To dream up board game Life in Reterra, Eric Lang spent four years trying to forget

polygon.com:

If you’ve ventured deep enough into the molten core of your neighborhood big box retailer, you’ve likely seen them. Sitting there in neat little rows next to old standbys like Monopoly and Clue, near the endcap filled with expansions for Cards Against Humanity, is a new and insurgent class of products — the so-called “light hobby board games.” That is, games that look and feel like their heavier cousins from the local game shop or online, but with the rough edges sanded down.

Award-winning independent game designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage) has no issues with them being there, but he thinks that modern consumers deserve more — and perhaps, better. That’s why he pitched Life in Reterra, alongside his co-designer Ken Gruhl, to 100-year-old board game publisher Hasbro.

“My personal point of view as a designer,” Lang told me in a recent interview, “is to prove that the lines between what we call ‘mass market’ and ‘hobby market’ are mostly illusion — illusion and artificial. People are people. Fun is fun. Depth is depth. Of course, everybody has different tolerances, or [wants] different amounts of depth in the game, but there’s no one, weird, single, dividing line between what is in the mass market and what’s not. That’s all been decided by buyers at retail.”

In Life in Reterra, players will draw tiles from a communal pool of resources in the hopes of building a settlement after an apocalypse. But unlike Clue and Monopoly, the box contains so many various components that you’ll likely never play the same game twice. The starting hands of cards alone, Lang said, will have more than 11,000 different variations, which can scale from simple to more complex. Reterra is very purposefully trying to wheedle its way into players’ lives, becoming a pastime that they return to again and again to toy with its complexity. It’s every bit as complex as a traditional hobby board game, it’s just that it’s being presented differently.

Lang spent a good chunk of the last four years