James Wallis is a prominent figure in the gaming industry, known for his extensive contributions and expertise. His latest book, “Everybody Wins,” offers an insightful overview of the greatest board games from the past 45 years, delving into the history of the board game renaissance and the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award. Published by Aconyte in both the US and UK, the book is available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats. To complement the book’s release, James edited a six-part podcast featuring interviews with notable figures in the gaming world, such as Reiner Knizia, Matt Leacock, Peter Adkison, John Kovalic, and Leslie Scott. We had the pleasure of speaking with James about his book and the ever-evolving gaming industry.
James, thank you for agreeing to speak with Occhi Magazine. You have a wealth of knowledge and experience in the games industry, particularly in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. Could you share more about your influences and how they inspired you to start a fanzine when you were 14?
I was at boarding school in my teens, completely the wrong environment for me and I was doing very badly until a friend introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons. Suddenly I had a mental space that I could escape to, where my actions had purpose and I wasn’t constantly being told I was a failure, and which functioned as a rehearsal room where I could try out different ideas and ways of talking to people in the safest of environments, without being punished for making mistakes or doing something wrong. It changed my life and possibly saved it too.
Not long after that I discovered a games fanzine in a shop—cheaply produced but brimming with ideas—and found myself wondering if I could do something like that. I had a typewriter, an idea, and a small amount of money I was supposed to spend on school supplies, and a local games shop that was prepared to sell copies. A month or so later I had my first issue in my hands. It was very bad indeed, but I learned fast.
What is your favourite TTRPG and why and what TTRPG would you recommend to noobies?
My favourite RPG is generally whatever I can convince a group of friends to play. Beyond that, it’s probably whatever game I’m designing at the moment, though I’m still enormously fond of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which my company published under license in the late 1990s.
Beginners are spoiled for choice, though a lot of games that advertise themselves as suitable for beginners really aren’t. The Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set is very strong as a way to get familiar with the idea behind roleplaying, but if you find you like it then I’d suggest you look around to find a game in a genre you’d prefer. For example, Call of Cthulhu is the classic horror game, Pendragon is a brilliant game about King Arthur and the Round Table, Salvage Union is a newer game about building giant robots out of scrap, and they all have excellent starter packs.
You wrote your first article in White Dwarf in 1986. What was the driving force behind your transition from a player to a designer and writer?
I found that I enjoyed writing about games almost as much as I enjoyed playing them, and being at boarding school (and later university) gave me ample time to do both. It’s also a great way to exorcise an idea out of my head so I don’t have to think about it anymore: write it down and get it published. Once I’d got a small reputation for my fanzine, I started sending articles into the games magazines of the time, including White Dwarf which at the time was covering RPGs and strategy games. Most of them got published. It was all very informal back then: I don’t think I ever wrote an enquiry letter, I just banged out an article, put the pages in an envelope, and sent it off, and a few weeks later the magazine would arrive with it in print. I wouldn’t recommend trying that today.
What inspired you to write “Everybody Wins,” and what do you hope readers will take away from it?
Everybody Wins is my book examining the rise of board game culture and the renaissance in game design over the last few decades. It actually started off as a column in Tabletop Gaming magazine, looking at all the games that had won the Spiel des Jahres (the games equivalent of the Oscars), talking about their influences and asking if they were worth playing today. As the column was drawing to a close, Aconyte Books approached me about turning the whole thing into a book, and I gladly accepted. It was a really fun project, Aconyte turned my manuscript into a beautiful book, and people seem to really enjoy it. But the whole thing started because there wasn’t anything looking at the recent history of games, and chronicling how and why things had changed so rapidly. With a few exceptions, modern games are so much better designed than the ones I grew up playing, better made, more clearly explained, more enjoyable and with fewer arguments too.
How do you view the current board game renaissance and what role do you think it plays in today’s digital age?
The renaissance in tabletop games has been extraordinary to watch. It wasn’t long ago that people were dismissing board games and their ilk as artefacts of the twentieth century, dwarfed and defeated by video games in the current age. But a good game is its own advertising campaign, and the pleasures of going head to head with an opponent across a table are different, more immediate and more personal than any video game, and the growth of tabletop seems to be relentless. Catan has sold over 32 million copies, Ticket to Ride has sold 18 million, and the Pokemon card game has sold eight cards for every person on the planet, Those are numbers that would make most computer-game publishers green with envy.
Acknowledging the huge influence the gaming industry has on film in particular, how do you see TTRPGs becoming more influential with games such as Warhammer as an example?
The success of Warhammer is incredible—the fact that a company that makes toy soldiers is worth £4.3 billion is boggling, particularly for those of us who remember when it was one shop in Hammersmith. But, although it used to produce RPGs, these days it’s focused on its miniature wargames. However, the lore and storytelling that Games Workshop has developed around its Warhammer games, with its fiction lines and also the RPG lines that it licenses to other publishers, are a major factor in what makes these worlds so attractive to new players, and so rich.
Can you share your thoughts on the significance of the Spiel des Jahres award in the board gaming community?
The Spiel des Jahres has played an important role in championing the new school of game design that came out of Germany in the 1980s, which started with the seemingly simple idea of designing games that eliminated all the things that made older games less fun (players getting knocked out half-way through, games that could last for hours, not having anything to do when it’s not your turn, and so on). The 45 games that have won the award since 1979 are the high-water mark for games that are not only brilliantly designed but also innovative and huge fun to play, and that means they’ve served as inspirations and templates for new generations of game designers. It’s hard to think of another award that’s had such an influence on its field. And I’d recommend almost all the winners without hesitation.
How has the Game Design Masterclass evolved over the years, and what key lessons do you emphasize to participants? What challenges do you think game creators face when producing tabletop games, particularly at this moment in time?
The Game Design Masterclass is the crash course in tabletop game design that I’ve been running for over fifteen years now. I take groups of novice designers from blank sheets of paper to finished, tested, revised, and working game designs in three hours, and it’s always great fun. It’s evolved a lot since I first ran it at the London Games Festival, mostly thanks to my students at the University of Westminster and London South Bank University who helped me to develop my ideas and the structure of the workshop. Mostly it’s tighter, and the teaching and learning outcomes are a lot clearer—it’s not necessarily about how to make great games, but more about understanding and experiencing the process, and how to avoid its potential pitfalls.
The main problem for a modern tabletop designer is that the market has never been more crowded, and without knowing the market it can be very hard to find a publisher for your design. Many are tempted to go it alone and publish the game themselves, but that’s also fraught with difficulty and problems. The main advice I’d give to people starting out is to talk to other designers and game publishers to learn how the industry works and how to take advantage of that.
How did your experience as a narrative designer for “Insane Robots” influence your approach to storytelling in games? With many diverse narratives in gaming, what (if any) challenges are there in creating poignant stories as a creator?
I’ve been working in designing game narratives for video games since the mid-90s, and teaching narrative design and interactive storytelling since the early 2010s, so designing the game-world and the story for Insane Robots was an absolute pleasure, working with the excellent designer Rob Davis to produce a game that was a hit with critics and players alike. It can be hard shaping a story around a series of almost abstract fights, but Rob had already created the characters so I just needed to put them in motion and let them bounce off each other in interesting ways.
I grew up reading the Fighting Fantasy books and the work of Iain McCaig was very influential. What was it like co-writing “Board Games In 100 Moves” with Sir Ian Livingstone, and how did that collaboration shape the final product?
Working with Ian was brilliant. There’s nobody in the UK who’s been so integral to the development of games over the last fifty years, both tabletop and video games—in addition to the Fighting Fantasy books he co-founded Games Workshop, was the director of Eidos when it created Tomb Raider and the Hitman franchises, and much more. His insight (and his massive games collection) were absolutely integral to bringing the book together, and helping find the structure that made the whole project work: picking a hundred games from all across history that marked the greatest milestones in the development of play. He made it happen, I mostly sat in the British Library with a pile of dusty books and typed stuff.
How have you seen the gaming industry evolve over the years, and what future trends do you anticipate? I’ve read articles stating that the community friendships fostered and built through online gaming years ago aren’t there anymore. How do you anticipate trends changing socially?
Tabletop games are constantly evolving alongside our ever-changing society and technology. The pandemic saw a surge in cooperative and solo games, where the objective is to beat the game, not the other players. Cultures where personal storage space is at a premium, like Japan, have a tradition of designing rich, rewarding games that fit into tiny boxes. And every ten years or so there’s a huge hit game that shifts the power dynamics of the industry and creates a plague of imitators: the last one was Cards Against Humanity, so we’re about due for the next. Personally I’m delighted that RPGs are on the ascendant and D&D has never been more popular, and in its slipstream, there are hundreds of brilliant, clever, imaginative games out there—Monsterhearts for the teenage vampire or werewolf in all of us, Bluebeard’s Bride for horror tales of a trapped wife trying to take control, Rosewood Abbey for Name of the Rose-style murder mysteries, Alice is Missing which is played entirely with text-messages, Mork Borg for a new spin on old-school fantasy, even my own Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which replaces dice and pencils with money and fine wine and is over in 45 minutes.
Some online communities become poisonous over time, but the solution—as with Twitter and Bluesky—is to make or find a better community somewhere else. People are still making friends through games whether they’re playing online or off.
You recently gave a really interesting presentation for SEED TALKS on the history of Warhammer. In the talk, you mentioned the many influences on Warhammer including the narrative, artistic design and you included the socio/political issues prevalent at that time. This included the Miners’ Strike of ’84-85, Margaret Thatcher, in addition to comics like 2000AD, Dune, and Tolkien. All of which have socio/political influences reflected through these works. What are your thoughts on the role of games in society? In your opinion, what role do TTRPGs play in fostering social interaction, community building and expression. How do you think they may harness this differently to online gaming as a different and arguably more socially interactive medium?
Games are integral to human society, there are no civilisations in human history where we’ve not found evidence of games, whether that’s the great spectacles of the Roman colosseum, the Egyptian game Senet that started as a pastime and over time took on religious significance to depict the passage of the soul through the underworld. We play, we learn by playing, and games are just played with constraints and a winner. Warhammer is far from the first game to directly address political issues of the day: the Suffragette movement released more than one game to raise funds for its campaigns, and the Landlord’s Game, which became Monopoly, was explicitly designed to demonstrate the unfairness of the rental property system and how money inevitably flows towards those who already have it.
Roleplaying games can take this further because you’re explicitly present in the action: you’re not just pushing tokens around on a board, you’re picturing the game’s imaginary world through the eyes of the character you’re playing, you decide their actions, and speak their words. There’s a lot of political messaging already present in these games, as you mention, though a lot of it isn’t made explicit as that kind of thing tends to hurt sales. But I think with Donald Trump back in the White House we’re likely to see a new wave of them come through in the next few years.
Offline gaming communities function differently from online ones simply because they’re offline—they exist in the real world, people meet up face-to-face to play and get to know each other as friends, often forming local social groups with shared interests, which can mean groups that become active in activism. I’ve seen it happen both ways, groups of activists who use gaming as a way to socialise and stay in contact, or people who come to activism through playing games and getting into conversations with the other players about their themes.
Are there any upcoming projects or areas within the gaming industry that you’re particularly excited about exploring?
My own big project for 2025 is setting up Big Table, a trade body for the tabletop industry in the UK and Ireland. As an industry, it turns over hundreds of millions of pounds a year but there’s no central body to help coordinate all those activities that a large industry needs, from organising trade fairs to lobbying government. So I’m building one. It’s much needed: I’ve watched too many new companies making the same mistakes I was making thirty years ago because there isn’t anyone to tell them what not to do.
Where can our readers find out more about you?
My personal website is www.jameswallis.com but it’s probably out of date as you read this. Everybody Wins is published by Aconyte Books (https://www.aconytebooks.com/shop/everybody-wins-the-greatest-board-games-ever-made-by-james-wallis/) and can be ordered from all good bookshops. The Game Design Masterclass is www.gamedesignmasterclass.com, my talks on Warhammer are organised by Seed Talks https://www.seedtalks.co.uk/ and Big Table is www.bigtable.games. The RPG podcast I co-host is Ludonarrative Dissidents: www.ludonarrativedissidents.com and finally I’m on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/jameswallis.bsky.social
Images provided courtesy of James Wallis -Photo credit Rosie Mott (main) and Marc Gascoigne at UK Games Expo 2023.
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