by bruno faidutti

I became really interested in boardgame design in the early eighties. In these times, we had a handful of games and didn’t know much, if anything, about their designers. There were only a handful of names. David Parlett, the designer of Hare and Tortoise, was British. The other ones, Sid Sackson, Peter Olotka and the Future Pastimes team, were Americans. We vaguely knew something was beginning in Germany, but no names were famous yet. The polyglott and cosmopolitan Alex Randolph was the most fascinating character.

Alex Randolph

We knew that a after a golden childhood in very expensive Swiss boarding schools, this scion of a rich American family, whose parents were ambassadors, had studied philosophy and math, had worked as a secret agent, had brought a cute card game, Raj, from India, had lived in Japan and become a first rate Shogi player. He then settled in Venice where, with friends Leo Colovini and Dario de Toffoli, he had designed Inkognito, a secret agent game during the carnival of Venice. Alex Randolph was a character just out of a European novel, and I deeply regret having never met him.

Alex Randolph playing Shogi

Most of Alex Randolph’s designs are abstract, if not mathy. Twixt and Ricochet Robots are often said to be his masterworks, but I’ve never been much fond of them, as they feel too cold for me. I have played much more games of Inkognito, Intrigues à Venise in French, a deduction game in which one must first find out one’s partner before discreetly communicating with them about our common mission. Gorgeously edited, it revisits Clue with humor and subtleness. This game showed me that there was something more to do with Clue, and probably motivated me to design Mystery of the Abbey.

Games by Alex Randolph in my collection. I thought I also owned the tomato-vampire game, I don’t remember its name, and Die Rüsselbande, but I probably gave them or left them in my old home.

There are many other Alex Randolph designs I played a lot and still occasionally play. Raj / Hol’s der Geier is inspired by a traditional Indian game about which I’d like to know more. Ghosts is a deceptively simple tactical and bluffing game. Camel Gois one of the most original racing games. Big Shot, recently republished by my Korean friends at Mandoo Games, is a gem of an auction game.

Alex Randolph in Venice, with a copy of Veleno

In the late eighties, I incidentally played a lesser know Randolph design, Veleno, an abstract with very simple mechanisms. Each player on turn moves a common pawn on a board, capturing a token on a neighboring space. Those who follow my creations know that while I am wary of cooperation games, I have always been interested in games with a single pawn moved by all players, and idea I had already used in Silk Road and Isla Dorada.

Gute Nachbarn, German edition of Veleno

The other fascinating aspect of Veleno is its tricky three- and four-player scoring system, in which each player adds their left neighbor’s score. This clever rule gave its name to the German edition of the game, Gute Nachbarn – the nice neighbor. In Veleno, you have a good neighbor on the left, a bad one on the right (like in real life), and you’re the good neighbor of your bad neighbor. I’ve reused this rule in a completely different and more recent card game, Harvest Valley.

For years, I had this game in my thoughts. The simple and elegant system was fascinating, but the actual game play a bit lacking. The small playing board and the unbalanced values of the colored tokens often made for scripted games, in which movements were obvious and the winner determined in two or three turns. Then two years ago, on a whim, I dug up my old copy of Veleno and started to think of this game as I would like it, with a bigger board, more variety in the tokens and the scoring, and more interaction between players.

One of my first prototypes

I soon named my game Tonari, meaning neighbor in Japanese, because it sounded nice for an abstract, because Alex Randolph had had a Japanese life, because it reminded of the German name, Gute Nachbarn, and the central idea of the game, and because at that time I was trying, with little success, to learn some Japanese.

My final prototype

Like a novel or a piece of music, a board game never comes out of nowhere, is never entirely new and original, and it’s for the best. All my designs have been more or less influenced by other games, games I had liked or disliked, in an attempt to generate similar or dissimilar experiences. The truth is nevertheless that some games are more original than other ones, and Tonari belongs to the least innovative ones. It is not always easy, even for a seasoned game designer like me, to trace the line between minor development of an existing system and really new game. The line is often blurred.

While I was working on what will become Tonari, i was also designing a light card game inspired by another Alex Randolph’s design, Raj. This game, featuring an old lady giving breadcrumbs to pigeons, was finally published as Miaui. It is after both games were nearly finalized, when playing them with friends, that I decided the pigeon game was original enough to be considered a new creation, while Tonari was only a variation on Veleno / Gute Nachbarn, because while it added new pieces, it kept all the original elements in the game. Through his agent Smart Cookie Games, I contacted Michael Katz, Alex Randolph’s nephew and heir, who kindly accepted that I could look for a publisher for Tonari, and that if I found one, royalties will be shared half and half.

Publishers are a bit wary nowadays of publishing abstract games. I proposed Tonari unsuccessfully to several of them, and it’s finally IDW which, probably encouraged by the success of Matt Loomis & Isaac Shalev’s Seikatsu, decided to publish it. They didn’t want to go full abstract, but finding the right setting wasn’t easy. There were too many recent games about witch cauldrons, including Wolfgang Warsch’s outstanding The Quacks of Quedlinburg. They finally settled on fishing, with the common pawn being a trawler, and the tokens of different colors representing different varieties of fish. Placing the action in the Southern Kuchinoshima island of Japan after a great tempest, even allows us to keep the name I had chosen for my prototype, Tonari. Even though it was an afterthought, the fishing theme works surprisingly well, and is well rendered by the art of Kwanchai Moriya, an artist with a very specific style with whom I had not worked before. I am particularly fond of the cover art.

Cover of Tonari with artwork by Kwanchai Moriya

When Tonari was published in 2019, it got good reviews, and I had some hope it would, if not become a classic, at least got steady sales for some years. Unfortunately, only a few months after it got on the shelves, IDW decided to quit the board gaming business and focus on what was its core business, comics. The first print run sold quite fast, and that was it.

Journey to Friendly Fishing
Even when, due to the aging audience, a few publisher have recently specialized in revamping older classics, it is still harder to find a new publisher for an older out of print game than for a brand new game. It was even harder for Tonari due to the high quality of the first edition to which the new one would inevitably be compared. That’s why I didn’t try very hard. I had added Tonari to the short list of about twenty older games looking for new editions I occasionally gave to publishers, but the ones I was pushing the hardest were Waka Tanka, Minstrels, Small Detectives and China Moon – if interested by these ones, please contact me!

In February 2025, I went to GAMA in Louisville, a really nice game fair I heartily recommend. I’ll probably attend it again when the political situation in the US will be back to sanity and foreigners will again be welcome. That’s where I met Paul Salomon and the small team of Gamehead, who was already planning to publish in the US two of my games, Venture Angels and Vabanque. I gave him my small catalog of new designs and older stuff available for publication. A few days later, I received an enthusiastic email from Paul, where he told me having not realized before that I was one of the designers of Tonari, one of his favorite games, and one he was certainly willing to republish.

The challenge was to make a new version that would be sufficiently different from the original game, and that will look as nice as the gorgeous first edition. I think we achieved it.

There has been a few major changes to the game itself. The cloth board is double-sided, with a larger board on the back of the original one, making for longer games with up to five players. Of course, this gave us the opportunity to add new types of fishes, like the Kingfish, which brings an instant victory if you get two or three, depending on the number of players, or the Lunker, which brings five points but only to the last player who caught one. This means that there can now be different set-ups with different types of fishes in the lake, because the Eastern sea setting has become a North American lake.

To avoid the occasional very short game, the publisher decided to change the end game trigger. The game now doesn’t end when it is not possible to catch a fish on the neighboring space, and the boat starts again from the central island, until this is not possible anymore. This was the rule we discussed the most because even when short games can be frustrating, the possibility for the players to trigger the end game was for me, especially in two player games, an important tactical element. I suggested a compromise: two rounds of fishing, morning and afternoon, and that’s how I now play.

The fishing storyline imagined by the first publisher worked perfectly, and we kept it for this edition. The setting is now a forest lake, and the fishes are more or less those one can find in North America. The cloth printed board is really nice, and the art by Alisha Giroux is as cute and colorful as that by Kwanchai Moriya for the first edition. The Japanese trawler has become a cute small wooden boat, and the fishermen anthropomorphic animals – a recent trend in boardgames I recently tried to explain in a long article.

Friendly Fishing looks gorgeous, and I wish it a longer success than that of Tonari.