tabletopgaming.co.uk 33Anomaly is more combat-
focused than many hidden
movement games, with student
players able to fight back against
the creature chasing themW
hen omas Dagenais-
Lespérance says his career
as a game designer
started with the
classics, he doesn’t
mean Ticket to Ride, Catan and
Carcassonne. He doesn’t even mean
Monopoly, Go or chess – or any game at all, for
that matter.
e Canadian creator was instead
motivated to start making games by the
unlikely inspiration of classical music, which
he had studied at university before going
to work in a music school. But faced with a
crisis of con dence and a dwindling musical
output, Dagenais-Lespérance found himself
increasingly unsure about where to direct his
creative urges.
“Composing music, there was something
a bit stressful about it,” he says. “ rough
university you meet all those very, very
talented people. I started music quite late
and there was that feeling that I guess I wasn’t
good enough. I would see a lot of people
who had started music at ve years old or
something like that and had perfect ear and it
was like, how can I compete?”
Driven by a lifelong love of games, his
search for another medium in which he could
express himself settled brie y on video games,
which also failed to get the juices fully owing.
“ e whole programming aspect I guess felt
like a chore – like a lot of work to just get to a
very unsatisfying result,” he re ects.
Surrounded by a growing tabletop scene
in his native Montreal, epitomised by the
number of board game cafés popping up
across the city, Dagenais-Lespérance began
to consider an analogue approach. He was
soon entranced.
“ ere were two things that I found really
nice about designing board games: rst, there
was a community aspect. Composing music
is a solitary endeavour most of the time, and
then making games – especially board games- you need to test with people. You need to
physically test the game with other people,
so the community aspect was something that
really drew me in,” he says. “ e other aspect
was the immediacy of it. You could just take
a few pieces of paper and cardboard and
tokens and just do something and then have
something to test, like, right away, really fast,
and iterate on that. ere was also something
very satisfying about that, of having that
freedom of creating something.”
Having revitalised his passion for creating,
the designer set out to ensure that his own
games would strike the right chord.
“I kind of went a bit backward into board
gaming, in the sense that I had this idea of ‘I
want to create board games’ and I started doing
so and then at that point was like, ‘Well if I want
to create board games, I need to play more of
them,’” he says. “I started at that point playing a
lot and always discovering new games because
I felt I need to know what’s out there if I want to
create something that’s relevant.”CRACKING CODES
His e orts paid o . Last year, a game
Dagenais-Lespérance had designed in early
2016, Decrypto, was released. It immediately
garnered widespread acclaim for its inventive
twist on word association that saw two
teams of players working to identify their
opponents’ hidden code – determined by
four numbered words – by deciphering the
ambiguous descriptions given by a member of
each side. Heralded as brilliantly original and
fantastically entertaining, the game instantly
catapulted its creator into the limelight and
ful lled his ambition to be at the forefront of
innovative gaming.
“ ere’s so much competition, there’s so
many people designing games,” Dagenais-
Lespérance acknowledges. “Decrypto, it’s an
advantage certainly for me just in the sense
that it’s really good to just get meetings, to get
people to meet me.”More than a year before Decrypto had
announced him as a talent to watch,
Dagenais-Lespérance had already started
work on his next design. Anomaly began life
as a hidden movement game with elements
of Decrypto-like word association, before its
creator “very rapidly” moved on to something
completely di erent.
“Maybe I could’ve stuck with it and made
it work, I’m not sure,” Dagenais-Lespérance
considers. “ ere’s always an ambiguity
with word associations. In Decrypto or
Codenames or those kinds of game that’s part
of the appeal – that interpretation of word
associations. But for a hidden movement
game... I could’ve probably found a way to
make that work, but the way I made it at that
time – it was just terrible.
“Also, I kind of gured that I just made
Decrypto – maybe it would be more
interesting to try and do something di erent.
Even though I quite like word association
games. But as a designer I think I prefer
having di erent projects.”
A self-confessed “experiment” outside
of Dagenais-Lespérance’s usual design
interests, Anomaly was partially inspired by
a Quebec variation of hide-and-seek called
‘kick la cacanne’.Surrounded by a growing tabletop scenewant to create board games’ and I started doing
so and then at that point was like, ‘Well if I want
to create board games, I need to play more of