DESIGNER-STUDY · 2026-07-21
Inside Michael Brough's Philosophy — Shrink the Board, Keep Only the Choice
868-HACK, Imbroglio, Cinco Paus and the design thinking behind the 'Broughlike'
Introduction
Few designers have their own surname turned into a genre. Michael Brough is one: his habit of exploring a single facet of the roguelike on extremely small grids came to be called the 'Broughlike' (Wikipedia). 868-HACK is 6x6, Imbroglio 4x4, Cinco Paus 5x5. The board keeps shrinking—and yet the play, rather than thinning out, grows denser.
I (Kizuki) want to profile him because that shrinking is not a mere quirk but is backed by a clearly articulated design philosophy. This essay is not a walkthrough but a study of Michael Brough the designer himself—his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences—quoting his own interviews. I give the English quotations as they stand, each linking to its source. What he says has been consistent for over a decade, and it reads more coherently the more you return to it.
Background — from mathematician to roguelike craftsman
Michael Brough was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1985, and holds a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Auckland (Wikipedia). Almost unknown in Japan, he has been recognised in indie circles since the early 2010s as a maker of unusual roguelikes, building Zaga-33, Corrypt, 868-HACK, Imbroglio and Cinco Paus, mostly alone.
He is a designer who understands games within genres, and his focus rests on the roguelike. At the IGF, VESPER.5 and Corrypt were Nuovo Award finalists and 868-HACK and Imbroglio were finalists for Excellence in Design (Wikipedia). There is no flash to it. But the precision of a design in which, on a pared-down board, every single choice bites, has influenced many other designers.
Philosophy — look closer rather than go bigger
At the centre of Brough's thinking is the conviction that making the board bigger is not progress. He notes that the large board of the original Rogue (80x20) drives the player down long corridors while 'not making choices,' and, invoking chess (8x8) and Go (19x19), says, 'You should never need a larger possibility space than Go' (PRACTICE 2013 talk, quoted from the talk by Wikipedia).
In his Imbroglio interview this conviction is even clearer: 'While bigger spaces are fun to explore, at any given moment, you're only interacting with your immediate surroundings'—so by cutting out the rest of the map and zooming in on one room, you can focus more on the details of those interactions (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2016).
What is striking is that he frames smallness not as a constraint but as freedom: 'It feels quite freeing to start making something so small and then realise how much space you still have.' He goes on: 'chess is 8x8 and has fascinated people for centuries. But somehow in videogames, the tendency has always been to go bigger and bigger, just because you can, rather than to look closer' (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2016). I read this as the first principle running through all of his design.
Obsessions — pare one mechanic until it shines
The counterpart to the shrinking board is an obsession with 'cleaning up an idea to reach its heart.' Discussing Cinco Paus, he says, 'I get a lot out of cleaning up ideas to get at the heart of them.' Roguelikes, he notes, pile up overlapping progression arcs—item identification, collecting better gear, experience, descending floors, learning spells—and 'it's messy.' He counts them off one by one and asks, 'how many of these do we really need?' (Game Developer, 2018).
Another obsession is making everything himself. All the sounds in 868-HACK were derived from his own voice. He says, 'there's a singular focus you get from everything being done by one person.' Yet he does not treat this as an absolute rule, honestly adding that he has worked with others on sound and writing a few times (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2013).
In developing Imbroglio this paring-down crystallises into specific numbers: a 4x4 board, four enemy types for the four corners, four kills to level, four levels to gain—'From those numbers—4x4 tiles each taking 4x4 kills to level—you get that it takes 4^4 = 256 enemies to complete your board,' he calculates (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2016). The hand of a mathematician, I feel, shows directly in the design.
Failure and recovery — tripped up, again and again, by too much ambition
Brough does not hide his failures. 868-HACK is described as the product of 'basically forever' spent trying to make roguelikes and tripping up on oversized ambition. Completing Zaga-33 for a seven-day roguelike challenge taught him to strip down to bare essentials—and four too-big, unfinished roguelikes still rattle around his hard drive (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2013). That confession of 'four unfinished games' shows that his faith in smallness grew out of frustration.
He is candid about how design begins, too. He always starts from a clear idea, but it 'turns out to not exactly work'—'it always takes experimentation to actually get there' (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2013). His way through is consistent: not one big swing, but making many games, releasing them fast and learning from the response. 'You'll get better quicker by doing that than by trying to make your Giant Dream Game,' he advises (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2013).
Design dilemmas — authorship versus commerce, and a discomfort with violence
In 2013 a debate broke out in indie circles about his finances—why not polish more, make things more commercial? Brough pushed back: 'Some people seem to believe once you have a polished game MONEY HAPPENS, but no, you can't count on it' (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2013). He also refuses the 'outsider artist' label: 'It feels like appropriation. I'm not an \"outsider\" anymore'—to call him one, he says, is unfair to those genuinely struggling in obscurity as he once was (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2013).
A second conflict he speaks about openly is violence. Discussing Cinco Paus, he admits discomfort that his games put killing at their centre: 'I make these games with killing, but I'm uncomfortable enough with this that I...try to avoid making killing things the main goal' (Game Developer, 2018).
Yet he does not resolve the tension cheaply. When he tries the 'more complex path' of modelling a non-violent ecosystem, 'it gets messy and complicated and it doesn't usually get anywhere,' so he uses the convenience of simplified conflict (you versus the enemy)—a convenience that outweighs but does not eliminate the discomfort, he says frankly. And he calls on fellow developers to 'keep asking... challenging these defaults' (Game Developer, 2018). That he refuses to present the problem as already solved is, to me, a mark of honesty.
Influences — mathematics, Rogue, and conversation
The influence he names first is the classic roguelike. He cites Castle of the Winds as an early inspiration (Wikipedia) and notes that Cinco Paus's unidentified-item idea already existed in 1980s Rogue. Rogue is a touchstone he returns to again and again—and also the starting point of his critique that 'there's this tendency in games to repeat features out of habit' (Game Developer, 2018).
Mathematics is less a hidden influence than an avowed foundation. He says, 'there's very much an aesthetic element to mathematics... I don't see these thing as being in conflict,' revealing that he has taken to calling himself an 'artist' (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2013). His references to chess and Go extend from the same mathematical sensibility.
Easily overlooked: he draws design seeds from conversation too. The starting point of Cinco Paus, he states plainly, was a conversation with fellow designer Zach Gage about item identification in roguelikes (Game Developer, 2018). Contrary to the image of the lone maker working in isolation, his ideas grow inside dialogue with his contemporaries.
Kizuki's reading
From here on this is my (Kizuki's) interpretation, not something he said. I read Michael Brough as someone who wields subtraction not as humility but as aggression. Shrinking the board is neither modesty nor thrift; it is interrogating each feature—'is this really necessary?'—and cutting away whatever cannot answer. That blade is turned on convention, on his own past work, and on the very premises of the roguelike genre. When he calls Imbroglio 'quite contradictory—a long leveling arc inside a tiny space. But it works as a game, and I hope the perversity adds a pleasant tension,' I hear an affection for the strange thing that remains after all the cutting (Gamasutra/Game Developer, 2016).
And one more thing. As a mathematician he seeks the 'correct minimal form,' but when he speaks of his discomfort with violence he has not forgotten what minimisation drops—the rich, inconvenient relationships that lie outside simplified conflict. What makes him interesting to me is that these two coexist: a craftsman who pares down to the heart, and, at once, an observer who keeps noticing that the heart has cut something away. His small boards are a statement of cleanliness and, at the same time, a quiet record of guilt over what was cut—so I read him.
In closing
If you are coming to Michael Brough, start with 868-HACK. On its 6x6 board, the tension of danger rising the more resources you siphon makes his 'look closer' philosophy easiest to feel. Move on to Imbroglio, pared to 4x4, and the paradox that a smaller board yields denser play becomes plain. Cinco Paus—released in Portuguese only, and divisive for it—is the advanced course for tasting his 'trust in not-understanding'.
As related reading, Kizuki's pieces on this site also cover Zach Gage (his conversation partner behind Cinco Paus's spark), Jason Rohrer (who plays with life and death through constraint), and Zach Barth (who polishes single mechanics). They are designers linked by the theme of small boards and few rules. Read side by side, you can see how the single word 'cut' carries an utterly different philosophy in each maker's hands.
References
Primary sources and references cited in this article:
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The Designer's PhilosophyEpisode 29 of 29