The Fifteen Prototypes

Before Eric M. Lang published a single game, he designed fifteen or sixteen of them. All collectible card games. All based on roleplaying games he’d played. All unpublished.

“I basically got all my bad stuff out of the way,” he told GamesRadar in 2024. This is the telling detail. Most designers publish their early work and let the market sort it out. Lang threw his away. By the time Mystick: Domination appeared in 2000—a self-published card game, his first credit—he’d already spent years learning what didn’t work.

Born in Montreal in 1972, Lang entered the industry as a playtester at FASA Corporation, the publisher of Shadowrun and BattleTech. He arrived during the aftermath of the CCG gold rush. Magic: The Gathering (1993) had proved that customizable card games could generate enormous revenue. Every publisher wanted one. Lang absorbed the mechanics, the production realities, the distance between a prototype and a product. His ambition was initially to be a publisher, not just a designer. But after Mystick: Domination, the market corrected him. He met Christian T. Petersen at Essen Spiel and began designing for Fantasy Flight Games in 2002.

The Card Department

At FFG, Lang became the company’s de facto card game department. A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (2002, co-designed with Petersen) established his professional identity. Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game (2004, sole design) refined it. He wasn’t designing one-off products. He was building systems intended to support years of organized competitive play—a fundamentally different design problem than building a game someone plays five times.

The architecture of a competitive card game requires structural discipline that board games don’t. Every card must interact with every other card without breaking the game. New expansions must expand strategic space without collapsing it. The system must reward skill while remaining accessible. Lang spent roughly a decade solving these problems, and the work shows in the longevity of his systems: A Game of Thrones LCG supported competitive play for over a decade before warranting a complete 2nd Edition reboot in 2015.

During this period, Lang helped develop what Fantasy Flight Games branded as the Living Card Game format—fixed-content monthly expansions replacing the randomized booster packs of traditional CCGs. The LCG addressed the “booster pack exhaustion” killing the CCG market. The Opinionated Gamers described Lang as “one of the inventors of the LCG games.” The format became the industry standard for non-randomized competitive card play, adopted under various names by publishers beyond FFG. Important caveat: the LCG was a company-wide FFG initiative, and Lang’s specific contribution versus the broader organizational decision should be distinguished. He was the designer most associated with the format, but he didn’t create it alone.

He also wrote a 2008 essay for Electronic Book Review articulating his framework of “evocation” over “simulation”—the idea that licensed games should create lateral experiences that enhance appreciation for an IP rather than transpose players into the narrative. He coined the term “kneel” for A Game of Thrones (equivalent to Magic’s “tap”), demonstrating his principle that loaded terminology creates theme. These aren’t just design choices. They’re philosophy made playable.

The Fusion

Chaos in the Old World (2009) was the quantum leap.

Before CitOW, the board game hobby operated under a perceived divide between “Eurogames”—elegant mechanics, indirect interaction, mathematical optimization—and “Ameritrash”—thematic spectacle, dice-driven combat, dramatic narratives. Designers generally chose a side. The audiences talked past each other on forums.

Lang chose both. Chaos in the Old World married a Warhammer Fantasy combat theme with tight Euro-style victory conditions and multiple strategic paths. Four Chaos Gods—Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, Slaanesh—each had entirely separate card decks, unique threat-dial advancement conditions, and two parallel paths to victory: a VP threshold or dial completion. The asymmetry wasn’t cosmetic. Each god played a fundamentally different game while competing on the same board.

Deep factional asymmetry had precedent. Cosmic Encounter (1977) and Dune (1979) both featured radically different player powers. But Lang’s innovation was the marriage of that asymmetry with Euro-style win conditions in a “dudes on a map” framework. Reviewers at There Will Be Games called it “one of the first significant examples of asymmetric play” in the area-control genre. Its influence is traceable in Cthulhu Wars (2015, Sandy Petersen), Root (2018, Cole Wehrle), and the broader hybrid design wave of the 2010s.

The system’s architecture was self-correcting. Khorne’s advancement required other players to place units on the board—which they needed to do for their own advancement. Nurgle corrupted populated regions, incentivizing others to spread out. If one faction pulled ahead, the others were mechanically incentivized to pivot their aggression. The critical weakness: a single inexperienced player could collapse the entire ecosystem. The system’s brilliance was its fragility—it required all four players to engage competently. Exactly four players. No more, no fewer.

Lang called it the game he was most proud of in a 2012 Opinionated Gamers interview. He described the FFG creative team during this period: “Kevin Wilson, Corey Konieczka, and myself were like the three-headed creative force. So that’s when all of our best sh*t came out.”

The Genre

In 2011, Lang and Mike Elliott co-designed Quarriors! for WizKids.

Dominion (2008) had established deck-building as a new game mechanic—buying cards to improve your personal deck over the course of the game. Quarriors! applied the same logic to custom dice drawn from a bag. Players purchased dice to add to a shared bag, drew a “hand” each turn, and rolled to summon creatures and generate currency. Shannon Appelcline of Mechanics & Meeples confirmed it was “the first dicebuilding game.”

Lang contributed the “chaotic mana pool that attacks” concept, inspired by D&D’s Tome of Magic. Elliott—a Magic: The Gathering Hall of Famer—brought mechanical rigor and the math of acquisition loops. The partnership produced something neither would likely have built alone.

The dice-building paradigm spawned an entire genre. The Dice Masters franchise—dozens of licensed sets across Marvel, DC, D&D, and WWE—commercialized the engine directly. WizKids’ own website states Dice Masters uses “WizKids’ proprietary Dice Building Game platform.” Beyond the franchise, the bag-building mechanic propagated into Orléans (2014), Automobiles (2016), Altiplano (2017), and Dice Forge (2017). BGG now categorizes these under “Deck, Bag, and Pool Building.” A new genre existed because two designers asked: what if the thing you’re building isn’t a deck of cards?

Origins Award for Best Family Game (2013). A co-design credit. Lang shares the innovation with Elliott. Both deserve it.

The Mythic Trilogy

Blood Rage (2015) was explicitly conceived as a successor to Chaos in the Old World. Lang tweeted: “For those wondering when I would do another strategy board game in a similar weight class to Chaos in the Old World: Blood Rage is that game.”

It was his first major design for CMON, and it fused 7 Wonders–style card drafting with area control. The draft was the strategic layer—not an add-on to the main game but the engine driving every decision. Players drafted cards during each of three ages, then spent “Rage”—simultaneously a currency for actions and an upgradeable stat—to deploy units, attack territories, and trigger special abilities on a map where provinces were progressively destroyed by Ragnarök.

The most distinctive innovation was the “Loki strategy.” Cards associated with the trickster god rewarded players for losing battles—gaining victory points, upgrading stats, or deploying units when defeated. This created a viable “win by losing” path that transformed the game’s decision space. Cosmic Encounter had minor “win by losing” elements, but Blood Rage integrated strategic failure as a central pillar of the scoring engine. Not a consolation prize. A genuine path to victory.

Wikipedia noted Blood Rage “merges the traditions of American style games and eurogames.” The Dice Tower named it Best Strategy Game and Best Components of 2015. Blood Rage reached as high as #15 on the BoardGameGeek all-time rankings. Its Kickstarter raised $905,682.

Then Lang did something unusual. He designed two more games in the same genre—Rising Sun (2018) and Ankh: Gods of Egypt (2021)—as a deliberate design study. Three area-control games with radically different mechanical cores.

Rising Sun replaced card drafting with negotiation and alliances. Its blind-bid war resolution—where coins spent go to the opponent who wins, creating a closed economy—was described by Meeple Mountain as “an area control mechanic inside the greater area control.” The game was explicitly inspired by Diplomacy. Its Kickstarter raised $4,228,060 from 31,262 backers.

Ankh replaced both with a communal action-selection track and introduced the forced merger mechanic: two-thirds through the game, the two gods with the least devotion must merge—one player’s pieces are removed, and both players co-control a combined, more powerful god. Lang “insisted upon it from the initial pitch to the end of development.” The mechanic converted player elimination into a cooperative catch-up mechanism. Reception was deeply divisive.

Each game in the trilogy progressively simplified, with Ankh being “by far the simplest.” The trilogy was not three iterations of the same game. It was three explorations of what area control could be when you changed the decision engine underneath.

Known balance concerns across the trilogy: Blood Rage’s Loki strategy is arguably dominant and certain card combinations create runaway leaders. Rising Sun’s alliance dynamics at four players produce kingmaker scenarios. Ankh’s merge mechanic works best at two players, where it doesn’t trigger. Lang’s defenders argue the chaos IS the design. His games prioritize dramatic moments—betrayals, desperate bids, impossible comebacks—over deep strategic optimization. This is not accidental. It is the product of a designer who stated that his goal is recreating “the D&D moment” for broad audiences.

The App Experiment

XCOM: The Board Game (2015) required a free companion app as an integral gameplay component. The app managed alien AI, ran differentiated real-time timers per player role, and dynamically adjusted difficulty. It wasn’t optional. The game didn’t function without it.

Electronic components in board games weren’t new—Dark Tower (1981) and Alchemists (2014) preceded XCOM. But XCOM was a high-profile proof-of-concept from a major publisher that validated the approach for the modern era. Fantasy Flight subsequently released app-driven versions of Mansions of Madness (2nd Edition, 2016), Descent: Legends of the Dark, and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth. A 2025 GameAnalytics article explicitly stated that Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition “learned how the companion app worked in XCOM: The Board Game and took it to the next level.” The trend Lang helped catalyze now spans dozens of titles from multiple publishers.

The Reinvention

After leaving CMON in 2020, Lang described himself as a “Born-Again Mass Market Guy” on the Ludology podcast. The shift was philosophical, not just commercial.

He articulated a concept he calls the “complexity budget”—the idea that every game has a finite amount of mental energy a player can spend. If a game spends that budget on administrative overhead or complex movement rules, it has less to spend on what Lang calls “The D&D Moment”—the flash of narrative discovery and meaningful choice. His late-career work is an exercise in spending that budget almost exclusively on the moment.

Life in Reterra (2024, Hasbro, co-designed with Ken Gruhl) applied the complexity budget to a mass-market tile-laying game. Marvel United (co-designed with Andrea Chiarvesio) made superhero team tactics accessible to children while remaining satisfying for adults. He also co-authored The Game Designer’s Workbook (Wiley, 2024) with Bobby Lockhart, endorsed by Eric Zimmerman of NYU’s Game Center. The move from designing games to teaching game design is the latest phase of a career built on making systems accessible.

The Attribution Map

Attribution across Lang’s catalog is generally clean, with important nuances.

Sole-designed flagships: Blood Rage, Rising Sun, Ankh, Chaos in the Old World, XCOM, The Others: 7 Sins, Bloodborne: The Card Game, The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire, Star Wars: The Card Game, Warhammer: Invasion. These represent his clearest claims to authorship.

Co-designed works with clear credit: Quarriors! and all Dice Masters sets with Mike Elliott. Cthulhu: Death May Die with Rob Daviau. Marvel United with Andrea Chiarvesio. A Game of Thrones CCG with Christian T. Petersen. Arcadia Quest with Guilherme Goulart, Fred Perret, and Thiago Aranha. A Song of Ice & Fire miniatures game with Michael Shinall.

The LCG question: Lang designed core systems for multiple FFG LCGs, but ongoing expansion development was handled by other designers—primarily Nate French, Brad Andres—working within Lang’s frameworks. The A Game of Thrones LCG 2nd Edition (2015) is explicitly co-credited to Lang and Nate French.

The most important non-attribution: Marvel Champions: The Card Game (2019) was designed by Nate French, Michael Boggs, and Caleb Grace. Lang had no design credit. This is frequently confused because Lang designed multiple FFG LCGs and Marvel Champions shares the LCG format, but it is an entirely separate design by a different team. Zombicide (all editions) was designed by Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien, and Nicolas Raoult. Lang was CMON’s Director of Game Design during some releases but is not credited as designer.

The Honest Assessment

Lang is the most commercially successful board game designer of the Kickstarter era. Over $22.9 million in crowdfunding across his designs. Diana Jones Award at 44. Staff positions at three major publishers. A collaborator roster—Daviau, Bauza, Faidutti, Elliott—that doubles as a hall of fame shortlist. The narrative is impressive. But the methodology doesn’t score narratives.

What the methodology sees: a genuine mechanical innovation (dice-building) that spawned an entire genre, but co-designed. A fusion of Euro and Ameritrash traditions that changed how designers thought about hybrid games, but built from existing ingredients. An app-integration proof-of-concept that reshaped a publisher’s entire product strategy, but not the first app in a board game. A trilogy of flagship designs praised for dramatic moments and criticized for balance issues. Card game systems that supported competitive play for a decade, but maintained by other designers.

The pattern across all three pillars is consistent: excellence that falls just short of transcendence. An 8 everywhere. The co-design credits on his strongest innovation moderate Invention. The balance issues and experiential-over-equilibrium philosophy moderate Architecture. The “spectacle over strategic depth” choice moderates Mastery. Each score is earned honestly at the 8 level. None quite reaches 9.

The adjustments are almost maximal. He triggers everything except Branded Name—Blood Rage and Rising Sun are invisible to non-gamers. Twenty-five years of full-time professional design, awards across multiple categories, cross-genre success, plausible $10M+ lifetime revenue on multiple titles, and documented design propagation across three separate innovations. That’s +8 out of a possible +10.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Lang is a dramaturg.

Every system he builds serves a single purpose: producing the moment. The card draft in Blood Rage exists so that the simultaneous reveal creates a gasp at the table. The blind-bid war resolution in Rising Sun exists so that the coins sliding across the table create a betrayal narrative. The merge mechanic in Ankh exists so that two players stare at each other as their gods are forced together. The Rage action economy exists so that the player who makes one more move than they can afford feels the desperation.

He doesn’t build games for strategic excavation. He builds games for stories. Not authored stories—emergent ones. The kind where someone says “remember when you Loki’d your way to victory while we all fought over Yggdrasil?” The D&D moment, as he calls it, except produced through mechanical interaction rather than a dungeon master’s narration.

This is why his systems have balance issues and why his defenders don’t care. A perfectly balanced game produces optimal play. An optimally balanced game rarely produces the story. Lang’s systems are calibrated not for equilibrium but for dramatic peaks—for moments where the numbers don’t quite add up and the player has to make a decision that feels like it matters. The chaos is the feature.

His stated design tools confirm it: “I think it’s essential to have a rock solid grasp of mechanics, game theory and behavioral psychology.” That last element—behavioral psychology—is the tell. He’s not designing for the system. He’s designing for the person sitting across from it.

The Mythic Trilogy is the clearest expression. Three games. Same genre. Three different engines for producing drama. Blood Rage: the drama of the draft reveal. Rising Sun: the drama of the broken alliance. Ankh: the drama of the forced union. Each game is a different theatrical machine.

What Remains

The dice-building genre—Quarriors!, Dice Masters, and every bag-building game that followed. The LCG format—fixed-content competitive card games across a dozen franchises. The app-integrated board game—XCOM’s proof of concept, now an industry standard. The Euro/Ameritrash fusion—Chaos in the Old World’s marriage of tight mechanics and thematic spectacle, extended through Blood Rage, Rising Sun, and Ankh into the dominant design mode of the 2010s. Twenty-two point nine million dollars in crowdfunding. A career that other designers keep asking to be part of.

And a design philosophy that says: the complexity budget has one purpose. Spend it on the moment.

The methodology measures systems, structures, and propagation. It does not measure the gasp at the table when someone plays the Loki card. Lang built his career on that gasp. The score captures the architecture. The gasp captures the rest.

Total: 32 points. Year: 2000.

Total: 32 points. Year: 2000.

The methodology measures systems, structures, and propagation. It does not measure the gasp at the table when someone plays the Loki card. Lang built his career on that gasp. The score captures the architecture. The gasp captures the rest.