Josep. M Alleu: “I don’t think technology is the problem, but the little time we have to enjoy ourselves”

Josep M. Alleu is a renowned author of board games who, in an effort to satisfy his own playful needs, invented a way to extend them to other people around the world. Creator of at least 50 board games, including Go Cuckoo!, Castle Party, Regine and the Colour Monster, based on the book of the same name by Anna Llenas, Josep tells us how he started in this world where playing is the main rule. -What is idealúdica and how are the projects you carry out chosen? “Idealúdica is a company that Dani Gómez, who is my partner and friend, made where we work on projects around the game. Just if it has a playful component, we’re done,” The author begins by describing and adds: “We design games to order, for the big toy companies, they give us the themes they want, we design it for them. Or they tell us Hey! There is a new program that is hitting very hard and we want to buy the license to make the game of the program’, and we designed it for them. They also call us to test toys with children, so we set up the tests,” Explains. “We also do business events, where we are summoned to bring the employees together in an hour and explain the marketing plan, but in a different way, and that’s where we come in with our imprint. The same thing happens from the Red Cross to political ranks that ask us for a design to better communicate what they want say.And as long as we have a game point, we contribute our knowledge”, summarizes about the breadth of your enterprise. He recently released the game that is sold out everywhere called Go Cuckoo! and also edited with Devir for children. “The Color Monster” and although there is no formula that describes why one game becomes more popular than another, Josep knows that the key is to enjoy the process. -How did the idea of the Color Monster game version come about?” They called me to play a children’s game, which is one of the areas where I handle myself the most. I got together with Dani who is my partner in Idealúdica, and we read the author’s books, and of course the book is very beautiful,” she describes about the story shared by the book and the game. “So when we thought about how to make the game, the first thing we said was that it was very nice, but what happens in books, like movies and series, is that they give you everything canned, solved, and the idea in this game was to find a way around it so that you can classify emotions, but let the players do it.”  The Color Monster, board game by Josep M. Alleu“That’s why it was proposed, well, there’s the monster, there’s the girl and we have to help the monster to classify each emotion, but the twist we gave it is that if I fall on the board that has the area of anger, of anger, which is the color red to grab the tile of that color I have to tell something that makes me angry, and there, choose a jar to place the piece, if when you turn it over the color matches we already have a point in favor, since the objective is to put each color token in its corresponding bottle”, details about the mechanics of the game that is planned for the age of 5 and up. “And the important thing, and the purpose of the game, is that both adults and children can express their emotions and there you see the reaction of the little ones who are amazed by the fears of their parents or with the things that make them angry”, he asks about the proposal of his work. “Because many times children have the perception that parents are like superheroes that nothing happens to them, or that they can be happy or angry, but there is nothing else in between. And in this game we have a very natural, and very playful way, the opportunity to share things that are not normally topics of conversation,” Says. We play more or less in this new eraSpecialising in the playful gaze and working with children, Josep answers about technology and the new generations that seem to have been born ready to leave the tabletops and surrender to the screens and surprises by making his analysis. -What is the role of technology in this era? Is play no matter how?
“I think there is one thing that is the impulse to play and that impulse to play is materialized in different ways, so technology is there, yes, and it takes up a lot of your time, but I don’t think we have so much time to be together as a family. I think that if people had to workTo have less, to have more time to enjoy and to have more time with his people, without so many worries, we would play much more”. Observed. “The other day with my family we were all playing Parcheesi from our phones in the same game, and we didn’t care if it was a screen or if it was a physical board because if you ate someone else’s piece we all laughed out loud and the moment of enjoyment was there, present. The support is the least of it,” Highlights.
“Because when you only have 5 minutes between making dinner and taking a bath or whatever, it’s more likely that you’ll turn to a mobile phone than that you’ll take out a board game. Then For me the important thing is the experience of playing, and I think that the life we lead, it is very difficult for us to find time to play and be together and enjoy quietly“, he sums up about the times. You may be interested in: “Meet the creators of SAND, the Argentine game that comes to the world”To close our talk, Josep told us about what it is like to work with Devir and what his preferences are when it comes to playing”It’s like working at home, Devir is a Publisher that takes care of its games. Very large publishers release litters of games and if they don’t work, they discontinue them and release another one. Here, he makes references, makes promotions, takes care of the game. You can tell that they are people who love games,” she says about the board game editor. “I like games, where gambling ends up being an excuse, gambling is 20% of the activity and 80% is what people say to each other, what people get out of themselves, getting together, hanging out. If in a game people forget that they are playing and the talk comes up, and we spend 1 hour laughing at what someone has said, for me that is a round game,” he says about his preferences. And he adds: “I am an author of three axes: Fun, Family and Filler (fun, family and light) we have a fairly wide range of games, my limit is the average Euros” he describes about his personal tastes. “The beautiful thing about the game on a pedagogical level is that you don’t have to put anything inside the child’s head, rather you have to take it out. Because the programming of play is already standard then, it is very different from what happens with a school hour where the children are sitting for 45 minutes looking at a blackboard and that’s it. Because that’s not what it’s programmed for, but to play, yes”, concludes betting on his years of observation, experience and career the author who is one of the best known in the microworld of children’s games.     “When I was studying to be a teacher, I realized that I liked the area of free time more than the area of formal education. So I left the internship and entered as a playroom in one of the oldest toy libraries in Barcelona. And I was there for almost 10 years. We had a stock of 300 games and many discontinued and the children came to play non-stop. And that’s where I really realized what I liked,” he recalls about his beginnings. 

Original source in Spanish