"Every work of fiction speaks with many voices and is heard with many ears." That's not a quote from an academic textbook; it comes from Cole Wehrle, designer of some of the most prominent board games of the last decade. From the first moment I meet Wehrle, it's clear that he sees games as anything but frivolity. 'Fun' plays second lieutenant to the more pressing purpose of a Cole Wehrle board game: conversation.
For Wehrle, designing games like Arcs, Oath, and Root involves a complex network of voices. There is the conversation that Wehrle has with other people, via the medium of his very best board games. There is the conversation that the board game itself has with its audience, independent of any meaning Wehrle might look to create. There is even an ongoing conversation between Wehrle and his past selves.
Wehrle does not shy away from difficult conversations. He's also not shy about explaining his modus operandi, offering lengthy designer diaries for his most anticipated games. Despite this, I still felt there was a conversation to be had about Wehrle's most recent board games - and what might be coming next.
Wehrle published his first board game, Pax Pamir, while working towards a PhD at the University of Texas. His dissertation was titled "The Narrative Dimensions of Empire: Time and Space in the British Imperial Imaginary, 1819-1855". It's no surprise, then, that his games concern themselves so much with the creation of meaning.
Board games themselves exist as an abstraction of an idea, whether that be a period in history or a broader concept like war, industry, or relationships. Wehrle sees the potential for metaphor in every part of a game, from the arrangement of mechanics to the physical presentation of the tokens and squares on a board.
"If I make a game about history, and I say this piece is an army, I'm working in the space of metaphor", he says. "But games are not just their pieces. I have rules, of course, but I also have the relationship between the players, and all of these can be working as metaphors."
Consider, for a moment Molly House, the title Wehrle co-designed alongside Jo Kelly. The squares on its board represent the streets of London, but you don't have complete control over how you traverse it. You must roll dice to see if you can move at all and to determine how many steps you take.
It's a basic component of many board games, but when we combine it with Molly House's theme, it takes on an entirely new meaning. Molly House is a game about queer communities trying to create joy while escaping persecution. In this context, those movement limitations represent the ever-present threat of exposure - when your identity is deemed criminal, you literally aren't safe walking down the street.
This might just be my personal interpretation of an abstract mechanic, but that's kind of the point. The way Wehrle sees it, he is never the sole author of a game's story. "It's a little old-fashioned, but I've always been attracted to the basic formulation of reader response theory", he tells me, "the idea that we have an author function and a reader function, that the actual story - the text, the living document - only really happens when those things touch each other". "Games make this very explicit, because a game in play is often something that cannot be described by the rules themselves."
Wehrle refers to board games as a "necessarily collaborative form". For a game to occur at all, players must agree to its social contract and see it through to the end. That also puts them in collaboration with the designer, who can impose limitations to create systems and ideas, but can't completely control their interpretation. Wehrle also points out that a board game is a conversation between that game and all others that come before it.
"When I was writing game reviews and commenting on game forums, I participated in the discourse by talking about games and playing them", he tells me. "On the design side, if I want to advance the conversation, I have to finish games and publish them - and they have to react to other games."
Wehrle can be quite critical in his 'reactions' to games. "I tend to be a very reactive designer", he tells me. "I build in absence: I need to find something that I don't think is good and then push against it." "That's what animates me", he says, with a smile. "I want to get mad at a game before I start working on a new game."
Fortunately for any sensitive designers, the games Wehrle tends to take to the chopping block are his own. Root's design diaries pitch it as an iteration on Wehrle's previous game, Vast. Likewise, Arcs was born as a response to Root and Oath.
An ongoing Kickstarter campaign is evidence of this. It offers both reprints and errata for Molly House and John Company. The former has a handful of new components, while the latter offers what Wehrle calls "some very low-level errata" for the rules. "These are changes that come from the fact the game has now been played by many thousands of players many thousands of times." That's a lot of voices joining in the conversation. Wehrle appreciates the fact his work has become less insular, but he alludes to a "psychic toll" that such complex webs of conversation create for him.
Wehrle is in the middle of developing a new edition of 2016's An Infamous Traffic. It's a game about the Opium Wars "which has a very funny relationship with John Company". "John Company was originally a much larger game that was incomprehensible", Wehrle tells me. "It buckled under its own weight."
While Wehrle has been working on John Company since 2009, this unruly version would split off into many fragments. "I would take an element of that game and say 'oh, the East India Company's military and diplomatic operations in Central Asia: That's actually Pax Pamir. That's a whole separate game. And then there's the question of privatization and the opening of trade in China. That's a separate game: that's Infamous Traffic."
"John Company has a really grand scale which enables a lot of wonderful things, but every turn is like half a generation, which can be a little zoomed out for character drama to happen", he continues. "Because Infamous Traffic only covers about 20 years of time, I'm able to reorganize the way those systems work and give them a bit more color. I am actively iterating."
After that, Wehrle hints that the scale of his next project will be immense. "Over the past couple of years, I've been running a John Company mega event where we play a 40-person game", he tells me. "I've also been playing games that are longer in my personal life. My children are getting a little older, and it's allowing me to play longer games." "I've been really interested in telling some larger stories, and Arcs unlocked something in me where I realized it was possible to build a game system that could do both, that could be compelling for short games and long games."
"The thing I'm working on right now, after Traffic, is a treatment of the Reconstruction Period in the United States", he adds. "I've been thinking about this design for four or five years and doing reading on it. It's always vexed me when it came to scale, but a lot of those choices were informed by the fact that, without acknowledging it, I was trying to build a small game." "But I've been playing a lot of eight or nine hour history games, and I think I've started to articulate an approach that is going to let me attack the subject of the game that I feel really confident in."
"It is a capital B, Big project", he says. Apparently, the new John Company and Molly House Kickstarter will help push the project forward. As well as guarantee reprints of the two games, "we're going to use some of that capital to finish the development of Infamous Traffic, and then as soon as Traffic is done, we are going to start this big project, and it can be a two or three year project - that's the thing that is animating me right now."
Historical board games may still be on Wehrle's mind, but an Arcs-style follow up is also brewing - though the plans are less set in stone. "In terms of the next big fantasy or hobbyist game I'm working on, it's a little more questionable", he tells me. "I'm mostly working on narrative elements, thinking about what the proper scale is, and stewing on genres to figure out how the stories I like in that genre operate."
One thing does seem clear for Wehrle, however: he's ready to move away from luck-based mechanics. "A lot of the games that I built recently have been very card-driven", he says. "I'm intrigued at the possibility of finding a less noisy narrative engine."
"Here is the central dissatisfaction which is animating the stuff I've just started working on", he continues. "When I first started designing, I was very adverse to uncertainty. Pax Pamir has very few random elements in it. In Root, all the random elements are very heavily weighted, so strange things happen, but they're in the small minority."
"Then, with Arcs, John Company, Oath, and Molly House, all of those games work with different types of uncertainties, different textures of chaos." "I feel like I've gotten a lot of narrative juice out of those projects, and I'm very happy with them - but I also want to see if I can do storytelling in a more controlled manner." "I'm interested in what it means to make a big thematic narrative game where there's very little uncertainty and all the uncertainty is being generated by the players."
Playing with uncertainty has produced several critically acclaimed games for Wehrle, but it has also generated some controversy. That, however, is something you can learn more in part two of my interview - coming to Wargamer soon. You can find out when it drops by checking back in on the website or by joining our Wargamer Discord, where we regularly discuss the latest news on beloved and new board games.