Vlaada Chvátil (pronounced Vlar-dja Hwa-teel ) is a Czech board game designer responsible for dozens of award-winning, strongly thematic board games. His most recognisable, commercially successful being Codenames in all its ever-increasing flavours (over 15 million units sold).
Born 1971 in Jihlava , Czech Republic (Czechia) he began creating boardgames for family and friends from an early age prior to exploring a career in video game design before a busy return to board game design in 2006.
His breakthrough game was Galaxy Truckers in 2007 – a board game about racing space truckers in cobbled together space craft.
Space Truckers marked the first output of CGE (Czech Games Edition) the games publishing company he founded with other liked-minded Czech and Slovak designers.
His name has become synonymous for heavily thematic board games, and rule books littered with humour and jokes – a refreshing change to the dry, business-like, perfunctory standard.
something old, something new
Borrowing from his video game design background his board games frequently employ tutorial type scenarios to help teach the mechanics.
Uniquely his designs regularly straddle the two board game ‘camps’: Eurogames (strategy, resources, elegant mechanics and components) and Ameritrash (heavy theme, conflict, luck).
Providing an insight into his design process Vlaada revealed that he often prototypes games entirely on computer – using automated processing for cards, creating placeholder graphical elements, and analysing and programming logic in Excel. This allows him to tweak and iterate at speed until he’s happy with the mechanics.
Indeed, he often distributes these digital prototypes for early playtesting before a physical copy even exists.
genre alchemist
His design output manages to span a broad genre of games, and includes: Pictomania (drawing party game), Space alert (programmatic co-operative space survival), Mage Knight (fantasy deck building RPG), Through the ages (civilization building epic), Dungeon Lord & Dungeon Petz (micromanagement worker placement), Galaxy Truckers (tile placement space truckin’) and of course his commerical apex – Codenames (social deduction word game).
After several years producing CGE’s digital board game offerings, what next Mr Chvátil for the board game world?