Reiner Knizia needs no introduction. As the most prolific game designer in the world today, you've almost certainly encountered his games, of which there are many. During our conversation, I was struck with not only how kind and funny he is, but also how much wisdom he's amassed over the years, wisdom that he was more than willing to share with me.

And now I'm going to share it with you.

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Tell us about yourself - Who are you? What do you do?

This is my third life. My first life was at university where I really enjoyed teaching, studying, and researching mathematics. My second life was in banking and I.T., where you work for the big company, get big responsibilities, and also get involved in big politics, which I never enjoyed. My last job was running a big mortgage company here in the U.K., with about 300 people working there.

Then I decided to jump into my third life - it’s been quite a while ago now – to do games. Of course I’ve done games on the side all the time – they’ve always been my love and my hobby – then I got braver and had some successes, and I knew that I wanted to do this. Now I’m a full-time game designer.

What tabletop games (including digital board/card games) are you playing most right now?

Two answers: I’m playing every day, because designing games is essentially experiencing the fun of games, therefore [it’s important to be] playing them. But whenever I have an opportunity to play, I play my new designs. There are sixty drawers in my office, and most of them are filled with new designs, so there are lots of ‘monkeys’, as I call them, who want to be fed. This means that I rarely play other people’s games. I do play them, and my play testers bring new designs they think are remarkable, and we look at them – but that’s not the normal day-to-day business.

One fact that we probably don’t know about you:

I’m a thief. When I fly in airplanes, I steal the cutlery. I have a big collection of cutlery from the different airlines. And I’m running organized crime, because I ask other people to steal for me when they fly on certain planes. I have several hundred collectible pieces now. Of course, now we’ve stolen all of it, because the airlines have run out of cutlery, and they give you plastic instead of the metal ones.

(I want to be part of a Reiner Knizia crime ring! –A)

What are you naturally good at that helps you in your work?

That’s a very difficult question. I think every game designer has his or her own strengths – some people come from the graphics side, some people come from the storytelling side – I think I come from the scientific side. Mathematics help me create models, and my perfectionism helps me really test everything in detail.

But calling it a strength is a dangerous thing, because as soon as you call something a strength, you’re bound to overdo it – and then you turn your strength into a weakness. What I have learned over time is to not rely on one strength, and not to have one fixed methodology when designing games. Designing games is not a science where you have a specific method that you always repeat. As a designer, my ambition is to create something new and innovative every time, and it’s been my experience that I should start with something new and innovative – a new character, a new technology, a new material – because, although there’s no guarantee, that’s my best chance to come up with something innovative at the end, and not trample along the same path all the time.

So, in a way, what I’ve learned is to be wary of my strengths.

What are you not naturally good at, that you’ve learned to do well anyway?

It’s funny – some people criticize my games for being abstract and not very thematic, and I’ve learned to be careful with my models, which in the past usually started from the thematic motivation, so I don't forget to communicate the theme.

The theme would be there, but I would very much bring it down to its bones – its essentials. I could still see the theme and interpret a lot of the actions, but sometimes the communication process to the publisher and the players causes the theme to be lost, so that players no longer know how to interpret the individual actions. I’m now putting more emphasis on communicating the theme how I see it. That’s a challenge, because I do have a scientific approach: I don’t like to tell a vast story with lots of details, or make players read long, complicated rules. [inlinetweet prefix="" tweeter="" suffix="@andhegames"]I try to make games with very few principles, so they’re natural to play.[/inlinetweet] Once you understand the basic principles, you can almost derive what to do in various situations. But this does mean that the rules are short, and you’ve got to be careful that you don’t lose the theme as you condense the rules.

Do you generally approach a game from a thematic or mechanical angle?

In the early days, I usually started from the theme: I’d have a theme that really fascinated me, and then I’d try to transfer that theme into a game system. Even when people though that the theme is missing, it was the starting point, as we’ve just discussed. But now I try to avoid this – I’m essentially trying to feel uncomfortable in the design process, because as long as I walk along the comfortable path, the innovation is not as strong as when I’m uncomfortable.

I was very uncomfortable when I did The Lord of the Rings, because you want to be true to the story and the spirit of the book, and you know that all of the fans have a certain viewpoint: therefore you must be a hobbit; therefor you cannot compete with each other; therefore you need to cooperate with each other; one thing leads to another, and suddenly you end up having to make a cooperative game that goes through this enormously big book, a game that you can play in an hour. That was an uncomfortable situation in the positive sense: it forced me to think in a new way, and therefore come up with something innovative.