The Venetian fire that put a name on every box

In Venice, somewhere among the calli, in 1978 a studio catches fire. Papers, letters, manuscripts burn — twenty years of a writer's work. When the owner returns and sees what remains, he realizes he will no longer write novels. He is fifty-six years old, his name is Alexander Randolph, and he had returned to Venice six years earlier, in 1972, to stay.

Venice was not a romantic choice. It was home. The Randolph family — his father Sacha Finkelstein, a painter, and his mother Mary, an American sculptor — had lived in the city since 1924; Alex and his half-brother Christopher had spent their childhood and adolescence in Venice, between Swiss boarding school and afternoons on the lagoon. In 1938, as war approached, the family moved to a ranch in Arizona. Alex, who still had no birth certificate or official nationality, stayed behind for a few months and then left on the SS Excalibur.

After the war, twenty years in Boston working as an advertising copywriter. He wrote stories, novellas, and tales for his niece. And he invented games, in the evenings, in his spare time — without thinking they could be sold. In 1958, traveling in Vienna, he showed a paper and pencil game to his friend Herbert Feuerstein at the Café Hawelka. The first 23 games are still documented. Four years later, that game was released in a box under the name Twixt. From there came his first paid job as a designer — 3M hired him along with Sid Sackson to found their games division.

Then six years in Japan with his wife Gertrude, playing shogi at a master dan level. Rome. Finally, in 1972, he returned to Venice to stay. The studio. Six years of work that burned in 1978. And that fire did one specific thing, which the German biographers of the Deutsches Spielearchiv in Nuremberg soberly state: it closed his past as a writer and opened his future as a full-time professional designer. From that moment on, only games were designed in the re-established studio.

To understand what Randolph opened up, one must imagine a world that no longer exists. The 1970s, a Monopoly box, a Scrabble box: turn the box over, read the flap, read the bottom. Nowhere do you find the name of the person who designed that game. The publisher exists. The product exists. The designer is an internal, anonymous figure, paid a lump sum — an industrial technician, not an author. Randolph's own games were often signed with six different pseudonyms: L. W. Bones, J. Phumby, P. Halvah, because publishers didn't want too many titles by the same name in their catalog.

Randolph, who knew everything about books because he had spent twenty years writing them, immediately saw that this was an anomaly. A book has the author on the cover. A painting has the artist's signature. A musical score has the composer's name. A game does not. A game is the only modern cultural object whose inventor is invisible. After the fire, after having had to re-purchase the rights to Twixt himself, a battle began that would last twenty years and that is the true Root-gene of all his work.

The battle has a documented and almost comical turning point. Nuremberg, February 1988, toy fair (Spielwarenmesse). During an informal evening organized by Reinhold Wittig — the father of the gathering of German game authors — someone took a beer coaster and wrote a single sentence on it in German. The translation is this:

That evening and the next day, thirteen authors signed. Wittig would later recount receiving two very good contract offers if he would destroy the coaster. He didn't. Three years later, in October 1991, again at the Essen fair, the SAZ — Spiele-Autoren-Zunft, the "guild of game authors" — was founded, with Randolph as a co-founder alongside names like Wolfgang Kramer and Klaus Teuber. In 2001, three years before his death, he was named Ehrenzunftmeister, honorary master of the guild. From that coaster came everything else: the names of the authors on German boxes first, then Italian ones, and finally American ones. When you pick up a box of Wingspan today and read "Elizabeth Hargrave" above the title, that line of print originated in Nuremberg, on a beer-stained coaster, in February 1988. The coaster is preserved at the Deutsches Spielearchiv. You can still see it.

In Venice, around Randolph, a small school of designers formed in the 1980s that would become a serious endeavor. The first to appear in his studio was a twelve-year-old boy who played chess at a club in the city center. His name is Leo Colovini, born in 1964, and for the next twenty years, he would spend almost as much time in Randolph's studio as Randolph himself — first testing prototypes, then co-signing them. Inkognito, Carolus Magnus, Cartagena, Clans — catalog pieces that anyone familiar with eurogames would recognize — originated from that studio. Around them came Dario De Toffoli, Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello (the authors of War of the Ring), Dario Zaccariotto.

In 1992, within the Inventors' Corner at the Gradara Festival, Studiogiochi set up what two years later would become the actual Premio Archimede — chaired by Randolph until his death. In 1995, Randolph founded Venice Connection with De Toffoli and Colovini; the following year, Studiogiochi was established in Sestiere San Polo, where De Toffoli and Colovini still work today. But the most vibrant piece of his legacy is not the publishing house — it is the competition.

Randolph's legacy is not in a mechanic. It is in a practice: every two years, in September, in a grand hall in Venice, someone shows a box and a German publisher signs it. The fire of 1978 burned a writer. What remained is the first professional of our craft — and an Italian city that, once every two years, becomes for a week the capital of unpublished board games worldwide. On Randolph's tomb, on the island of San Michele, it is written in French Ci-gît Alexander Randolph Inventeur du TwixT. But the most important invention is not Twixt. It is the fact that every modern game, somewhere on the box, has a name.