To dream up board game Life in Reterra, Eric Lang spent four years trying to forget

“My personal point of view as a designer,” Lang told me in a recent interview, “is to prove that the lines between what we call ‘mass market’ and ‘hobby market’ are mostly illusion — illusion and artificial. People are people. Fun is fun. Depth is depth. Of course, everybody has different tolerances, or [wants] different amounts of depth in the game, but there’s no one, weird, single, dividing line between what is in the mass market and what’s not. That’s all been decided by buyers at retail.”