What does it take for a good board game?
A smart author with good ideas, of course.
An editorial team in the game publishers who discuss their ideas, possibly adapt them and turn them into a marketable product.
And engineers.
Every game.
Because everything the creative departments have thought of must also be technically feasible.
Icebergs for penguins, medieval worlds for knights and traders, escape scenes through hotels, ports and abandoned houses.
And all of this in boxes, if possible, of the format 28 by 28 centimeters and a maximum of 6.7 centimeters high.
Daniel Mohr
Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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Sebastian Runge heads technical product development at ASS Altenburger, one of the largest game manufacturers in Germany.
“The more adventurous inquiries have increased,” he says, cautiously expressing that some game ideas are technically not as easy to implement as some game inventors imagine.
"The pattern for a game is one thing, producing thousands of times on one machine is another." Accompanying the way from the idea to the realization is the job of the graduate engineer.
"How thick can the game board get, how is it printed or finished?"
“We are asked for every game, ideally we meet at the publisher and are involved very well at an early stage.” Runge can then say quite clearly what is possible and what is not. He studied printing and packaging technology at the University of Technology, Economics and Culture in Leipzig (HTWK). “It was all a bit coincidental,” says the trained media designer, who was actually interested in studying media technology and then ended up with the engineers on the university's open day. “I've always been interested in paper and cardboard and what you can fold out of it.” After working for the T-shirt printers at Spreadshirt in Leipzig (during his studies) and Hassia in Bad Vilbel (after his studies), he found a job advertisement from ASS Altenburger.
“I didn't really know what to expect, and I didn't really want to get into the games industry, so I came less from games than from an interest in the material,” says Runge. In Altenburg, Thuringia, he has been able to let off steam for eight years. While his fellow students have to deal with food and tablet packaging, Runge has, for example, accompanied the extremely successful Exit game series by Kosmos Verlag from the start. Anyone who knows the games knows that the puzzles depend on even the smallest detail on the packaging and game material and that a lot of tinkering, folding, cutting and kinking has to be done. "We have a great collaboration with the editors from Kosmos," says Runge. In this way it was made possible that the box had to be torn down in the event of a puzzle,to find a code. "What glue do we use to make it work and not destroy the whole box?" Is how Runge describes his challenge.
Connection of electronics with the classic board game
ASS Altenburger is also the producer for the publishers Spielwiese and Pegasus Spiele for the new game of the year "Micro Macro: Crime City". The players have to recognize and reconstruct crimes on a huge city map. "The challenge here was to find suppliers for this size of paper and that the plan could still be folded into a handy format." The result is a city map of 75 centimeters by 1.10 meters, which is unusually large for games. That is the area of about seven A3 sheets. “This is also a big issue,” says Runge, who as an engineer and his colleagues always have to keep an eye on delivery times, production capacities and the machines available in production. At the game of the year, sales are multiplied with the award,and hundreds of thousands of games are canceled in the first year.