Our guest Giovanni Galanti interviews Olivier Arneodo, director of the gaming monthly French magazine “Des Jeux sur un Plateau” (JSP for friends).

GG: I don’t remember how I discovered JSP. I remember I searched it in the newspaper kiosks. I bought three or four issues of it and I discovered that there was some continuity in the quality of articles; moreover, it was increasing more and more with the passing of time.
Today JSP is one year and a half old: a similar journal on board games would hardly exist and survive in Italy (well, with the exception of the previous paper version of GiocAreA, the last experiment in the field – editor’s note).
How can JSP survive in France, where the conditions are not so different from Italian ones?

GG: The idea of JSP was born within Olpan, the publishing house. Can you tell us something about it?
OA: Olpan is a firm of five persons that revolves around three axes. We make books for the Reader’s Digest selection, for which we are paid yearly, we do graphical creation and we produce all the support material for stands and promotion: catalogues, magazine rack, film posters and many other things. We deal with products from A to Z, from the creation to the press.

GG: How could such an initiative work in France and how could it reach positive results against the difficulties of the market?
OA: It is difficult to give an immediate answer; there are some aspects to underline. The first aspect is: why to launch such a magazine and with which goal in mind?
It is necessary to know that when you launch a magazine and you create a company to do it, you have a probability of 99% to close down, because on one side you have to spend to be known and on the other side you need to amortize the expenses as soon as it is possible. But in our case we existed already from 8 years and the magazine is only a part of our activity, I could say that it represents maybe the 20% of it. It is clear that the public of board games is not enough that a company can survive with a magazine: until some time ago the money lost with the magazine were covered by the rest of the lines.

GG: Was this fact foreseen by you?
OA: Yes, it was. Each time we gave us stages: we begun in the specialized shops and we said: «we do five issues of the magazine and then we’ll see. If it is worth the effort we can pass to the newspaper kiosks, otherwise we stop».
The public in these shops answered positively; then the last year, in June, we begun with the newspaper kiosks. Then we decided we could continue until Christmas: if there would have been a positive evolution we would have continued, otherwise we would have closed it. Today we practically do not lose money anymore, the readers follow us and appreciate the magazine.

GG: Why trying all this, then, if not because of a mad passion?
OA: In fact, first of all because I am keen on society games from many years. I was nostalgic of Jeux et stratégie, and from 15 years there was nothing similar to it. In all honesty I felt its lack.

GG: But there was already Jeux en Boîte (another famous French magazine – e.’s n.).
OA: Yes, but Jeux en Boîte is not a competitor because, as I see it, it is a really well done magazine, which is addressed to a public of expert players. Because of its circulation, its contents and a certain austerity in its presentation: it is all in black and white, with the exception of the cover.
We never put ourselves at the same level because, even if we started in the specialized shops, our goal was to reach the newspaper kiosks. When we begun it was partly because of our passion, partly as a challenge, as in a game. Then we got overwhelmed by the game and now we try to do always better.

GG: You said that the public of Jeux en Boîte is made by expert players. While JSP public is..?
OA: We try to reach every type of public. The magazine is divided in three thirds. A third is on reviews and is not addressed to players but to persons who want to discover games. A third are leading articles and some of them are very specialized, for players, like those of Faidutti or Ehrhard, those on the status of society games, or the place of classical games among society games.
The last third is the gaming part, that is the problems, that address to everybody and most of all to players. When I say players I should say internauts also. That is, today there are two main media, Internet and the printed paper. Our viewpoint is to try not to compete with Internet because clearly we have not the same responsiveness neither interactivity. Then, as the players surf on Internet, we have to present articles that complete what we find on the web.
On the other hand the big public does not necessarily surf, so they can be interested from texts. On the contrary the player is not interested in reviews because the game does exit today and tomorrow you can go on Trictrac (http://www.trictrac.net) where there are already fifty opinions. Two months later we cannot say anything new. Instead, we can add something on the “by-products”, that is to do a guide, a game aid.

GG: Then, what are the reviews for?
OA: The reviews are necessary to inform the big public.
Today the magazine goal is to reach the big public and maybe to pass to the distribution of Toys’r’us or Grande Recré (big distributors with big department store chains specialized in toys – r.’s n.). Otherwise we would have remained in specialized shops, as Jeux en Boîte does. And to reach the big public it is necessary to do an appealing and enough informative magazine.
The reviews are there for this reason while some articles may interest the big public. Especially in the interviews, some professions can be discovered: it happened in the issue with the interview on the university Master in Sciences of Game.

GG: In the reviews each game receives votes in twentieths, following the French school vote system. Fifteen points are given for the interest of the game, while the remaining 5 are divided among the materials and the clarity of the rules. The risk is that some games without interest regain points because they have clear rules and pleasant components. At the beginning the risk was higher because the points were divided 10-5-5.
OA: first of all, I don’t think there is a voting system absolutely good.
A vote is necessarily subjective and it can be always discussed: it is nothing more than the reflection of what the reviewer thought when she played the game. It is possible that the day after she re-plays it and changes her opinion.
Even if the votes are distributed on 4, 5 or more parts to remove this subjectivity, you cannot eliminate it anyway. Moreover, about the fact to divide the vote in three parts: I think that a game needs well explained and clearly written rules and it must have quality materials to be a good game. And today the clarity of the rules plus the materials represent 5 points on 20. We try to weigh the vote by adding the vote of other persons. The goal is that the reader can recognize herself in the votes of one of the critics. Moreover, when the vote is different from that of the other critics we try to give a brief explanation to indicate if what is negative can be considered positive by the reader or vice versa. But it is true that I am not completely satisfied by the voting system; but I didn’t become enthusiastic over any system.

GG: I think that it is right to divide the vote between rules, materials and interest. But to assemble the three votes, I don’t like that. I prefer that they would remain separated. I don’t like to see a bad game that makes up for it is well realized and the rules are well explained.
OA: But insignificant games can recover at most 5 points: they will have 7 points in the best case. It is right to put in parallel the different votes: today I believe that the mean is 15. If a game receives 10, it is below the average.
It is necessary to extrapolate with respect to the votes that are meanly given on JSP. Effectively I do not remember a vote below 5, but 10 is below average: I would not buy a game that has a 10.

GG: Talking about to buy… can I ask you some numbers?
OA: we have a print run of 15.000 copies and we sell a different number of copies for each issue. A particular case was the issue on LES CHEVALIERS DE LA TABLE RONDE (SHADOWS OVER CAMELOT, published by Days of Wonder – e.’s n.), sold in 6500 copies; generally we sell between 4000 and 5000 copies.

GG: And the other two thirds?
OA: The other two thirds go to the retting-pit for economical reasons.

GG: Is it because 15.000 copies are the minimum threshold to be taken into consideration?
OA: Because 15.000 coincides with the number of served newspaper kiosks.
This allows us to be present on 5000 selling points out of the 32000 ones that there are in France. But, since one month we have we subcontracted to a society that is charged with the optimization of our presence in the newspaper kiosks. For example we have decided to put the summer number in the stations, the airports and the coastal cities.
So we think to lower the print run because it is not useful to reach a newspaper kiosk that doesn’t sell the issue or does not present it in an adequate manner.
This will allow us to diminish the print run and to have fewer expenses.
The objective is to optimize it with respect to our selling points. In this manner we can be more precise and to sell more in proportion to what we distribute, and maybe even in volume because what sells three today will sell five tomorrow.
When we will arrive to the maximum number of sold copies with respect to the print run, we will increase it and so on.

GG: I have found often newspaper kiosks that ignore what JSP is, other times I found it out of place…
OA: I have found it among magazines dedicated to cooking.

GG: … And there are so many magazines about video games that the other ones have difficulties in emerging.
OA: After the assumption of this company, we have tried to innovate to be more visible.
The innovation is the insertion of free gadgets (for example an extra knight of SHADOWS OVER CAMELOT or a little expansion for MEMOIRE ’44 – e.’s n.). When we put a gadget the newspaper seller puts the magazine well in sight because he thinks he will sell more of it: so not only he will expose it, but he will expose it in a manner that it will be more visible.
The principle of these gadgets is that we have more visibility at once and that we attract readers that won’t otherwise acquire the magazine. In this manner the persons discover the magazine and perhaps they will continue to acquire it.

GG: Let’s take a foot backward: how many subscribers?
OA: 1.200-1.300.

GG: Sincerely I thought more, as they are the “hard core”.
OA: No, I want to say that it does work very well, and the rate has remarkably increased. Moreover, we have a renovation ratio of 95%.

GG: In the last issue I saw the proposal to subscribe for two years!
OA: It is what I was going to say! This high ratio of renovations of subscriptions means that, even by remaining on low numbers with respect to print run, readers who know JSP are satisfied.
This means that we can continue our efforts, because who has the magazine is satisfied and who does not read it, it is because – in some sense – she does not “see” it. And this offer of 24 numbers is a surprise even for me.
It was Oriol Comas i Coma, a Catalan author of games, that is a subscriber since the beginning and called me saying that he wanted to subscribe for 24 months. It was a thing I didn’t foresee, so I didn’t have any fare to propose him. This gave me the idea.
We had 20-25 subscribers in about one month.

GG: You told me that the Asmodée publishing house is part of the distribution circuit. This does not create an interest conflict? Doesn’t it have an implicit power, to impose the test on its games, or put them forward?
OA: No. If we look for them, we find that there are not so many reviews of Asmodée games. There are, but they are in a reasonable number.
And we must consider that Asmodée is mainly a distributor. And, by definition, if you want to reach the shops you must pass through a distributor. This distributor is an editor also. But our world is a little one, where everybody knows everybody: the persons of Tilsit of Days of Wonder or Asmodée. They do not exercise any stronger pressure by distributing the magazine. Asmodée should do – I am not sure of it – about 18 millions of euros per year. They sell 700 copies of our magazine every month. This gives an idea of what we are for them.

GG: But it is true that the magazine is read by some persons that can make other persons read it, or try with other players some games rather than other ones…
OA: I can say that they do not exercise any pressure on us. It is not in their interest to do that. We have a completely different view. For example some editors – not Asmodée – proposed us to enter in our capital. But this is not our point of view. Moreover I don’t see which type of pressure they could exert: we have begun the distribution in shops through Asmodée with the issue no. 14 and we did it alone, before.
On the contrary, there are some important things we are going to do with them and with Days of Wonder, as today we are pointing to extend our field of action and to increase our visibility: putting handbills of our magazine in the boxes of the games, so that when a player buys a game, she can buy a JSP spending only one euro more. A thing we do also with a company of us, Inhumans Interactive, that does video games distributed at the FNAC: we have inserted a handbill with an offer coupon for JSP in each box.

GG: Will you increase the advertising pages to increase the earnings?
OA: At the moment we have very little advertising, for two reasons: the first one is that we have 56 pages and we have much news to put in them.
From September we will begin to have more advertising: from companies that do DVDs and from magazines on PCs. At this point we would like to increase the number of pages and then the price but I don’t think it is a good solution. Vice versa, if we do not increase the price we cannot increase the number of pages, because it is not advantageous. So we are obliged to contain the number of advertising pages to not lower the contents. For the September issue we had many more candidates and we decided to spread them on the following issues. Not everybody accepts this, and this is a problem.
The second reason for which we have not much advertising is that we are little and we are in a very little world. The only ones who could do advertising are the editors of our size: Tilsit, Days of Wonder, Asmodée, Interlude, Gigamic… These persons do not gain enough on games to pay advertising because a page of advertising, whichever is its price, is related to a certain volume of sold: in France, a game sold in 3000 or 4000 copies is an extraordinary fact. With the exception of very rare cases, there are not selling volumes of hundreds of thousand.
There is another target that could be interesting: telephony, hi-fi, video, computer science, access providers that are interested in the same public we are interested in. This type of advertisers, when they discover our print run is 15000 copies, laugh at us.
The price of our page is not high, but we are in a system where it is difficult to find advertising because we are too little, or too big and therefore too expensive.
It is necessary to find the right medium.

GG: Continuing to talk about publishing houses: how do you see French market with respect to France and to foreign countries, especially Germany?
OA: If I would be a game publisher, I would do a game in three languages: English, French and German. To do a game only in French, today, is an economical heresy.
I think that the French market is in big expansion: the players are more and more and the occasional players buy more and more games.
The market is in expansion because today people like to meet other people around a table to play together, and it is no more a shame to be thirty years old and to play. About Germany, I think that it is always the market that drags but it is in stagnation and it scans other horizons...

GG: In fact the German companies have begun to present the games with rules in different languages: China by Abacus has rules in 4 languages.
OA: Yes, and it is interesting, too, to note that a magazine like Spielbox has a print run of 13000 copies, a very limited number in a huge market. France, instead, is filling the delay, but it is important to not go too fast: the editors must be cautious to not destroy what they are building. The market does not grow by itself but only if us, as actors, aid it to grow.
On the other hand it seems that a new market was born, the Asiatic one.

GG: They are almost exclusively pub games. And in the pubs the player are more on playing rather than buying.
OA: It is true, but in the meantime new games are discovered, persons play them and perhaps buy them. But it is not a thing that happens overnight.
On the French market there are three categories of publishers: the very big ones, not necessarily French ones, like Hasbro; the very little ones (Paille Éditions, Interlude) that occupy a niche and can exploit it very well; and then the ones that are in the middle (Asmodée, Days of Wonder, Tilsit). This last ones have to be the locomotives but being very careful: Tilsit had difficulties, problems...

GG: Has it overcome them?
OA: It seems so. Last year they have published an amazing number of games.
Perhaps a strategy could be to rely on Days of Wonder – as it had the Spiel des Jahres for TICKET TO RIDE – to create something great: for example LES CHEVALIERS is a super game. They have a very specific range of games that costs much, but with nice materials and some interesting games that can drag up the market.
The same for Asmodée, thanks to its activity of distribution and publishing. So, there are many things to do in the next years.

GG: There are five persons who work in Olpan: all of them collaborate to JSP too?
OA: No. On the long run, I and the person who does the page proof, we work on JSP one week per month. We cannot involve the 100% of the persons of a company for a magazine that covers the 20% of the activities.
The remaining ones are collaborators: today we have between 20 and 25 of them.

GC: Are there any girls?
OA: Only one. It is not a voluntary choice, but it reflects the gaming world, that is mainly a male one.
The group of collaborators grew progressively.
At the beginning I searched collaborators for a certain type of games: one dealing with family games, another one for German games, one for abstract games, another one for 2-player games, etc.
We started with 5-6 persons that suited with these characteristics. With time, our needs grew in terms of novelty and differentiation of themes, we expanded and other persons candidate. And there never were girls who proposed themselves, with the exception of one, that corresponded to the required profile.
But I am very open-minded.

GG: In Germany, on the contrary, there are many girls that like to play. It has to be a cultural fact...
OA: Without any doubt. The majority of us come from role-playing games, which is a mainly male environment too.

GG: Or it derives from the childhood education: the females can play only until a certain age, while the males have more freedom...
OA: Is it possible that this is true. I don’t know the reason, but it is so.

GG: Let’s go back to JSP: the reviews seem more a description that a critic, more suited to the big public, as you said.
They allow the reader to discover a game rather than to make her own opinion on it.
OA: You can note that in each issue there are games for the kids, for the big public, German games, 2-player games. In the games for the big public we do not enter too deeply in the description of the mechanics or the tactic, that sometimes doesn’t even exist and that does not interest the readers.
On the contrary, if you do the test of TOWER OF BABEL or LOUIS XIV, in those articles you go deeper in game mechanics.
If you are talking about CRANIUM, you are forced to be descriptive. There are some articles that have to be descriptive, other ones that have not and some that are half-and-half, like LES CHEVALIERS.
In MANILLA the mechanic is redundant, that is it is always the same and the game is given by the atmosphere.
If you have to fill one page because it is a topical game, then you have to describe it. The choice of the collaborators follows this: I ask to be descriptive to some of them but not to other ones. Fabien is never descriptive because he writes only about “big” games while Rody, who works in a games store, writes about games for the big public.

GG: Manila makes me think to the Spiel des Jahres, which was won by Niagara.
OA: Without any surprise, for me. When I was in Essen the last year and I discovered the game, I discussed with Manu and we know it was a serious candidate.

GG: The aesthetic of the game allowed it to succeed.
OA: To win the Spiel I think that there are two criteria to respect: the beauty of the components, as you said, and – more important – the accessibility to all the players.
NIAGARA is not necessarily a game that you play for a long time, but it is the typical game: you open the box and it is attracting at first glance, with the board that symbolizes the waterfall, the little wooden boats and the precious stones... you can play it with persons of any age and they will find it nice.

GG: What is interesting is that in the same year there were three French names in the list of the suggested games and among the candidates to the SdJ: Himalaya, Diamant and La fièvre de l’or (Boomtown – e.’s n.).
OA: Yes, perhaps this is a part of the speech on the German market that opens more and more to foreign countries. I don’t like LA FIÈVRE DE L’OR very much, while I adore DIAMANT, even there isn’t a real strategy. The authors are Alan Moon, the 2004 Spiel winner, and Faidutti, maybe the most famous among French authors.

GG: looking at 2004 games, the impression is that the previous year there where more interesting titles...
OA: I didn’t know two of them: JAMBO and VERFLIXXT. Among the three I knew – HIMALAYA, NIAGARA and AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS – I thought that they were good in categories very different one from the other. But HIMALAYA was really a gamers’ game.

GG: Do you think they were particularly innovative in the mechanics?
OA: No, I don’t think so.

GG: Going back to the starting point, you said that the idea of JSP was born from the fact that you are a player. What do you play?
OA: I like gamers’ games, the games that last long, the headache games, like STRUGGLE OF EMPIRES or HIMALAYA. This does not mean that other games do not involve me: as an example I like SHADOWS OVER CAMELOT because I find it new, innovative, and I like the cooperative aspect. While I don’t play games based on the atmosphere at all.

GG: Like Les loups-garous de Thiercelieux?
OA: Yes. Without mentioning names, I don’t like games where there is too much luck. I like to lose because I am not good at a game, I don’t like to lose because there is too much luck.

GG: So Can’t stop and Geschenkt are “out”?
OA: I like CAN’T STOP.
I like GESCHENKT too, because there is a bluff atmosphere on the table. But it depends on the people you play with: it is similar to POKER, that I like.
What I don’t like at all is a game where you are ahead and then you become last and at the end, by an upset of the situation, you manage to win. I don’t like this at all.

GG: The last question: why the name JSP “Des Jeux sur un Plateau”?
OA: Because our ambition is to talk about board games and in French the expression “ammener quelques jeux sur un plateau” (“to put some games on the board”) means to propose to play.
Here we propose games, so there is a pun on “plateau”: we propose board games, and we present them on a board/table. But, then, everybody calls the magazine “JSP”, simply.