With my main gaming partner gone, and the motivation I had through the positive experience I had with creating the Dominion cards, I had enough courage (and now time) to try to give in to that whish to design a game on my own.
I think it is important and fulfilling to hear and react to you inner voice. To the things you want to try, want to do and want to achieve. Therein lies a big part of happiness. So I try to live my life with that philosophy.
3) What is your best memory in your career as a board game designer?
To find out that many other people like the game I created. After Targi was released I was a little afraid that maybe nobody would like the game and it would be a flop for the publisher.
But after a while the first reviews and feedbacks showed up and most of them were very positive. That made me very happy and still does. Every now and then sombody reaches out to me and tells me he enjoys my game and it alwasy brings a smile to my face. My main goal with Targi was to bring some joy to my fellow players, and if I see and hear that I suceed in doing this I am glad.
Also game designing opend so many doors to meet new friends in the board gaming world. Authors, reviewers, journalists, gamers so many great people I would not have meet otherwise. These are also so very worthwhile memories.
4) How did you come up with the Targi theme?
The story how I came up with the Targi theme is actually quite funny. I just had bought the animeeples for my first edition of Agricola. So I had the white, brown and black cubes as spare parts and used them in my prototype as goods. So I thought, what could the colours white, brown and black represent? The first thing that came into my mind were salt, dates and pepper. I googled if there was a tribe that traded these goods. And there was one, the Tuareg! One single male Tuareg is called Targi. When I looked a little more into the culture and history I got very fascinated with those people. They have a so many interesting layers in the ways how they lived that I wanted to use them for my game. I am very happy with that decision. They still fascinate me today. That the man cover their faces and the woman not, their heart warming tea ceremonies, what happens when young boys turn into man and now have to sleep under the stars… all truly fascinating stuff.
5) What do you like the most about the process of designing a new game?
Just to see which ideas work and how some, maybe just small changes, influence the gameplay. I love games with cards that give you special powers and therefore, just by the way how the deck is shuffled, adds much variability to each game. So most of my prototypes have such cards in them and just playing with the variables on these cards and seeing the effects in the gamplay is the most fun part in designing new game ideas. Writing rules is not 🙂
6) What was the reason for releasing an expansion for Targi? Did you miss something in the basic game or did you see more potential?
The base game is fine as it is, but I always have ideas for new cards for Targi and always liked the idea to see some of them beeing published as well.
But the whole process really took of when there was a little promo request for the boardgame advent calender 2015 by Frosted games.
While I thought about a little promo item, I had so many new and cool ideas for Targi that I keept going after I finished the tokens that I came up with.
But Kosmos is not known for their trend to publish a lot of expansions for their games. My editor told me that they would not publish the expansion for an expansions sake, but only if the test players never wanted to play without it again. After they did a prototype weekend, my editor contacted me again and said: ” The play testers told me they never want to play without this expansion again, so now we have to publish it!” 🙂
My intention with the expansion was to give the players as many new interesting choices as possible without changing the game to much and with as few new rules as possible.
7) What other kind of games would you like to make?
Since Orleans is one of my favoutite games of all time I would really like to design a bag building game one day.
I would also like to create one game that is very easily created but has a strong core concept that it carries the whole game idea.
Two examples would be Vegas and the Crew. Rüdiger Dorn told me that he designed Vegas from start to finish in just three hours.
The core conect Crew was designed by Thomas Sing by laying in bed and thinking about trick taking games and the game was right then just there.
Since I threw a lot of game ideas into the trash sice I think they are not good enough, one so easy design would be nice 🙂
8) We read in another interview that when Targi needed to be tested you did this a lot together with your wife. Now the most important question, who is better in Targi? You or your wife?
My wife.
But not only in Targi.
In most of the games.
I maybe won only one percent of all our Castle of Burgungy games ever.
What shall I say…
9) You go to an uninhabited island, and you are only allowed to take 3 games with you. Which ones will it be and why?
Depends on who will be on this island with me. Let´s assume my wife, who is my main gaming partner anyway.
Then Castles of Burgundy, Orleans and Santa Maria… I guess I would be able to build an extra copy of Targi out of banana leaves anyway, cause even if this sounds like a shamless self plug, we still enjoy that one as well and play it very often 🙂
10) Do you happen to be working on new projects you can tell something about.
I would have enough ideas for a second expansion, but that Kosmos would publish another one seems very unlikely.
But I am constantly working on other projects but designing is going very slow. So there is nothing that I could already tease about.
Maybe I need a third son to find more time to do this more efficently 🙂
Finally, we asked if Andreas Steiger had any nice pictures of himself and while playing board games. He sent these back to us and as you may have seen they have been processed by the interview.
In this way we would like to thank Andreas Steiger once again for the effort he took to answer these questions. If you have any other questions for Andreas you can leave them down here, we can always ask him if he still wants to answer them!
