Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #448: Other Wizards Games, Part 2

Episode Date: June 30, 2017

Wizards has made many games other than Magic. So many, in fact, that I needed two podcasts to talk about them all.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last time I was talking about all the different products that Wizards makes, and I got through half a list. So today is part two of other Wizards products. So what I'm doing is I'm going through the history of all of Wizards back from its beginning in 1991 to modern day, talking about all the different games we've made. Now, I did a little bit of research. I have a pretty long list. My caveat, or my, I might have missed something. I think I hit all the major things.

So, if you missed something, let me know. But I tried my hardest to do them all. Okay, so last we left, we were in trading card games. We were almost done, but we have a few left. I talked about Vampire the Eternal Struggle as we left. So now we get to WCW Nitro. Okay, so the funny story about this is, so I guess there's two different big wrestling.

There's WCW, and there at the time WWF, which now I think is WWE, I think. But anyway, I knew nothing about wrestling. I knew nothing about wrestling. But when we had the right for the license, they asked around and said, does anyone want to make a wrestling game? And I was interested in doing trading card game design for new games. So I said, yes. So I did a whole bunch of research. I learned all about wrestling.

I watched a bunch of wrestling. And I made what I thought was a really fun game. The premise of my game was that you are trying to get so much applause. And you win the game by having so much applause. But you have to spend energy to sort of do the moves but the more energy and the more things you do the more applause you get. And so it's sort of like this circular thing where you're trying to generate excitement

by doing cool things. And part of the way of getting extra applause was doing cool combos. So I wanted the game to explain why you were doing all the crazy things you were doing, why you would combo moves together, and the reason was the audience liked it. So the splashier it was, the more applause you would get. So you had a reason in the game to act like they wrestle. But anyway, mine was not chosen. A different design was chosen.

wrestle. But anyway, mine was not chosen. A different design was chosen. So, this is one of those products where I was kind of associated with it, but they didn't actually use my design. I spent a lot of work designing a wrestling game, but it is not the wrestling game that became WCW Nitro.

Next, Xena Warrior Princess. Okay, so this is a third arc game. I talked about it last time. C23 and Hercules The Legendary Adventures, I think it's called. Legendary Journey. So what happened was we made three different versions of the Ark system. They came out three consecutive months. The idea, the plan for the Ark system was that we would just get lots of licensees

and just have, hey, your entry into Magic is whatever license you like. And that, you know, the idea was we'd have 20, 30, 40, 50 different you know, trading card games on different licenses and that if somebody wanted to make a trading card game, we'd make the ARK system and that would be introductory and we'd have a lot of different ways to learn.

So anyway, the first two ones, we did one of our own, C23, and then we did two that we got licenses to which was Hercules and Xena, which I know some of R&D were giant fans of. I mean, I did not watch a lot of Hercules or Xena, but we knew that there were a lot of fans. We ended up getting the show a little toward the end of its run, so not at the height of its popularity. And the ARC system just never quite took off. hate of its popularity. And the ARC system never,

just never quite took off. I did a whole podcast on it. So if you wanted the blow-by-blow of the ARC system and what it is and how it works, you can go listen to my podcast. Okay, next, Shaolin Showdown. So Shaolin Showdown, I'm trying to remember this.

It might have been based on Shaolin soccer. It was based on some property. I think it was based on a property about monks who play soccer, I think. It's my gut. I did not work on this, so I vaguely remember us doing it. But I don't remember exactly the mechanics or anything. Okay, next is the X-Men trading card game. Now, I, for those who don't know, I'm a giant comic book fan.

So I was really excited. X-Men, oh, I want to make the X-Men game. Because this is back in the time where I was, you know, now most of my time is spent doing magic. But back in the day, I spent plenty of time on magic. But I was trying to do a lot of other designs. And so I was eager to do more trading card game design.

And as we just made less magic products less than, I was looking for other things to do in addition to magic. So I wanted to do the X-Men game. I was quite excited. But it turned out that they used a system from a previous game that we already had, and the thing that saddened me most was it wasn't

a combat system. It wasn't a combat game. It was like, I don't remember exactly, but one of those games were like you're trying to achieve points or something and I'm like, wait, wait, how do we not have a combat game? Like we are the experts of trading card games that are about combat and you have an IP, the X-Men, that literally built into the IP is an explanation why any two characters would fight. You know, like, in the X-Men comics, there's a thing called the Danger Room in the X-Men.

And the idea of the Danger Room is it's a place that they practice so they can, you know, get better at using their skills. So they would fight each other in the Danger Room. They had special alien technology so they could fight, you know, holograms of their enemies in the Danger Room. So, like, anything could happen in the Danger Room. So, like, anything could happen in the danger room.

So, like, you could have a game where just anybody could fight anybody and, like, the IP explains it. Plus, it's a comic book IP about people who, like, the idea of conflict and combat not being the center of the X-Men game seems crazy to me. It was one of those games that came and went,

so it never became a big thing, but it always saddened me. I think it was tied to the first movie, if I remember correctly, that back in those days when we were making a lot of trading card games, a lot of them were just like, oh, here's a quick little thing to tie into a movie or something, and so. The one last thing that I remembered that I wrote down, and I didn't know the name of it, something else that we did, although we didn't do it in the U.S. office, but I remember we had at least one European soccer. I want to say FIFA, but I'm not 100% sure it was FIFA.

But we definitely had a very big trading card game that was meant for the European market and beyond that was based upon one of the big soccer clubs, one of the big soccer organizations, or football organizations, I guess. They call it football in Europe. But anyway, I remember we also did that. So that is all the trading card games I remember.

I'm sure I'm forgetting one or two here or there. And there are a lot of trading card games that we didn't make. One of these podcasts, I made a Dungeons and Dragons trading card game with Scaf Elias and David Eccleberry that maybe one day I'll talk about. It never got made,

so it doesn't quite technically fit the list today. These are all games we did produce, not games we made and didn't produce. Okay, next we move on to miniatures. So let me explain a little bit about miniatures. So, and this goes back to when Peter Atkinson was the president. So this is pre-sale to Hasbro. Is Peter said, you know what?

We have, and this is after he bought Dungeons & Dragons. So after we bought TSR. He said, okay, we have the definitive number one trading card game in the world with Magic. And we have the number one role-playing game with Dungeons & Dragons. But, you know, there are three big markets in sort of core hobby gaming. And that is trading card games, role-playing games, and miniatures. He goes, but we're not even in the miniatures game. We should get into the miniatures game.

So we hired people that, like, knew their stuff on miniatures. And we got into miniatures game, we should get into the miniatures game. So we hired people that knew their stuff on miniatures, and we got into miniatures. And so what I want to talk about is some of the stuff we did in miniatures. The thing that is interesting is, a little side story, is one of the big shifts in miniatures, for those that don't know the miniature industry. So miniatures go way back. Miniatures, like I did a podcast on Dungeon Dragons, I talked about how it was miniature wargaming that Dungeon Dragons came out of miniature wargaming. So miniatures goes way, way back.

But it's expanded over the years. One of the big things about miniatures is this... They used to be made out of metal, and then you would paint them. And there was this whole craftsman side to miniatures, that you would get them, and that you would hand- hand paint them and decorate them. And so we hired the people.

They were really old school miniatures. And at the time, the idea came up that what if instead of having metal miniatures, we had plastic miniatures? Because plastic miniatures, we could pre-paint. And the people at the time were like, no, no, no. The whole fun of it is to get the miniatures and to paint them. And that's a big part of the process. You know, to shift to plastic would be the wrong thing.

That's just, you know, losing the spirit of what makes miniature miniatures. And anyway, what ended up happening in the miniatures industry is the shift to plastic that there was a giant shift to preformed plastic because it allowed you to do a lot more what you could build in metal versus what you could build

in plastic plastic could do a lot more and it could be pre-painted and it turned out to be like the big innovation in miniatures and the funny thing was we were sort of there

and had the opportunity to do it. Now, we would later get into plastic. I'll talk about it a little bit. But we actually kind of were on the opportunity to sort of beat the curve and be the innovators. And we opted out of it, which is an interesting sort of story.

Okay, so access and miniatures. So access and allies. Well, we have Avalon Hill, and so I don't, we don't, I don't think we currently make miniatures anymore. There was a period where we had a miniature department make miniatures, so these are all in the past. So we had access and allies miniatures,

and the idea was that a lot of access and allies, it's you know, it's wargaming, but the things that come with it are not, because it comes with the game, are not as detailed. So we made Axis and Allies miniatures where if you want more exacting details of the planes and tanks and all the stuff, that you could do that. We made D&D miniatures, which were for your, you know, Dungeon Dragon playing. Like I said, Dungeon Dragons kind of came out of a miniature background, and there's always been a lot of...

There is a style of play of Dungeon Dragons where you have figures that represent the members of the party and the monsters, and you have a grid, and it's very physical. Not everybody plays that way. A lot of people just sort of talk. But there's a group that really enjoys the physical aspect and use miniatures. So we made Dungeon Dragon miniatures. We also made Star Wars miniatures at the time because we had the Star Wars license.

I talked about the Star Wars trading card game. And so we made a miniatures game using Star Wars characters. So you could have the Star Wars. And also HeroScape. I think HeroScape was originally out of TSR, but that was kind of the introductory, you know, it was sort of a fantasy-themed thing

where you would get miniatures, and it was kind of like a precursor game to Dungeon Dragons. It had a board, and it had pieces, so it, I mean, I could have put this in board games, I guess, but it had miniatures as a big component, so it got listed under miniatures. Okay, the one other big push we made,

and this was the one thing we did do in plastic, in pre-painted plastic, was this called Dream Blade. And that was our big push to try to sort of be, you know, to get into the miniatures market in a big way and be our own new game. And we did a big push on this. We did a lot of tournament organization stuff.

So what Dreamblade was, the attempt of it was, we were trying to make a little bit more of a mass market miniatures game. Something that was a little easier to get into, a little shorter play time. The thing about traditional miniatures is A, you know, A, you had to buy the metal pieces and paint them, so there's a lot of work to get into them, and they took a lot of space, and they took a lot of time, and it just, you had to be really dedicated to play miniatures. I mean, there's lots of people to do, but it just required a lot of investment, and so the idea was to try to create a little bit less investment. This is the move,

the miniatures market has moved into this space. We really weren't the leaders in this space, but it moved in the space. There's still old timer miniatures that play, you know, with giant armies and take hours and hours. But there also is a move of more miniature games that are a little faster, come pre-painted so you don't have to make them. And that's just become something that's become a bigger part of it. Like I said, we really aren't in the miniature

business anymore, so it's not something that, I mean, I'm aware of the business just because we're aware of general gaming. But not something that Wizards really has a lot of attention to anymore. Anyway, Dreamblade made an interesting choice. They decided to set it in a dream

world, allowing us to have factions that could be completely different sort of genres. And so it allowed us to sort of have like just to go in a lot of different places. And the IP I remember there was a lot of quirky things. One of the enemies was like a giant pair of scissors that chased you. And the game definitely had a lot of tongue-in-cheek sort of qualities to it.

You know, a lot of sort of fun attitude. The problem in the end was twofold. One was the IP was kind of so broad that it didn't have enough definition. That in kind of including everything, we didn't end up sort of having a feel to it so resonance wise we were affected and um in the end we just didn't make a game i mean we were our own ip so we weren't using you know a lot of miniatures games are using hey do you like this thing do you like this ip and so a lot of miniatures revolve around people having some some affinity already for what the thing is And we did a brand new thing people didn't know. It was kind of

very broad. And the game, I played once or twice. I mean, I think the game just didn't catch on. I think it was an interesting game, but it just, for whatever reason, you know, some games are what we call sticky, and some games aren't. You know, some games people just want to play again and again. Some games are like, oh, I played it once. Okay, let's try something else. So anyway, Dream Blade didn't end up being a big success. So online, so there are a lot of licensed things. That's not what I'm talking about today,

so I'm not going to go through all the licenses. There have been a lot, a lot of Dungeons & Dragons licenses, a few Magic licenses. The two games a lot, a lot of Dungeons & Dragons licenses, a few Magic licenses. The two games that we've made internally, just to mention, is Magic Online and Magic Duels, which was formerly called Duels of the Planeswalkers. Magic Online, we'd wanted to make from the very early days, but it took us a while to get the technology we needed. We ended up working with a company to make it. Magic Online started

the first set on Magic Online was Invasion. We since went backwards and filled in most of Magic. The reserve list that we can't print in paper, we can print in digital. So that does exist online. And we've done a lot of sort of online vintage master stuff online.

There's still individual cards that don't exist, although we've hit most of the cards that people actually play in vintage. So we've replicated it. So not 100%, but mostly you can play competitive vintage decks, at least on Magic Online. And we've over time tried to include the vast majority of cards people actually play. Tools came about because we were interested in getting on consoles and we wanted a Magic experience that was Magic but a little

like Magic Online was meant to replicate Magic exactly. It's exactly the experience. We know there's a lot of people who like to play Magic but don't have the ability to get out to the store, and giving you the ability to play Magic at home, just, you know, expose Magic to more people to let them play. Magic Duels was designed a little bit more of an entry-level project,

intro, entry-level product that could help teach people Magic. And Magic Duels has appeared in a bunch of different places. It's been on a lot of the consoles. It's been on iOS, so on the iPhone. It's been on Steam. And like I said, it started as Duels of the Planeswalkers, was its original name, and then slowly morphed into Magic Duels.

But anyway, those are the two online games that we mostly internally made I guess Magic Online started with us partnering with somebody and Magic Duels in each case

we partnered with somebody outside but most of the work was inside and it was our card so it wasn't it wasn't like we licensed the game

to somebody else and they made their own game it was somebody else working with us to make Magic in both of the games you are playing Magic Magic Duels it's a little bit of a streamlined version, but it is still magic. Okay, now we get into role-playing.

So, Alternity. So, Alternity was made by us right after we bought TSR, trying to make a science fiction version of Dungeon & Dragon. So, it used the D20 system, but to use all the tropes of science fiction. It didn't really take off. Ars Magica 3rd Edition Supplement was pre-Magic.

It's one of the two things that we made. So one of the things that Wizards of the Coast made in the early days with a small company was it would make things that would be supplements for existing role-playing games. In this case, Ars Magica, which is a pre-existing game. D20 Modern, D20 System. After we bought Dungeons & Dragons, they opened up the system to a lot of other people.

They licensed out the D20 System, so you can use the core rules of Dungeons & Dragons to make your own trading card game. Not trading card game, role-playing game. Dreamcraft. I'm not sure what Dream card game. A role-playing game. Dreamcraft. I'm not sure what Dreamcraft is. I don't know all these. Dungeons & Dragons. Obviously, I did a whole podcast on that.

That's the reason we bought TSR. It is the very first in the pinnacle role-playing game. Everway. Everway was a role-playing game made by Jonathan Tweet, who worked at Wizards for a long time, worked on Magic for a while. Everway was a role-playing game that the shtick was, instead of rolling dice,

you had a deck of cards that had pictures on it, and you used the pictures as inspiration. So there's a randomizer, but there's a randomizer that was a little more oblique and less number-oriented and more image. And anyway, I've been told it's a very popular product and people are very excited. It's been discontinued a long time.

It's become sort of a cult role-playing game. Gamma World. Well, Gamma World is also made by TSR. I talked about when my friend and I, my friends and I down in LA used to play. We alternated between Dungeon Dragons and Gamma World. Gamma World's a post-apocalyptic game where radiation is your

friend, where people play mutated animals and things, and you're going through this post-apocalyptic wasteland, finding wastes of things once upon a time. It's fun. Marvel Super Heroes Adventure, which is, I think, something that TSR did, that we did for a while, we no longer do, which was a Marvel game. You play Marvel characters, and it was a superhero role-playing game. The Star Wars role-playing game, well, when we had the Star Wars license, we made a trading card game, we made a miniatures game, and we made a role-playing game. So you could play in the Star Wars universe. I don't know whether or not you, I think you could play the characters if you wanted to. I assume we gave you the stats. But it was also just like, hey, do you want to be a Jedi

in the Star Wars universe? He'd let you do that. Finally, the Primal Order. So the Primal Order was also pre-magic. It's the big thing that Peter did. And what it was, was it was a role-playing system that dealt with different planes and gods. I think at some level this might have been something

to help influence Richard. I don't know if the idea of a multiverse was something Richard brought to the table or something Peter brought to the table. In fact, now that I think about it, how many of you Peter brought that to the table? Peter really loved the idea of multiple worlds. Yeah, and it's quite possible that it was,

I mean, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm sort of extrapolating knowing Primal Order that Peter was really interested in and it explained how to build a system of of having multiple worlds into your role playing system and Peter was super proud of it. There's a card in Homeland's cult Primal Order

which is a nod to this game and it's the fact that Primal Order had any success, like had Wizards of the Coast gone out of business, there would be no Magic now, I think, because without Peter and, you know, him sort of prompting Richard, I don't know if Magic would have gotten made,

or at least the chance of being where it is today is a lot less. So Primal Order, you know, once again, Magic owes a little bit of debt to Primal Order. Okay, next, card games. So we've made a lot of card games that aren't trading card games. So Alpha Blitz was made by Mike Selinker.

It was a word game. I don't remember all the details. Earthquake was a magic-themed game. So we made two games, Earthquake and Instinct. One was a trick-taking game that Bill Rose designed, and one was a general game that used magic. The trick game used magic symbols so there were five suits each of the five colors. I think that was Instinct and then Earthquake I think was Mike Elliot's

game that was a strategy game that used five colors that were the magic colors and I think it used a bunch of magic imagery. Both Earthquake and Instinct used magic imagery. They were sort of magic-themed games, but they weren't magic. They were separate games, but they used magic iconography and stuff. Filthy Rich. So Filthy Rich was a card made by Richard, inspired by his trip to Hong Kong for the very first Magic Invitational. So one of the neat things about Hong Kong was it's this ancient, ancient cities,

but with these very modern trappings. For example, you would see these buildings that must have been thousands of years old with neon lights advertising things on them, with billboards and stuff advertising. And Richard was fascinated by this. So what he did is he made a game where you have a binder, like a card binder, where you have nine by nine, three by three sleeves, and there are multiple sleeves in a row. And the idea is you put advertisements in sleeves, and as long as people can see your advertisements, you score money for it. But people can put stuff in front of you and cut off the ability for other people to see you. And so what happens is you sort of go to different parts

during the page and you get money. And the idea is the closer up you are, the more you block other people. But as people sort of go to different vantage points, the farther back you are, the more people can see you no matter where you are, but you can be blocked easier. But anyway, it was a fun game.

It was a very unique game. Richard really, Richard's a great designer and he's you know he's very inventive and this is just him doing like a really different kind of game next Go Wild was another card game we made it's one of the number based games

it's a sequential number game once again I've not played some of these games in so long I believe it was designed by somebody in Europe, a European designer who'd made other games, that we just liked this game and printed it. Next, Guillotine, made by Paul Peterson, who used to work in R&D.

The premise of Guillotine, it's a great game. We still produce Guillotine. You can still buy it today. It's the French Revolution, and you're on line for the Guillotine to get your head chopped off. And so what you're trying to do is manipulate the line so that other people, you know,

you adjust the line so you're not, and everybody's in line and they're trying not to get their head chopped off. And so you're manipulating the line and then I think the game ends when somebody gets their head chopped off and everyone else wins, I think. I haven't played the Guilty in a long time either.

It is very whimsical. It's a card game in which there's a line of people and you're manipulating the line. It's very tongue-in-cheek and a lot of humor. It's kind of dark humor, obviously. You're in the line of the Guilty. And Paul Peterson's gone on to do lots of other stuff. Look up his name. He's been at a whole bunch of different companies

making all sorts of fun games. So go check him out. Next, Infighting. I-N-N, as in like an inn, like a hotel, whatever. Infighting was a game with a Dungeon Dragons theme. It's a tavern brawl, I think, something. Once again, this is one of, something. I don't know. Once again, this is one of those games that I don't know if I've even played in fighting. But I know there's a period

of time where most of the games we made were tied to one of our main products, and this was tied to Dungeon Dragons. Next is Mad Scientist. Mad Scientist was made by Sean Carnes. So Sean Carnes, who we used to call Captain Volume.

There was a period in time in the pit where I was the third loudest person in the pit, which is funny if you know anything because I'm really loud. Sean was number one. Sean worked for a long time in customer service, and then he came over to R&D. And Sean was really funny. And just when he would get frustrated sometimes, he would just scream at the top of his lungs.

And he was super funny. Once again, like Paul Peterson, Sean's out there in the gaming world. I mean, he hasn't worked at Wizards in years, but you can look up, find his names on stuff. So Sean was hilarious. And anyway, Mad Scientist was a game where you played

a mad scientist and you were trying to, I think, take over the world was the premise of the game. And once again, it was a very comical game. Cards.

And we put it out for a while. There was a period where different points in Wizard's life where we produced a lot more games.

Right now, we're a little bit more focused on our big games. But there's a point where we owned The Game Keeper, which was a retail store. I'm sorry, not The Game Keeper. It was Wizards of the Coast branch, we bought The Game Keeper. And turned it into,

it was Wizards of the Coast branded retail stores. And during that time period, we were making a lot of games to put in the stores. I think that's when Mad Scientist got made. Next, Pivot. Pivot is another number game that somebody else made, I believe, that we licensed and sold. I think the idea was it was a number game where you're trying to get cards out of your hand and the numbers were going up or down

but you could change where the numbers were going up or going down and so it was one of the games where you're trying to get the cards out of your hand but you were controlling going up and down the numbers Next, Great Del Moody The Great Del Moody was a game that Richard made pretty early on like before I got to Wizards and it was based on an old card game, although he sort of added some rules and added some flavor.

And the idea is, it is a game in which, if I remember correctly, it's 1 through 10. I think there are 10 10s, 9 9s, 8 8s, 7 7s, 6 6s, 5 5s, 4 4s, 3 3s, 2 2s, 1 1, I think. And the idea was, you were trying to get rid of cards in your hand. And what you did is you placed some number of cards face down. And then people could either challenge you or not. If they challenge you, if they don't challenge you, you're fine. If they challenge you, you reveal what you put down.

If you were telling them the truth, they take all the cards in the pile. And if you were lying, you take all the cards in the pile. So the idea is you want to get rid of all your cards, but you have to be careful because if someone calls you and you're lying, you take all the cards in the pile. So the idea is you want to get rid of all your cards, but you have to be careful because if someone calls you and you're lying, you can get in trouble. So it's a bluffing game. We made a version of it called the Corporate Shuffle, which was a Dilbert-themed version of the game. So it's the same game.

It has a few little twists when we add it in the Dilbert part. But anyway, we still sell The Great Dalmoody, I'm pretty sure. It's a fun game and a pretty cheap game. So anyway, if you ever want to... It's a fun... It's a very light,

easy-to-learn game. So if people ever want to do that, I would recommend it. Next, Three Dragon Ante. So Three Dragon Ante was another

Dungeon Dragons-themed card game. So what happened was in Dungeon Dragons, Three Dragon Ante was another Dungeon Dragons themed card game. So what happened was, in Dungeon Dragons, 3 Dragon Ante was a game that got invented to be a game that got, I'm using quote marks, played within the role playing game. And the idea was, it just was a game that they'd made up that was a fictional game that like when you're hanging around in the tavern before you go on your dungeon crawl, maybe you play some 3 Dragon Ante.

And then at some point, they were looking for games to make that were Dungeon Dragons-themed games. And they said, hey, you know, this game's existed forever within-game. We should make it. And so they did, and it's a fun game. And so, you know, it's, especially for fans of Dungeon Dragons, you know, it's a game that the existence of the game long exists the game, the actual game.

Okay, the final game, I'm almost to Rachel, so I'll talk about my final game, which has a funny story. It's Twitch. So Twitch, okay, the premise of Twitch is that you sit around in a circle and everybody has a bunch of cards that they're trying to get rid of,

that shuffled cards in a stack, and then a bunch of cards that they're trying to get rid of, shuffled cards in a stack, and then you have one penalty card. And so the way the game works is I flip my card and then my card has information on it that'll dictate who the next person to go is. Maybe it's the person to the left. Maybe it's the person to the right. Maybe it's

two to the left. Maybe it's two to the right. You know, the game starts going clockwise, but maybe I alter it. So not only, you know, maybe it's the next person supposed to go, depending on what order it's going in. Maybe I reverse the order, and then the next person in the reverse order is supposed to go.

Maybe, you know, and so the idea is there's a bunch of different things of what you're trying to do. And the idea is, so for example, there's left and right, but then you can play cards that reverses the order. So that means is when someone plays left, it really means right. And when it plays right, it really means left.

And so what happens is it's a, it's what we call a Twitch game. That was a R&D back, Richard used to have the thing that he set up in that, what was it called? It was a, it was a folder all about talking about games. What was it called? It was a folder all about talking about games. What was it called? Anyway, we had a folder on R&D to talk all about Capshaw, I think it was called.

Capshaw. It was a folder to talk about games, and Richard really was big on game terminology, to talk about kinds of games. So one of the kinds of games he talked about was what he called a Twitch game, which is, it's a reaction game. It's all on speed and reaction. So we ended up calling this Twitch, about he called a Twitch game, which is, it's a reaction game. It's all in speed and reaction. So we ended up calling this Twitch because it was a Twitch game.

There was no Twitch game called Twitch. So the interesting thing about this game is the behind the scenes thing is Richard made this game. In fact, I think he had made it before I even got to Wizards. It took numerous years for us to actually print it. And R&D used to play this at night. And if you did not know this, R&D is a competitive group. So Twitch is fun. And I think Twitch, for most people, is kind of a lighthearted game. And oh, ha ha. Oh, so if you, I forgot to explain the game correctly. If you throw the wrong card, if it says, hey, person to the right, it's your turn. And the person to the right

isn't fast enough. If somebody else can throw their penalty, hey, person to the right, it's your turn, and the person to the right isn't fast enough, if somebody else can throw their penalty card before the person to the right throws their card, or if the wrong person threw their card, you can also throw the penalty card. So the idea is, if you can be faster than the person whose turn it is to go,

then they have to take all the cards in the pile and put it on the bottom of their thing. And so, R&D treated this game like it was the Olympics. Like the most serious thing ever. And they used to bend the cards so that they could grip them faster. Like the Twitch deck that we used to play with had bowed cards because R&D wanted to make sure that they could grip them as fast as possible. And

watching people that knew what they were doing play Twitch was like, it was the spectator sport because it would go so fast. It was intimidating when I was learning how to play because I didn't want to play with the R&D folk when I first was learning because they were

so blisteringly fast that it just, it was, it was, it was truly a thing to watch because, like, the differential between card throws would be second,

would be, like, half second. You know, someone would throw a card and, and so anyway, it was, when I first started learning,

you know, I would get penalties all the time. Like, even when it was like, okay, person to the right, and I'd go, hey, I'm the person to the right. And I would throw my card, like not even, I wouldn't, and I would be too late. You know, the penalty card would already be thrown. And it was, it was this neat thing. And then we finally published the game what happened was

we decided to there was a push to make a bunch of trading card games and then like Twitch and Alpha Blitz and Go Wild and Pivot I believe were all made at once that we really wanted to get in more and we realized that we

hey, it was easy for us to print cards you know, we printed a lot of trading cards. And so we started to do a whole line of card games. Anyway, none of them really took off. Twitch, I think, was one of the funnest. Like, once again, I don't think we sold Twitch anymore, but if you find Twitch and you use the thing, it's a fun game. I'm not sure it's fun at the competitive level that R&D was playing.

That was more of a, that was an amazing thing to watch as a fun game. I'm not sure it's fun at the competitive level that R&D was playing. That was more of a that was an amazing thing to watch as a spectator. It was an intimidating thing to actually play. But anyway, I'm now driving up to Rachel's school. So that, in a really long definitive list in two whole podcasts, was every, with a caveat,

maybe I forgot one or two, every game that Wizards of the Coast made. It's very easy to, you know, I know that we are known for Magic and Dungeon Dragons and Duel Master and, you know, those are our major games right now. But along the way, in the last, you know, 25 plus years, Wizards has made a lot of games, a few of which I've had a hand in,

most of which I haven't. And like I said, check out the Wizards of the Coast site. A lot of the games, a lot of the A've had a hand in, most of which I haven't. And like I said, check out the Wizards of the Coast site. A lot of the games, a lot of the Avalon Hill games I talked about. Axis and Allies, Diplomacy, Robo Rally, Great Del Moody, some of the Risk variants. There's a whole bunch of games we still make. So go check our site. If you haven't tried some of these, some of these you have to go to e stores to find, but we've made a lot of fun games. What Were You Thinking? and Twitch, and there's been a lot of great games we've made over the years. So my recommendation to you is go check it out.

And anyway, guys, I'm now at Rachel's School, so we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.