Ganz Schön Clever or That’s Pretty Clever, as it has been termed for the English-speaking market, is my favourite roll-and-write. In a highly cluttered market, it stands out for me with its simplicity, multiple scoring opportunities and highly satisfying cascading turns in the later rounds. It works in any player count and is brilliant in solo. I never thought I would find another game in this field that would beat it. But I did. Welcome To and Rail Road Ink are very good games and have far better themes, I mean, they have a theme! I rate them very highly. But it is the next outing in the roll-and-write market from the same publisher as Ganz Schön clever, Schmidt Spiele, that has pipped it for me. With a similarly odd title, Man muss auch gönnen können is my new favourite dice chucking game, and I would say, an essential game for any collection. It translates to “you have to also grant others something”, and this is a major part of the game that I will come onto later. It has been released to the UK market at Divvy Dice, which is one of the worst names I have ever heard, but like Ganz Schön Clever, this game has zero theme, So the name is irrelevant. This is all about the game play. And its brilliant!

WBG recently sat down with the brilliant team, Ulrich Blum and Jens Merkl, to ask them how it came about.

We regularly pitch game ideas to each other to find out if it would be a project we are both exited in. One day Jens said: There are so many roll-and-writes and they all have this static score sheet. What if it wasn’t a pre-printed sheet, but something you actively build throughout the game. Wouldn’t that be cool?

The idea immediately clicked, and we started working on it. We had a prototype pretty quickly and it already resembled what can be found in the box now. We knew there was only one publisher we wanted to pitch this game to. Fortunately for us Schmidt Spiele liked the game just as much as we do.

Awesome! This is your 8th (Jens) /9th (Ulrich) game now right? How did you first get into making board games?

Jens: My very first steps I did back in the 80s as an 8-year-old. I designed a kind of a solo game with a standard deck of cards, that I loved to play. Believe me, I had friends! I made the game when I was on holidays with my parents. The next bit of board game design, I did during my studies (Interactive Media Studies at the Film academy in Ludwigsburg, Germany). We had a workshop with Noah Falstein, one of the first game designers of Lucas Arts Games, where they did famous games like ZackMcKracken, Monkey Island or Indiana Jones - and the last crusade. The cool thing was, this digital games expert, told us a lot about designing games, and he did that by letting us design... Analogue Board Games! Because it was a course about game design, not about programming, he had chosen the analogue games to teach us mechanics. And again, I had lots of fun and we did an interesting game there, which is called I am Bob!, which by the way is still on my shelf. Hey, maybe I have to show that to someone! Anyway, after my studies, I had the opportunity to design games for the hybrid system tiptoi from Ravensburger (hybrid as in: combining analogue and digital elements). I did 13 games for that system, but only one is listed on BGG, because the others where kind of a mixture of game, story and learning which you can only play solo, which BGG doesn’t list as board games. So yes, eight classical board games.

Ulrich: I also have a few more projects than the ones that can be found on BGG. Mainly because all forms of play are interesting to me and if the chance to work on something weird is thrown my way, I’m usually interested.

Like many game designers, I did my first designs back when I was about eight or ten. Some of these prototypes even still exist. As for doing game design on a professional level, it started with me getting hit by a car whilst riding a bicycle. I couldn’t work as an actor (what I wanted to do at the time) or as a chef (what I did to pay the bills) for a whole year. I started working on games to keep my sanity (doing nothing loses its appeal after about two weeks). Via a few winding paths, this led to me winning the German game designer scholarship, which is highly recognised in the German industry. That’s when I decided to go full time (the money couldn’t be worse than from acting, right?), which I managed to pull off two years later.

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What an interesting path into the field. I am glad you were not seriously hurt in the accident Ulrich! How did you both get into the hobby as players?

Jens: As a kid I played a lot of board games. But as a teen I was more into computer games like Civilization, Monkey Island and Sim City. Then consoles took over with titles like Tony Hawks and Pro Evolution Soccer. As for boardgames, I was completely out for quite a while. Until one day friends wanted to play this game called Carcassonne of which I never heard anything. And so, it all started again.

Ulrich: I never hat to get into gaming. I can simply not remember a time when I didn’t play board games. It is probably something that makes the market in the German speaking countries special to this day. The Spiel des Jahres is so widely recognised that you will come into contact with modern game design early on. We played a lot as a family. And while we did play quite a few games of Risk (we never really liked Monopoly), more modern games where always being played too.

Roll-and-write are all the rage right now, but this one feels different. How did you go about making such a fresh feeling game within such a busy sector?

We try to have something new and fresh in every design we work on. As described before we pitch Ideas to each other quite often, to find out if it is something we want to work on together. This is a very effective first filter. Even your first idea needs to have something to get the other excited. Otherwise it’s not something we pursue (at least not together). The central idea of building your own score sheet, was there from the very beginning. Now, an idea on its own is not worth a lot and we strongly reject the image of the creative person that has a eureka moment and everything is just there. It’s the execution that makes a good game and is responsible for 99% of the work. But a good idea can give a vision of what you’re trying to achieve. It’s a goal or a signpost. The road right in front of you might be unfamiliar and confusing, but a clear vision will keep you from making too many detours. 

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Excellent advice! The solo mode is amazing too, with the mini campaign scoring mechanism. Was it important to you to have a strong solo mode in this game? How was this developed?

Ulrich: I play games solo quite often. So, I took the lead on the solo version. I want a challenge in a solo game. I want to be able to lose the game. That’s why pure high score races are never as appealing to me. I’ll play them, but I prefer this constant threat that it might all go wrong.

These thoughts led us to the basic system of the solo game, where everything below a certain score is a lost game. From there it was only a small step to create several levels with increasing difficulty. Once we had that, we thought: and why would I replay the game once I’ve beaten all the levels? And so, the campaign was born. You now have to win all seven levels back to back. That should keep you busy for a while. And if that’s still not enough for you, you can of course fall back to comparing the final score of all your successful campaigns.

Well I think its brilliant! I’m still struggling to beat it but having a lot of fun trying! What is next for you, are you working on new games?

Oh yes, very much so. We are currently hard at work on a game that’s been in development for quite some years now. As with Gönnen Können we are trying to break a few conventions and do things a little differently. The game is due to come out in the fall of 2021. Unfortunately, we cannot yet talk about it too much. This much we can say: Players will experience an interactive story and they won't be sitting down doing so. We’ve put in (and still are) an extraordinary amount of work and we are looking forward to the release quite a bit.

Not sitting down? Intriguing! I will look out for that. What game, not made by you, would have been your dream game to have been involved with in the development phase?

Ulrich: At the moment I am quite impressed with the design of Fog of Love. What fascinates me, is the way it works for different types of players. The game experience is obviously improved if you role-play your character a bit. But unlike other games with that quality, Fog of Love doesn't break down if players are reluctant to the role-play aspect. The mechanisms are built in a way that even if you play purely mechanical, you will still create a vivid three-dimensional character. This concurrence of mechanism and story (or theme if you will) is something I admire very much in games that achieve it.

Jens: That’s a difficult question. I might say Pandemic Legacy Season 1. I was impressed with how the designers achieved such a well-balanced game. Considering all the changes the players will make to the game throughout the campaign, that is quite remarkable. 

Agreed. We love it too. If you could have a game night with any other designers, who would it be and why?

Jens: Michael Schacht, Rita Modl and Peter Jürgensen. With the right communication game, that would be a blast. We would be laughing quite a lot in this group.

Ulrich: There are too many to mention. Generally playing games with other designers is super fun. Just because you can always feel this great love for board games in each one of us. I also feel very blessed that I don’t have to imagine playing games with some of the big names in the industry. I can just give them a call and visit them.

Brilliant! Very jealous of that! What are your top five games to play?

Ulrich: This is constantly changing, but at this very moment I would like to play: 7th Continent, [The]Kings Dilemma, the Exit series, Flipships, Gloomhaven.

Jens: It’s kind of hard, but let me try an All Time List: Stone Age, The Pillars of the Earth, 7 Wonders, Race for the Galaxy, Man Muss auch gönnen können (Is that allowed? Sorry, I love to play that game, even after hundreds of testing rounds ;-)

Great list, and yes, I think that is definitely allowed, it’s on my list for sure too! It was great chatting with you both, thanks for your time. I look forward to hearing about your next game and will get some comfy shoes ready!