Cole Wehrle, a designer with a small army of beloved board games under his belt, didn't get to where he is by playing by the rules. His designs challenge the player, requiring several playthroughs to fully uncover their vision. Wehrlegig Games, the historical board game publisher he co-runs, portrays periods in history that confront players with uncomfortable questions. And, as Wehrle himself tells me, its latest board game is "the most controversial game I've worked on".
Wehrle told me in Part One of this interview how his games obsessively iterate on themes and mechanics that he wants to improve. We discussed the marriage of mechanics and metaphor that adds so much merit to his designs. But there is one aspect of his design approach that we haven't yet covered - and it's the one that tends to ruffle feathers.
"One of the things that I'm most compelled by is the question of player agency", Wehrle tells me. "As soon as you say 'I'm going to let the player decide', you've given up the highest level of abstraction, because you're saying that, at some point, there is a single mind guiding this action." Player decisions and relationships are as much a part of the board game's capacity for meaning, so the more control a player has over the game's outcomes, the more they are responsible for shaping it as a metaphor.
Wehrle argues that historical board games in particular function better as metaphors when player agency is limited. "I'm always very surprised when these very smart historical game designers give so much agency to the individual, because they say that you as a player can choose to do anything." "But Neville Chamberlain couldn't choose to do anything", he says. "Elizabeth the First couldn't choose anything. They were constricted by all sorts of interesting considerations."
"I think if you're trying to make a game that is capturing the past, there has to be an element of the unknown", he continues. "For a long time, I never played games about the Second World War, because I found they were so processional." "It was like going to see a Shakespeare play - now we have this soliloquy, and everybody knows this one." "It can be thrilling to watch Macbeth, but you already know how it's going to go", he explains, "and so what you're doing is enacting a ritualistic experience of theater".
"You can suspend your disbelief, but you know how the play goes", Wehrle adds. " For the actors, it's the 'not knowing' that's really important. It's important, when you're trying to tell a story, that there is a real sense of openness. So, when I'm playing history games, I'm always interested in how slavish the designer is to what actually happened historically." "My attitude is that the historical outcome should actually happen 10 to 15 percent of the time, because you're playing the game as people who didn't know they were in the lead up to the Second World War."
Wehrle cites the board game Triumph and Tragedy as a perfect example of this philosophy in action. "It starts in the '30s, and you don't even know if the war is going to happen", he says. "It creates this lovely sense of paranoia and possibility that feels much more like a 1930s spy thriller than a stodgy 'let's pull out our little World War Two miniatures and reenact all these battles'."
Board games like this force you to empathize with an individual who doesn't have perfect knowledge of the events unfolding around them. "Uncertainty is an important engine that can be really useful for a story where players don't fully understand what's happening on the ground level", he tells me. "So, we're going to have a trade policy go this way, but I'm not sure if there's going to be a banking crisis or not".
This methodology is obvious in the design of many of Wehrle's recent games, but particularly in Molly House, the one he co-designed with Jo Kelly. Its core mechanics heavily rely on luck. Your movement is dictated by dice rolls, and your most important method of scoring relies on a randomly-dealt hand of cards.
Wehrle says that "the dealing of a random hand of cards in Molly House is about what happens when you start to violate the agency of a player and put constraints on their choices". These mechanics come to represent the restrictions that society placed upon the queer and gender diverse in 18th-century London. Trying to find joy in a world that actively wishes to contain, control, and erase you would feel uncertain. A threat to your joy or safety could appear at any moment.
The violation of player agency is fascinating from the perspective of storytelling, but when it comes to play, it can be unpleasant. Luck, too, is a feature that often switches off heavy board game lovers. I know more than a few hardcore hobbyists who will refuse to touch games with luck-based elements, for example.
"This has been the really interesting thing about watching the reception of Molly House", Wehrle tells me. "Molly House has proved to be the most controversial board game I've worked on, and not because of its theme, but because players were uncomfortable with the amount of chaos in the design - and the fact they were going to be asked really difficult questions about how much security they needed." "I stand by it", he says. "I think it does its thematic work really well, but I don't think the approach is appropriate for all stories."
It might not suit every board game, but the violation of agency also played a prominent role in Wehrle's award-winning space opera, Arcs. In our Arcs review, my colleague Matt Bassil praised the trick-taking wargame mashup for its ability to rubber-band from round to round, meaning that dominance was hard earned and easily lost in just a few turns. Bad luck was always around the corner, and it could destroy your best-laid plans. It's for this exact reason that I disliked my first playthrough of Arcs (and I told Wehrle as much).
Wehrle says that, to capture the theme of a struggle for a grand space empire, the design relied upon "a really simple observation that the kinds of stories we tell rely on the protagonist having bad luck, not good luck". "I wanted a game that would spit really bad situations at its players ,and the players would have to rearrange those situations in a way that is satisfying."
"You have to deal with uncertainty, not turning it over to fate, but to think about the heuristics", he explains. "What is a way of understanding the shape of this uncertainty, and then navigating around it? I find that problem space so rich." "It's what I think makes Molly House work, and it's why I was so happy to spend years working on Arcs."
Wehrle has previously said that he plans to move away from card-based designs and find "a less noisy narrative engine". However, that doesn't mean he's done infringing on the free will of his players. "I don't necessarily want to run to a land of low-risk games, because there's still so much space to explore", he says.
That might sound like bad news to the eurogame lovers of the world who detest uncertainty. But, truthfully, Cole Wehrle doesn't care much. "I think a lot of the core board game audience is playing to master a system or demonstrate some kind of skill", he says. "That's not how I play games."
Wehrle - and by extension, Wehrlegig games - is not interested in making board games that appeal to every corner of the industry. Wehrle tells me "we really just make one kind of game", and it's far from a mass market pitch. This is something he's very upfront about.
These games are what Wehrle calls "interactive". "One player puts pieces on the board, and another player is going to take those pieces off. And, sometimes, it will feel bad - and you just have to get over it." "It's the price of the narrative space that you're getting", he adds. "If you want to play a game about kings and empires, then you're going to be playing a game about dynastic betrayal. That just comes with the territory."
The second trait of a Wehrle game is that it's designed to be played repeatedly. "These games are really for groups who want to drill into one game", he tells me. "If you're the type of person who likes to order tapas and try a little bit of everything, these are not the games for you." "I'm really, really clear about that", Wehrle continues, "because we've found that there is a sizable audience out there that actually likes playing the same game over and over again. When you design for that audience specifically, you gain all these amazing things."
"Normally, when you're developing a game, you can optimize for the first play experience", Wehrle says. "There's always little decisions that you make about how the rules work and where the victory points are to really encourage players to have a good time in that first game." "When you say 'hey, don't worry about the first game, assume the first game is bad', a little door opens up. On the other side of that door are really rich, interesting things."
"I remember having this conversation with Patrick [Leder, Leder Games founder] where we started thinking about the games we loved growing up - and how, the first time we played them, we had a horrible time." "Everyone's first game of chess is just bad", Wehrle insists. "I really think games function best when they're systems at the edge of our cognition. When they're in that state, they're so beguiling and intriguing, so challenging and provocative." "As soon as you start to understand them, they lose the thing that makes the form of the game so wonderful to begin with."
Wehrle's games, it seems, cater to those who enjoy the journey more than the destination - the acquisition of a skill rather than the demonstration of it. In this way, they're not so far apart from the low-risk strategy board games that Wehrle said appeal to those looking to master a system. There is still a dragon to tame here, but you take pride in showing off your battle scars, not the dragon's head mounted on your wall. The art is in the struggle. Each game is a process of actualization, whether that means unlocking a clever strategy or realizing ways to empathize with figures from the past.
It's a lofty concept that, by design, discourages some gamers from moving past the first playthrough. The rewards, however, are evident. Molly House is one of my top games of the past year, and the rest of the Wargamer team have similar reverence for Arcs. If you're prepared to sacrifice a little of your time - and your sense of control - you'll uncover some of the most thoughtful designs in recent board game history.
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