Robin & BYO Draft

Whenever I go to reference this post, I have trouble finding it on GA… because that's not where it was. It was on CoolStuffInc. So I'm reposting this 8 year old article here. With the author credit returned. And edited for modern pronouns.

Lenses for Friends: Making Mechanics Interesting

Last time in Lenses for Friends, we introduced the lenses of gameplay and experience. Today, we're introducing the lens of interest, and sharing a story about helping a friend with it. I've seen more designers struggle with this lens than any other.

Also: check out Episodes 59 and 60 of the Beacon of Creation custom Magic design podcast, to see these lenses used in action. I made a guest appearance helping Bradley Rose, Adam Victor Klesh, and Juliet Louis with their community set, Castmire!

Lenses for Friends: Making Mechanics Play Well and Tell Stories

As some may know, I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on the Beacon of Creation custom Magic design podcast, discussing their community designed set Castmire with Bradley Rose and Adam Victor Klesh. On that podcast, I mentioned something I called "mechanical lenses", which I use to evaluate the mechanics of game designs, especially for custom Magic design. Today, I'd like to begin a series where I formally introduce these mechanical lenses, by telling some stories about how I've used them to help fellow designers with their design troubles. In this part, we'll introduce two lenses which most designers think they're very familiar with already...

The 8 Kinds of Fun

Understanding our audience is one of the holiest grails of game design. Mark Rosewater's psychographics are famous in this community, but he's not the only one thinking about this. A couple years ago, BGG users will remember Quantic Foundry's motivation profile going around. There's the Bartle taxonomy of players types. And I recently encountered another older analysis called The 8 Kinds of Fun.

Here's the oldest post I've found about it, the firstest, and the bestest.

The Emperor's New Clothes & Activity Analysis

Years ago, just as KickStarter was realizing its potential in the board games market, a concept game full of blank components funded and I thought it was all a big joke. At XOXO 2018, I got to play it with its author, Jonathan H. Liu, a gamer so generous and trusting he lent out his game collection for the hundreds of strangers at the conference to borrow and play, unsupervised. Jonathan reviews game at GeekDad and, I now understand, is brilliant. As is the delightful Emperor's New Clothes.

The game comes with a scoring marker for each player and a score track, 10 cubes for each of the three resource types (dignity, gold, and gullibility), 13 role cards, a deck of action cards, three normal resource dice, and a fourth special resource die. Except they're all completely blank.

Multiplicative Design

Today I want to dig into a broad design concept called multiplicative design, and look at how we can approach Magic design through that context.

Why Designing Other Games Makes You Better At Designing Magic

I spent several years before the GDS working on non-Magic games, and the experience I gained from that is what gave me the skills necessary to get second place. I wanted to share a couple specific reasons how designing these games helped me as a Magic designer and to help illustrate an alternate path to becoming a Great Designer.

Wrath Effects Are Bad for the Game.

Hypothesis: Effects that kill everything hurt the game.

A game session is a story. Actually, it's two. One story is being told by the game about the fiction of the game's world. In Magic, it is a story of a conflict between two powerful wizards, whose spell repertoire represents the most powerful magic across many planes of existence. The other story is about the players themselves, and their card-based duel.

Meet the Top 8: Jeremy Geist

I reached out to GDS3 Contestant Jeremy Geist for a brief interview as we ramp up to the show. Click through to find out a little bit about one of the Top 8 competitors.

Dreams

Let's get personal.

My dream job for the last 25 years has been: Magic Designer.

Non-Games

Hey friend. I want to tell you about a game I'm really excited about. It's the most expensive game on the market, and the rulebook is so much bigger than all other games they don't even print it. But it's totally worth it because the theme and the art are fantastic and the gameplay is so deep and fun. I mean, when you get to play; Maybe a fifth of all games are decided by the luck of the draw, though you don't always know that until you've played it out.

Let's talk about game design, variance, and non-games for a bit. Non-Games are experiences that look like games but whose outcome is not influenced by choices the players make. Candyland is a non-game. Some games of Magic are close enough to being non-games that it's a problem worth discussing.

Non-games aren't Magic's biggest problem. A steep learning curve, overcoming the perception of a poor value ratio and appealing to the full potential market are #1, #2 and #3 in some order. I would put the frequency of games that are frustratingly decided by the draw at #4. I'm calling these non-games because they aren't decided by decisions players make after the game has begun (after deck-building and mulligans, which certainly factor heavily). While not the most important problem facing the game, it is important, and it's something we can address.

Match Structure

Currently, match structure at a Magic tournament is this: Play best-2-out-of-3, unless you run out of time. Except 2HG and other multiplayer formats that go long, in which case you play 1 game, until time. Or if it's a feature match at the end of a big tournament, then you play to best-3-out-of-5.

The winner gets 3 points, and the loser 0. Or if it's a draw, 1 each.

Two-Player Draft Formats

I've been doing a good bit of two-player Limited over lunch the last few weeks, and I thought I'd share the formats we've done and considered, and a new one I'm eager to try. All but the last two work with 3 or 4p too.

Cunning Folk available now on kickstarter

Greetings, artisans! You likely know that I design games outside of Magic. I'm proud and excited to announce that my bluffing and deduction micro-game Cunning Folk launched this morning on KickStarter. It funded quickly, but I'd be grateful if you'd take a moment to check it out and see if it's of interest to you.

Conflicting Metaphors—Inspired VS Heroic

Games are metaphors and game designers are poets. In order to make a card feel thematic, we need to find one way to express the concept it represents through game mechanics. That's all that's needed to make a player feel, "Yeah, that is a dragon. That is a unicorn. Yup, that's dark magic."

Collaboration Draft

Collaboration Draft
What I love most about drafting Magic is the interaction between myself, the players on either side of me, and the rest of the table. Game like SolForge and Hearthstone that allow you to "draft" without players lack that interaction entirely, which got me thinking about ways to enhance it.

What if your rank at the end of a draft was based not just on your own results, but those of the players next to you? Not necessarily L+C+R, maybe L+2C+R or so, but the formula's not the point. The point is that you now have a very real incentive to coordinate as well as you can with the players you're passing directly to.