You know too much to build it well

Toronto, 2024. Christopher Westmaas is a game designer almost unknown in the international scene. He doesn't have dozens of titles under his belt, nor a BGG profile rich with declarations. He has an idea — and he takes it to the right publishing house.

Kids Table Board Gaming was born from the obsession of Helaina Cappel — a teacher with twenty years of classroom experience, wife of game designer and illustrator Josh Cappel. The frustration was clear: children's games were boring for adults, while adult games were inaccessible to children. KTBG was founded to bridge this gap. Their motto has become a manifesto: making casual games for serious gamers and serious games for casual gamers.

Lairs arrived at Gen Con 2024 as a prototype. Those who played it at the exhibition table immediately realized there was something strange about it — in a good way. Two months later, the Kickstarter opened on November 12th with a goal of CA$40,000. It was funded almost on the first day. It closed on December 5th with CA$262,588 raised and 2,402 backers — almost seven times the goal.

What's striking about Lairs, looking at it from the outside, is that it has nothing revolutionary in its form. Two players, a fantasy dungeon, dice, and cards. What's new is in the concept: you're not exploring a dungeon. You're exploring the dungeon that someone else built to stop you — and in the meantime, you're building yours to stop them.

First phase: construction. Each player takes the exact same components — the same walls, the same traps, the same monsters, the same treasures — and behind their screen builds a dungeon. They build it for someone else. They already know they'll never enter it.

Second phase: exploration. The adventurer enters the enemy dungeon without seeing anything. They ask: what's around me? The opponent answers — they know everything, but they must tell the truth. The explorer notes it down on a sheet, builds the map in their head, deduces, takes risks. They move with action cubes, can peek into adjacent rooms, can run through unknown corridors and hope not to land on a trap.

There's something that refines itself game after game. The dungeon you build in the fifth session is different from the one in the first — not because the rules change, but because you change. You learn to think like your opponent. Or at least, you think you do.

The most perverse thing about Lairs is this: while you guide your opponent through the rooms of your dungeon — answering their questions, indicating where the walls are — you are also watching where they are going. And you know exactly what awaits them.

There's a precise moment in Lairs where you realize you're losing. It's not when you step on a trap. It's when you realize you're building your dungeon thinking like yourself — and your opponent doesn't think like you.

The construction phase seems simple: place traps where you think your opponent will go. But where do you think they will go? Where you would go. And that's the problem.

Psychology

The Curse of Knowledge In 1989, researchers Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber described a phenomenon they called the Curse of Knowledge: once you know something, it’s almost impossible to imagine what it's like not to know it. Knowledge distorts perspective — those who know can no longer think like those who don't. In Lairs, this mechanism is activated in both directions. The architect knows every corner of their dungeon — and tends to overestimate how difficult it is to navigate it without that knowledge. The explorer, on the other hand, faces an opaque space, builds an incomplete map, and often makes rational decisions that the architect judges as obvious or stupid — because they already know what's behind that door. The result is that the worst dungeons are not the most complicated ones. They are those built by someone who couldn't forget where the traps are — and assumed their opponent would go exactly there. Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber — Journal of Political Economy, 1989

Lairs is one of the few games where losing reveals something precise about you: not that you were unlucky, not that the rules were unbalanced. But that you still don't know how to think without knowing.