Remembering the Master: An Inelegant Eulogy for Kory Heath

The joke was: Kory doesn’t like games.

Yes, Kory introduced me to some of the most important games I’d ever play. Yes, Kory designed many of my favorite games of all time. Yes, Kory introduced me to game design methodologies that made me the game designer I am today.

But we would say that Kory doesn’t like games.

Kory was an auteur game designer in every sense. Games he made needed to follow his personal rules. He wouldn’t settle for just a band-aid solution to an issue. “The potential space for games is infinite,” he’d say, so there was no point in settling for a lesser solution, one that wouldn’t hit his personal definition of elegance. (Elegance a word that Kory would often be associated with, and highly misunderstood when he’d say it.) Instead of just settling for some minor ugliness in a game that Kory was working on, he would try and come up with more solutions. This would mean plenty of tear-downs of game prototypes that plenty of designers would be happy to take to a publisher. Or the design would languish, waiting for the right idea to come along to fix it, instead of just saying that it was “good enough.”

Many know Kory from his design diaries about Zendo. Zendo was essentially a finished game when I became an intern for Looney Labs and became a part of their extended game design circle, so I wasn’t there for its creation. My only part was using Microsoft Publisher to layout a copy of the rules for Zendo for print, helping to turn it into a semi-apocryphal, almost oral tradition game into one with printed rules. I’ve heard from many modern designers that attribute Zendo as a prime influence in many games that they’ve created. You would think that would be as definitive a game as you could make, right?

In June of this year, I playtested even more changes to Zendo, still trying to “fix” those parts that weedled at his sense of perfection. (In this case, he didn’t like people having a pile of guessing stones and then spending a bunch of them.) Not only that, but we were still testing changes for Jewels of the Sultan, an unpublished game that he had been working on for over 20 years. Jewels of the Sultan is a game where we tried out an idea for it in roughly 2008, and he ended up scrapping, and I would take that completely cast off idea and turn it into Thief’s Market, which is getting ready to have its second edition soon. Yes, one of my successful games is built from the discarded parts of a Kory Heath game (with his blessing.) 

Then there was Uptown, later known as Blockers. The very first playtest just featured a grid with tiles for each space. Very quickly that became playing tiles into the row or column to match. There was basically no win condition initially – the group agreed the most natural thing was to try and make a big group, so we just spitballed something off that idea. It didn’t matter: the important part was that the core clicked immediately.

After that playtest, Kory sent out an email that said he was taking the game into the third dimension: each 3×3 block would have a symbol, so you’d have 27 tiles (and later, an added wild tile.) One simple change, and in retrospect so obvious, and suddenly, a core that we had never seen before. It had the elusive concept that he’d always shoot for: the feeling of “why hasn’t someone done this before?”  

It was during those years of getting Uptown published that Kory’s sense of perfection would manifest in other ways. The first publication was done on the cheap, with symbols that looked like clip art and cardboard tiles instead of his preferred chunky, etched tiles that would stay on the board. That endgame would also get tweaked in future versions. The production quality was improved, though never to the level he liked. And ultimately he seemed let down on the reception to the game, one that seemed like it could stand the test of time. I told him that I doubted it was the game design that caused that issue, but issues of marketing, presentation, etc. He didn’t disagree but felt like the game was ultimately flawed, and that unforgivable flaw in his eyes was that it was annoying to have to pick up tiles from the board when capturing. He would then spend at least 10 years obsessing over a captureless version, while also not compromising his other rules of perfection. I know for a fact he turned down other publication offers because a new, problematic-in-his-eyes edition in the world would bug him. The only way he wanted it in the world was perfection, while simultaneously knowing that there was no such thing.

The more years that would pass, the fewer games would come out that would excite Kory at all. The early 2000s seemed to come with plenty of new games that had that essential elegance, that concept plucked from the infinite that was just waiting to be manifested. Kory’s visions of what constitutes a flaw would be disagreed with by basically every game designer that you could consider an authority on the subject. Multiplayer wargame? Fundamentally flawed, according to Kory. Text on cards that you have to read? Too annoying to process from across the table. Special action cards? Often overused to cover up an uninteresting core concept. 

This is where Kory would get the reputation for not liking games. Even games that people were convinced would be right up his alley would fall flat. And the style of playtesting he helped drive in our group would be described as “brutal” when we applied those same perfectionist metrics to games outside of ours. 

This is why I list Kory as my game design mentor. Not because others didn’t help inform and guide my designer skills – John, Kristin, Jacob, Andy, and so many others I could name. Nor is it because I have the same annoyances and strict dictates that he did. But it was his particular way of seeing the entirety of the game design process that was so unique that I learned so many things from him over our 23 year friendship. It wasn’t just what he said, it was the way he thought about every decision. My games are different than Kory’s games, and some of them he definitely did not like, but I feel confident that because of him I know what I’m doing. 

In 2002, he and I went to one of the very first Protospiel conventions in Michigan. Many of the game designers we met there remain my good friends to this day. Kory’s Zendo diaries preceded him, immediately giving him credence in a room of talented designers who had the same or more experience than he did. We both came to learn, but he was teaching before too long, and years later, we can still see his influence.

There’s a lot more I could say about Kory, like how he was the most monk-like person I knew, while still beating me out for “person who most looks like a pirate” that determines who starts the game in Cartagena. His most recent release, The Gang, was a co-design, which started as a simple concept by John Cooper that the two of them ran with. I got to spend time with Kory traveling to Gen Con where The Gang made its official debut, selling out each day. 

While at the con, I spotted a new version of Expeditions, a game he and I played together over 20 years ago that we had fond memories of. I told Kory I’d buy it if he’d promise to play it with me, and he agreed. 

Kory is gone now. He’ll never fulfill that promise. But what did I expect?

Kory didn’t like games.