Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #578: Transformers TCG

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

My carpool guest Scott Van Essen and I talk about the design of the new Transformers Trading Card Game, which he and I both worked on.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. And I have a carpool guest. Say hi, Scott. Hello. So this is Scott Van Essen. So real quick, Scott, give a little explanation of who you are. Sure. My name is Scott Van Essen. I was a finalist in both the first and the second Great Designer Search. And that second one ended up getting me a job on Duel Masters. I am now the lead designer for Duel Masters and have had my head in a couple other games,

including the Transformers trading card game. Yes, so I mentioned a while back that I had had a hand in working on the Transformers trading card game, and a lot of you said, oh, you've got to talk about the Transformers trading card game. So I decided to bring a special guest. So Scott and I were the two that worked on it the most of the earliest. There were some other people that worked on it later on in the process that had a big

impact. We'll talk about that. But anyway, we had a chance to sort of start from nothing and make something. So we're going to talk all about that. I can't wait to tell you everything. Okay, so here's how the story starts for me, and then Scott can jump in on his part. So Charlie Cattino, who I've talked about on the show many times, who was one of the original playtesters who was on the playtest team, made Mirage and Visions. Charlie actually is in charge of the other

trading card games at Wizards, the non-magic trading card games. Mostly that has been Duel Masters. Right. But we decided to make a brand new trading card game for Transformers. And the problem that Charlie had was, once upon a time, we used to make a lot of games in the pit. We used to design a whole source of trading card games.

In the past, I had worked on the Star Wars trading card game. I had worked on the Duel Masters, originally, trading card games. In the past, I had worked on the Star Wars trading card game. I had worked on the Duel Masters original trading card game. I had worked on a bunch of trading card games that didn't actually make it to the public. But I had worked on a lot of trading card games. So Charlie had come to me and said,

look, we don't have a lot of people with experience making trading card games. Would you help out? And luckily, my schedule had some time. So I actually worked on Not Magic. So how did you get involved, Scott? A somewhat similar process. I had known that there was a desire within the building for a trading card game for kids.

There had been some sort of rumbles that there was something there. And so I actually started a side project with a co-worker of mine, Ali Medwin, who now works on Magic Digital. And we had just started working a little bit on gross concepts, ideas for what we could do. And that positioned me well. And since I already worked for Charlie on Duel Masters, he asked me to participate in the creation of the game. And Ali Medwin also continued to make contributions throughout that process. So one of the things that's really interesting

about this game was the game started by saying, okay, it's a Transformers trading card game. Right. I know early on they were trying to figure out what the best... We wanted to make a kids' trading card game, and there's a little talk about what made

the sense to make for a trading card game and we knew that we wanted to use a property that Hasbro owned, because we're owned by Hasbro, for those that didn't know that. We wanted to have a strong IP that people would get excited about, that had a preferably that had a lot of nostalgia and that we knew that both kids and adult gamers

would enjoy and I was not part of those explorations, but when the decision was made, it was pretty clear that Transformers was a fantastic choice for making this game. Yeah, by the time we were both brought in, we were going to make a Transformers trading card game. Neither of us had any input on what game,

but it met all the criteria. It was a Hasbro property. Anyway, so when we started, the design started with the following premise, which is we were going to make a kids' trading card game that adults could play that, you know, did the best it can to be the most awesome Transformers trading card game it could be. Right, which meant we needed to start from the beginning and throw out any preconceptions we had, just build it from the ground up. One of the things that we identified from a very early point in time was that we wanted to use this opportunity to have oversized cards for the Transformers characters.

They needed to be double-sided, which meant that we couldn't have them be part of a deck that you shuffled up, because we couldn't obviously guarantee that you don't know what card's coming when it's a double-sided card. So it was a very obvious step for us to get to, let's have these be separate in some way, and we didn't know which way initially, but we had the opportunity to say, let's make these big, let's make these exciting, let's make these impactful, let's make people excited to just hold them in their hands. Right.

There was two things that I said right one was we wanted awesome transformers and clearly clearly they had to be double-sided cards like if we didn't have a card that on the front was optimus prime and the back was a truck like we we have failed to make a transformers trading card game we would have gotten a lot of angry letters especially mark would have gotten a lot of angry emails um so so a we we knew that. The second thing was, one of the questions you always ask is, okay, we're making a trading card game. What is the inherent conflict you expect? Like, what is the goal of the game? And, look, the Transformers IP is about fighting robots. That is what it's about. It's not like it's like Optimus Prime doesn't solve crimes or something, you know.

Right, right. Like, you know, the Autobots, the Decepticons, the Autobot Decepticons are battling each other, right? Right. From the beginning, we identified three major pillars that we wanted the brand to hit. One, it had to be about giant robots battling. Number two, we wanted to have the Transformers have a sense of heft and scale and just durability. And number three, we wanted it to be meaningful that they were flipping back and forth between modes. Like, you didn't want to be just a robot or just a vehicle.

It wanted to matter which one you were, and you have reasons to change from one to the other. Yeah, I mean, part of what we're saying when we knew we wanted to have Optimus Prime in the back have a truck, it had to matter, like from a game design standpoint, hey, you wanted to care that you had a truck and you wanted to care that you had Optimus Prime and the fact that it could flip back and forth was important. You wanted, like, that had a matter. So we started, the premise that we started with is, and this was from the earliest versions I remember having, is I'm going to have some robots. You're going to have some robots. They're going to be represented by giant cards.

They're not going to be in your deck. They're just going to start the game in play and you're going to fight. And the end condition was my robots knock out your robots. I think that was from the very, very early part of the game. That was very early, but it wasn't the very first thing. We had earlier versions of the game.

Some of our very first explorations, we said, can we make this, can we use some of our existing systems? We wanted to say, you know, are there aspects of Magic or Duel Masters that we could use to sort of serve the needs of the game? And we wanted to have, we were considering the necessity of having some level of deployment or progression in the game. Because one of the things that's been very successful in both Magic and Duel Masters is that you start with an empty board and the game progresses, the game escalates.

And so some of our earliest explorations had a separate deck and maybe you sort of mobilized Transformers. And, oh, I get my little guy and then my medium guy and then my giant guy. But none of those ended up being satisfying so we did very quickly by the time Mark came into this have a much more of a you have a team and they have a team yeah the very first version I ever made

you had a team I had a team and like your team was always there and the goal was to beat the other team I never had a version of my version but and I made it that wasn't true. And I have to say, we made dozens of versions. Oh, many, many versions. Some of them lasted a playtest. Some of them people worked on for several weeks or even months.

But we went through version after version after version. So something to explain, because you guys are used to me talking about magic design. The one thing about designing a known system is you're not trying to sort of create the system. What's really different about making a brand new game is you're trying to understand what the system is. And so when I'm designing a set for magic, like magic's defined its system. I'm not really, I might be inventing new mechanics, but I'm not defining the system. So trading card game design is a little different

from expansion design, because you really are trying to understand the, what is it, what is it, what are you trying to do? What is the scope of what you're trying to do? And while we very early on figured out we wanted giant Transformers that you could, you know, had two sides, and they weren't going to fight the other ones. That was the only thing we really knew early on. There's a lot of other things we were unsure of. I mean, I guess, okay, the other thing we knew is there were going to be normal-sized cards.

We knew you were going to have a deck. It's a trading card game, so you had to have a deck you built. Right, we wanted to have a deck-building component. We wanted to have an ability to customize your team, not just your team, but how your team fights. And we felt that battle cards, in one way or another, would give you more opportunities than just saying, all right, I've got two robots and you've got two robots

and let's bang on each other. We wanted to have room for surprises and for special moves and for ways to take advantage of board situations that you might not have expected for the beginning of the game. Right, one thing that was important for us was we didn't want the outcome of the fight to be dependent solely on just the Transformers by themselves because part of what's fun about a game is oh you don't quite know what's going to happen and so we figured out pretty early on

that the deck was going to be a lot of the variance of the fight. That the things were going to happen in the deck that said, oh, well, what happens? I'm not quite sure what's going to happen. That was one of the things when you start with stable pieces is you need to make sure you have enough variance

because you don't want it to be, oh, the same thing happens every time. Like one of the things about Magic is you have nothing until you draw stuff, so every game is different because what you draw is different. But if we had a game like Transformers where, look, I know Optimus is always going to start the game and play. If too much of the game is dependent upon things they're doing without any input from your deck, it would be boring

because every time it would just do the same thing. That's right. We also had another challenge creatively, and just from a deck, it would be boring because every time it would just do the same thing. That's right. We also had another challenge. Creatively, and just from a feeling, it was important that the Transformers feel like the most powerful objects in the game. And we wanted to feel like it's these giant robots smashing into each other, and less so about the cards you're playing. And yet from a game design perspective, want the the cards that you're playing to contribute significantly to the power um one of the ways that we ended up doing that was to say the ways that the most of the cards generate power is to funnel through the transformers themselves and through the transformers fighting um so there was it was important for them both to

contribute to the power of the game but for the feeling to be mostly on the Transformers characters themselves. Yeah, one of the things that was true for most of the design was you had the Transformers as separate cards, giant separate cards, and that the deck that you were playing with was enabling them, but the Transformers were always the cards in front of you, and then your deck was actions or things that enhanced, or it was always about how do i help my things fight um now one of the things interesting is there were a lot of questions we had to answer like one of the questions we knew we had to answer is look clearly

at some point the truck had to turn into optimus prime right at some point like you you needed to have them in their different states, and the game needed to give you a reason and a way by which, you know, the truck becomes Optimus Prime. That had to be important to the game. And we also wanted big, dramatic moments. Like, for example, we knew we wanted back and forth. That we knew we wanted, that forth, that we knew we wanted that when I'm fighting

your robots, that it's not like I just hit you once and you're done. Right. So that first said to us we needed to have some sort of sustained damage had to be persistent. Magic doesn't do that. And magic, and Richard did this, I think, to simplify a lot of things, there's no persistence of damage. Either your creature takes enough damage to be destroyed, or it heals at the end of the turn, essentially, and next turn it's got to take that much to be destroyed. Where, in a game where we knew we had sort

of giant robots that start the game in play, and had to slowly be defeated, we needed some kind of persistent damage. And that was something we talked a lot about because persistent damage requires you tracking things. And this was a kid's game. Oh, we should talk about this a little bit. One of the things about it being a kid's game was we wanted to make sure that it wasn't super difficult.

Like the difficulty level was something that was always on our mind, that we wanted something that kids could learn, but something that wasn't like so complex that like, you know, our target audience just couldn't learn to play. That's right. We talked a lot about making it, we wanted it to be fast and fun, and we wanted to have very lenticular card designs so that, you know, it's very common on an open board

where you say, you know, if I have three characters and you have three characters, there's nine different combinations of attacks that I could make. And that's an actually reasonably difficult strategic choice for people. Oh, do I want to attack here with that guy or attack here with this and save my main guy? But for kids, you can say Optimus Prime is to get you, and it simplifies it for kids. And so it's a wonderful example of lenticular card design, because kids can just say, I want to attack, and you go straight into that. And more invested players can say, now, which is the best attack?

Right. We spend a lot of time talking about who gets to attack who. Because one of the problems we knew was, so let's say you start with, during early design, it was three on three. But the finished game is not quite that. But one of the things was, oh, well, if every time I decide which of my robots is the one fighting and which of your robots it's going to attack, that's a lot of combinations. And so we spent a lot of time early on trying to figure out how to dictate so that there was some order to what was happening. That's right.

There were early versions that, in fact, your version was almost they just lined up and you attack the person in front of you, if I remember correctly. Right. Most of my versions you had, the way it worked was you had a, what do you call it? An active robot? Yeah, like an active robot. So like one of your robots was pushed forward and the idea was you had to rotate between the robots. But always the active, my active robot would always fight your active robot. So you knew who was going to fight. One of the things that I tried to do,

was I was trying to find the simplest way to do the game. One of the big things, having worked on a lot of other trading card games, was it's very easy for trading card games to get complex. And so I was really tolling the line, trying to make the simplest version possible. The finished product's not quite as simple as some of my versions, but a lot of what I tried to do, like, yeah, most of my versions, who fought who was kind of the game told you who fought who.

You didn't have tons of say just to keep it clean. That's right. We, in fact, we moved fairly far away from that, and then we ended up moving back closer to that in the late game. Perhaps this would be a good time to talk about how you actually play the game. Oh, sure. Let's talk about how does it actually work. So you start with a certain number of robots. How do you determine how many robots you got? So each robot has a star value or point value. That's roughly how strong they are.

And you build a team of 25 points worth of robots or less. If the ones you want to play only add up to 23, that's fine. You want to play just the set of robots that are your team. And then you build a battle deck of 40 cards. And these are regular sized cards. They're the same size as magic cards.

And roughly from what I've seen in the starter decks, usually it's about four robots? Most teams are going to be two to four robots. So some of your big guys, especially like your... We have an Optimus Prime in the starter deck that's a seven-star card because we wanted Optimus Prime in the starter deck. But most of the other Optimus Primes, or the other two Optimus Primes in the first set are, I think, 10 points and then either 12 or 13 points.

Okay. So I think a three-character team is one of the most common teams, but we definitely have some two-character teams and some four-character teams. Right, the starter deck has a four-character team. The starter deck has a four-character team. The starter deck is actually designed so that you can split it in half and play two on two. Oh, right, okay.

The starter deck is a learn-to-play. Ah, okay, that's cool. So once you've assembled your team, you want to take a look at your characters. So your characters have three stats on each side. They have an attack, they have a defense, and they have hit points. And then they also have a text box, which sometimes it's vanilla, and sometimes they have additional abilities. So just in magic terms, they have a power, they have a toughness, and they have hit points

which is different because there's, I mean, I guess their toughness is more their defense and then there is an actual, you know, how much damage they can make long term before they're out of the fight. Right. And then each character obviously has another side that you can flip to that has a similar set of stats. They always have the same number of hit points, but they can have different armor, different defenses, and different attacks, different defenses, and different abilities. Which is one of the reasons you want to flip between the sides. Right.

We have a number of different, in fact, maybe after we go through this overview we can talk about some of the different paradigms we had for why you might want to be on one side or the other. Yeah. So then you start the game with a hand of three cards. And there are two types of cards. There are actions, which are a lot like sorceries in Magic. And there are upgrades, which are a lot like equipment or auras.

In fact, a little bit more like auras than equipment. And there are three subtypes. Right. they never fall off. Well, they never move unless an ability moves them. Right. And then you have three subtypes of upgrades. You have weapons, armors, and utilities. And each character can hold one upgrade of each type. If you want to play an additional upgrade, you have to discard, of the same type, you have to discard one. And so those are the two types of battle cards. And your turn, we made it very streamlined and very simple. You draw a card, and then in any order you can play an action, play an upgrade, and flip one character to its other side. And then the last thing you do is you attack, one of your characters attacks

one of your opponent's characters. But there's a restriction on the attack. There is a restriction on the attack. So in order to attack, you have to tap. And you have to tap one of your opponent's tapped characters if they have any. If they don't have any tapped characters, you can attack anybody. So what that means, for example, on the first turn, if I attack, I choose which character I'm attacking, but I'm also choosing which of my characters my opponent can attack. Then on their counterattack, they can choose any of their characters to attack, but they have to attack my tapped character.

And here's something that's a little unique. Once all your creatures are tapped, if your opponent still has untapped creatures, or untapped, you know, robots, they can keep attacking with... You attack until all of them have attacked. That's right. You don't untap at the beginning of your turn. You go back and forth, attacking with one character at a time.

And if I've got a two-bot team and you've got a four-bot team, then I'm going to have all of my characters tapped and you're going to still have one or two untapped characters. And as Mark said, you will keep attacking at the end of your turn until everybody's attacked, everybody's tapped, and then all characters on both sides untapped, and you sort of start the round over. You have multiple turns within that round,

but sort of that overall round of combat is defined by everybody getting to attack and ending up tapped. Right, which means if you have a larger team of smaller robots, everybody you have is going to get attacked before they get to attack a second time with any of theirs. Right. And now the last part of resolving a battle is if I attack one of your characters,

I'm going to take my attack value and I'm going to add any attack bonuses that I get from actions that I played or from upgrades that I'm carrying, and then I flip the top two cards of my deck, and each of the battle cards will have some number of battle icons. We have orange battle icons for offense and blue battle icons for defense, and then we have a white battle icon that's like a critical hit.

So every orange battle icon adds to the attacker's offense, and then the defender also flips two cards, and every blue battle icon adds to their defense. If either player flips a critical hit card icon, the white pip, then they flip two additional cards, but it doesn't chain. Only the first white pip counts. So there's an option to do, oh, a little bit extra damage. And then all of those, you add up your attack,

subtract their total defense, and that's the amount of damage that you do. And that's how you finish, that's one turn. Now that you have an overview about this, we can go back a little bit more. Let's talk about the combat a little bit, because this is something I had a hand in. One of the things

that we were trying to do is, you had two robots that were defined qualities two Transformers that were defined qualities fighting and one of the things we wanted to make sure was it just wasn't fun if every single time my robot

fought your robot you just knew what happened it's deterministic, it gets repetitive so one of the things that we were interested in is having a variable. And this idea actually came from something we did in a different trading card game I'd made. It came from the G.I. Joe trading card game. So one of the things that we had learned is the G.I. Joe trading card, likewise, had people fighting. A popular trading card game thing to do. And the GI Joe, obviously the IP is about armies fighting. And what would happen is we liked the idea of having cards have some frequency on them.

And then it was another way to balance cards. It also said, why would I play this card in my deck? The effect's a little weaker. Oh, but if you flip it up during combat, it could be stronger. So it added an extra sort of level to why you might play certain cards. That's right. As I mentioned earlier, we had explored some systems that had a basic resource system like Magic's land system or Duel Master's mana zone system, but we ended up, for the point

of simplicity and also just to be getting into the game right away, we ended up abandoning any sort of resource development or any mana development, which meant that we needed another way to cost cards. And that's very important because otherwise it's very challenging to make a number of meaningfully different cards that give players choices on which ones they want to play and how to tune their deck. Right. I mean, one of the challenges of a trading card game is if I'm going to make a game and it's in a box and that's all that's ever going to be, I don't have to worry about chopping off future design space because I'm only going to make so many cards. But in a trading card game where you want to constantly be making more cards, you have

to be very open-ended and you have to have a system that allows you to make different kinds of cards that people might want to play them. And that robustness is very, very important for a trading card game. And so adding in a second vector, making cards matter in a different way, just really opens up the kind of cards you can make. And it gives players a reason to play sort of weaker cards in their deck. Magic solves this problem with its mana cost, right? The reason you'll play smaller cards is, well, you can't play them.

You can't play only, you know, smaller effects can you play early in the game and you want to do things early in the game. So Magic's system makes you want to have to have some cheaper stuff. But in a game without the resources that build up, like a mana system, there needs to be other things to do. The other thing that's really important is, this is a hit-straining card game. One of the things that you want, and we knew we wanted, is when my optimist fights your Megatron or whatever, whatever, whatever. You want a dramatic moment, right? Ooh, what's going to happen?

And if it was a known thing, if like, oh, I just know going in, I'm going to win, like that's not very exciting. And so one of the things about flipping the cards for combat is it makes every combat, ooh, I don't know what's going to happen. Let's see what's going to happen. And it adds a visceral thrill,

which especially for kids trading card games, is super important. I mean, I guess in general it's important. But especially when you're talking about having younger kids play, is we kept saying that we wanted the Transformers fighting to be the most exciting moment, right? And so we wanted a lot of focus on, okay, my character is fighting your character. Ooh, what's going to happen? You want to create something in the game design that pulls people in and makes that moment something exciting and some suspense. You don't know what's going to happen.

That's right. In fact, some of our most exciting cards are cards that are very underwhelming when you actually play the cards. that are very underwhelming when you actually play the cards, but because they have multiple pips on them, multiple battle icons on them, they dramatically swing combats, especially like we... I actually just... Yesterday, we did a demo of the final, final version

of the game actually produced in the box, and all beautiful that Mark hadn't had a chance to play yet. And we had a wonderful, huge, gigantic swing, and I hit two double-pip cards with a critical on the defense and survived when I wasn't supposed to. And those moments, you want them to be rare enough that when they happen, they're super exciting, but you want them to happen, and you want them to be, oh, I'm totally down.

I have nothing to do. No, I survived, I made it! And that's a wonderful feeling, that's a wonderful excitement that makes you question what you're going to do, that makes you plan ahead, that makes you make contingency plans when things don't go the way you are. And that's the really fun part of all these games, is when things don't go quite the way you expect it.

And here's another thing to talk about, which is, depending on your audience for the game, one of the dials you have to figure out is what I call the variance dial, which means, you know, like, on one end of the spectrum is, it's all skill. Like, the better player's going to win 100% of the time.

Right. And the other side of the scale is kind of like, who knows who's going to win? You know, experience and skill doesn't matter as much as the dramatic moment of what happens. And we want something, you know, like, clearly we want some skill in the game, but because it's aimed at kids and, like,

this game wants to have a little higher variance than, say, Magic Gods. You want a little more of, what's going to happen? Oh, no! You know, you want those sort of dramatic moments where you really like, for example, we had a fight yesterday. We were, I had not seen the finished, I hadn't played with the printed cards because I had played an earlier version.

We'll get to that in a second. Scott and I were involved in a very early version then I stepped away because I had like magic and things to make. But for example we had a fight where, I forget who the people were fighting were, but it was,

it was a very mismatched fight. It was like, one of his bigger, I think it might even have been Optimus Prime, and I had like, I had one of the smaller ones and like,

this is not a fight I'm supposed to win, but I had a great turn, for example, where I just was able to, you know, hit for a lot more than the creature showed. I mean, a combination of I played an action spell that boosted things, and then just I flipped really well. I hit the critical, and that was just an exciting moment.

Like, oh, well, you don't think this character could win, but I mean, actually, I didn't even win. But I did have an exciting moment where I did a lot of damage where I thought I was going to take an Optimus Prime. It turns out he's tough, but I really hit him for a lot. And those are the kind of things you remember in a game. Right. And also that variance and those moments are very important because one of our targets here is what we call intergenerational play. There are a lot of people in my age group who grew up on Transformers

and now have an opportunity to share it with their kids, and this is another way for people to share that with their kids. And having a little more variance and a little more lenticular design makes it so that you can play a game against your child and not, both not have to feel like you're kind of holding back but also not be pounding on, you know, your little seven year old daughter or whatever. You know, you can just play it together, enjoy the moment, have lots of swings back and forth, and really just appreciate a

brand new IP. Introducing your kids to something that you loved as a child yourself is just a wonderful part of parenthood. And another thing we actually didn't mention going in was one of the plans with this product was one of the things that a trading card game does really well is you get to keep putting out new expansions.

Well, one of the advantages of the Transformers IP is, look, it's an old property. There's a lot of different things you can explore. And so one of the, I mean, I can't give away what's coming, but one of the things that's really neat about the whole game is, you know, we're going to be doing lots of expansions, exploring a lot of different facets of the Transformers IP. And the game was built in such a way that we could allow all sorts of cool

things to happen. And when we talk about... we're talking like very technical and there's action cards and there's equipment and you know this and that, but in actual game terms we get it... go back and you know look at all the Transformers stuff and the IP and you and every card we're making gets to represent real things from the toy line and the story line and all sorts of fun things that represent Transformers. That's right. One of my favorite types of design to do is top-down design and the Transformers IP is just a wealth of interesting characters and different

mechanic potentials, and there's so many top-down designs that we've done that I can't wait for you guys to see. Yeah, like I said, we can't talk about the future, but I've seen some really cool stuff coming. Okay, so let's talk about the process a little bit. So what happened was Scott and I worked on what we call structure design, meaning we were just, like, when we were making the cards, we weren't worrying about necessarily, I mean, they were, we flavored them for purposes of demonstrating what we were doing. But we weren't, we were just trying to figure out how in the world does it work. So what happened was Scott and I and a few other people worked very early on. And what we were doing is we kept trying different formats, different formats, the wrong word, different versions, different systems.

And Scott and I each made numerous different systems. And then so much about Brian. Sure. Well, so we had we had a number of people who contributed systems. In addition to those we've already mentioned, Drew Nolasco, Matt Smith, Andrew Veen, all contributed some systems. Some of them were involved on the team for various points of time. And we had systems that were like,

oh, what if you're trying to blow up your opponent's base? Or what if you're trying to go on a bunch of missions and whoever finishes the most missions wins the game. And we also had different ways of fighting. We had the version that we ended up with now that's very similar to what Mark had, where you sort of had offensive and defensive symbols on your cards. We also had a system where there was sort of a pattern matching, like you had cards of different colors and this robot wants to get two greens and a blue, and this robot wants to get red, white, and blue. And so if you hit your pattern, then you get the combo and you get a super extra special

move. And we had lots of different systems. They had different ways of their randomization. They had different ways of structuring your team to fight. Some of them had sort of like a front row, back row thing, so you could have big, beefy tanks in the front and your sort of utilities and long-range characters in the back. We had all of these things, and we had never found anything that was really satisfying.

And then Brian Hawley came in, and he's now a play designer. Is he a play designer? Is he a developer? Or what's his title? He's actually the manager for the play design team. Okay, so Brian Hawley, who's the manager for the play design team, he had previously been a developer, and prior to that he'd been on the Kaijudo team with me several years ago. And he took all of these systems,

and he's basically picked apart from almost each system that had sort of made it past the first round. And he put them all together and added a lot of his own stuff, and he created something that was very close to the final system that we have now. I think the only really significant differences that I can think of were he only had offensive and defensive pips. He didn't have the white battle icons that give you the critical hit, and you could attack any character instead of only being able to attack tapped characters, and you just untapped your team whenever you had tapped everybody else.

So in his version, you tap to attack, then the next one taps to attack, then the next one taps to attack, or however many you have, and then you just untap everybody on your team, but it doesn't matter what your opponent's team has going on. And so we, those three changes sort of, we got to that system, we were very happy with it overall and we sort of continued to refine it. And those three changes that I just mentioned came about for, to solve, each was solving a problem. So the problem of having everybody untapped together instead of just having your

team untapped together was because in the original version where as soon as your characters were tapped, you untapped, what happened was it was very hard for big teams of small bots to fight small teams of big bots. The giant characters were just too overwhelmingly powerful. So what we did was we eventually arrived at the pattern that we've described as how you actually play, where once one side is tapped, the other side gets to attack with everybody. And that was a way to make small teams viable and different. And what that means, essentially, is everybody gets a hit in. So in each round, every robot gets one hit in.

So the one where you're untapped right away, the giant robots were basically getting more hits in, and clearly they were the bigger robots, so they were hitting harder. Right, they were just more powerful. The second challenge that we had was we had a problem of just always piling onto one character. So in a world where you can always attack any character, you pick somebody and you just

start hitting them and you just keep attacking them until they get knocked out. And that didn't, that was sort of less dynamic and felt a little formulaic. So we moved to a mode where you had to only attack tapped characters if there were any there. And that actually, it felt really good too. It felt like, all right, you swung at me, now I get to swing back at you. And it also served the purpose of like, oh, if somebody is really damaged, then you just hold them back and let somebody else fight. Yeah, the other thing that it did is, and my version actually did this early on, was if you were kind of forced to keep moving who you were hitting,

what it meant was, the strategic way you tended to do when you could pick anybody you want is you kept hitting the same creature until it was done. But if you sort of were forced to move it around, everybody got damaged at kind of an equal rate. So you had the early game where no one was damaged, and the late game was when everyone had some damage, and you're not sure when someone's going to fall. And it had a lot more sort of dramatic feeling to it.

Like it was just a more interesting fight and people sort of got damaged at an equal rate, which if you think of an actual fight, like an actual story, it's not like everybody attacks one character and then they fall and then everybody attacks another character and then they fall and then everybody attacks another character there's back and forth and so that feeling of the whole team slowly getting, you know, slowly

getting depleted felt more like a fight and it just it was a more dramatic game it just felt better and then the last change that I mentioned the critical hitpips the white battle symbols one of the things that

we wanted to make sure is that there was always some variance, as much as possible there was some variance in the battle deck. If you were, you know, it is possible to just put all offensive battle icons or all defensive battle icons in your battle deck, and then you lose some of that excitement of how much you're going to flip, because you know what you're going to flip. And so, by putting in the critical hit battle icon, what that means is, you have an incentive to put a couple of those in there, because then when you hit them, you're going to get, sometimes get more damage, but you'll also sometimes get less damage, because you flipped,

you know, two whites in a row, instead of, you know, and so they can, there are times where they will reduce, reduce the total damage. And that's one of the things that we wanted to do just sort of as a very detailed system design to say, here's something which will give you overall a greater expected value for damage, but also more variance. So, as Mark always says, we want to push you towards doing the fun thing by also making it the more powerful thing. Right, I mean, one of the things that, like, you'll see this is a reoccurring theme today, is we were trying to make higher variance. This was a game that wanted higher variance. And when you make higher variance games, you have to encourage the players to do the things that leads to the higher variance. So the White Pips is a really good example where, look, it is strategically the right thing to do,

but it also means that there are more exciting moments. There are more moments where you whiff and miss, and more moments where you're like, oh, I had the giant hit that you don't expect. And that is really important. Like one of the things I've learned from working on a lot of systems is you want a system that maximizes what you're trying to do in that game. And this was a robot fighting game. And so you wanted to have the dramatic like, oh, like I'm behind, he's ahead, but oh, I got the dramatic moment and I somehow won. Those are the kinds of things you remember in games. And that we wanted to make sure that you never quite knew when you were in or you were out.

There's always a chance. You always have something to hope for. One of the things you want to be careful in games is one of the dangers you can have is where I've lost, but I have to go through the motions before I technically lose. Oh, that's the worst. You know, where it's like, oh, well, I've essentially lost,

but okay, I have to spend five more minutes before I officially lose. And then what you want is, you want someone to always be in it, is what we say. Like, if the game is still going on, I have a chance. Right.

And that one of the things that magic does is really, really well is, you want to make sure that there's dramatic moments where I was down, but I had a chance to come back. And this game does that. That, you know, oh, well, clearly this person, this robot's going to be that robot, but oh, he missed a little bit. I get some criticals. You have a dramatic moment where it looks like

on the surface, like, oh, it's not going to be dramatic. But it can be. And those really are, like, one of the things I always say when you're designing a game is when the game is done, people tell stories about the game. What are they going to tell? And you want really cool, exciting story moments. That's for any game. You want like, and this happened! You want that because that's what makes the game fun and exciting.

Yeah, something that comes into that, a design decision we made that's related to that, early versions of this had, when two characters fought, they did damage to each other. And we very quickly got rid of that because it created situations where, oh, my character is really close to being knocked out. I don't want to attack. And we said, oh, that's a very bad feeling. We don't want to have that happen. So we set up the game so that you always attack. You have to attack if you're able. But there's no downside to attacking. You will always do damage. Well, you know, it might not do damage. My version does only

attack, right? Your version, I believe, was only attack. But we did explore versions where there was damage happening both ways. And pretty much everybody designed a card that we always called spiky armor, where if you attack somebody, it does a couple points back to you. And that's a very flavorful thing, but it's also very dangerous in game design because it makes you feel bad for attacking. Sometimes it will knock out a bot that's attacking and, you know, make somebody feel like they shouldn't have done that. And that's not a really fun state. You want them to be like, all right, I gotcha. And maybe you get me back on your turn,

but I haven't come. Yeah, one of the things in game design you have to learn is the smallest of negatives can really disincentivize people from doing things you want them to do. So, like, if you want people to attack, you have to be careful not to make,

even tiny negatives to attack can make you just not attack. And so it's important to sort of push people in directions attack you can make you just not attack. And so, it's important to sort of push people in directions to do the things you want, and you've got to be really careful when you disincentivize them. Because a little bit goes a long way to keep

people from doing stuff. Anyway, we are almost to work, so let me just end by saying this. If you like Transformers, or you're just inspired by listening to. If you like Transformers, or you're just inspired by listening to this podcast and it sounds fun, the game is out now, right? As we speak, the game is out.

No, it's not. Oh, it's not out. Oh, sorry. As we speak, it's coming out in two and a half weeks. I'm sorry. As you listen to this, it's out. We're talking ahead of time. But when you're hearing this, the game is out.

It all sounds fun. You can buy the starter, and you can play out of the starter deck. You don't need anything other than that to sample the game and get a test of the game is out. It all sounds fun. You can buy the starter and you can play out of the starter deck. You don't need anything other than that to sample the game and get a test of the game. And like I said, this is a fun game, so it sounds cool. Obviously

people listening to my podcast like trading card games, so... Or if you have a friend or family or somebody who really likes Transformers, who maybe Magic's not for them, but Transformers would be, this is something that you can you can give it give a try it's definitely a different feeling from magic but it's fun it's kinetic it's fast and it's exciting so anyway uh we are now parked um so i want to thank scott before i sign off so thank you for joining me scott thank you very much i've been looking forward to this and uh so anyway it was

fun it's always interesting talking about not magic design but anyway we are now here although that means that instead of talking Transformers it's time to go make

magic okay that doesn't quite follow the spot but anyway thanks for listening guys and I'll see you all next time bye bye