Think Like A Game Designer - Richard Garfield — Crafting Game Legacies: The Evolution of Unique Deck Games, Innovating SolForge Fusion, and Deep Dives into Procedural Generation (#31)

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

Richard is the creator of Magic: The Gathering, KeyForge, Netrunner, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, Battletech(CCG) and a lot more. He is a pioneer in the collectible card game genre and one of the most well-known game designers in the world. In this episode of the show, we discuss his life in game design, the development of Magic: The Gathering and KeyForge, and a variety of topics dealing with the challenges of creating collectible card games. This episode is, without a doubt, one of the most remarkable episodes I’ve recorded for Think Like a Game Designer – grab a notebook and take a listen! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. Today's episode is a special one. It's the first time I've ever brought on a repeat guest. And that repeat guest is one of the most illustrious in the game industry. This is Richard Garfield, and he is back to talk about our mutual project that is launching on Kickstarter right now, September 7th, 2021, called SoulForge Fusion. And it is the world's first hybrid deck game. We've used new technology to digitally, algorithmically print half decks that you can combine in ways that have never been done before,

using some of the best parts of the SoulForge digital trading card game that we made a decade ago when we first started working on it. So there's a lot of exciting things to unpack here, and the episode is all about the design principles and interesting thinking that goes on. But if you're excited about this project and you want to jump in right away, you can do it right now. If you go to stoneblade.com forward slash soul forge, that's S-T-O-N-E-B-L-A-D-E dot com, forward slash S-O-L-F-O-R-G-E, then you can go right to our Kickstarter page. You can see all the details.

You can back it. We have bonuses for people that back early, lots of cool exclusives. obviously it means the world to me and to Richard and to everybody on the team when you can support our projects. You can also play the game for free on tabletop simulator and talk about it on our Discord. There's tons of great stuff. And in this episode, we break down a lot of these principles in a way that's not just interesting for those two that are excited about Soul Ford Fusion like we are, but also talks a lot about the design principles for building these kinds of modular games and algorithmically procedurally generated games and cards and lots of really cool stuff that's at the cutting edge. of game technology today.

So I hope that you enjoy this episode. I hope you love the conversation as much as I did. I hope you take the time to please check out SoulForge Fusion. Whether you back it or not, it means a lot of you share it. You share this episode, share the information. It helps me to continue to do what I do and to keep making new and exciting games for you. So without further ado, here is Richard Garfield. Hello and welcome.

I am here back with Richard Garfield. Richard, it's great to have you back. That's good to be back. Always fun to talk about games. Yeah, yeah. So you're actually my first repeat guest on the podcast, which is obviously great to have you as the guest. But it's also because we have something pretty exciting to talk about

that we have been working on, depending on how you count it, for either a decade or at the very least about 18 months of intense work recently. Yep, yep. certainly looking forward to chatting about it. So the big thing, which is SoulForge Fusion, our sequel to SoulForge, the digital trading card game that we built back in 2011, 2012. As we're recording this, we are less than 24 hours away from the Kickstarter launching.

So by the time most people are listening to this, the Kickstarter will be live. It's going live at 8 a.m. on September 7th, 8.m. Pacific time. So very likely by the time you're hearing this, you can go to kickstarter.com and back us there or stoneblade.com forward slash SoulForge will also take you there. But yeah, I wanted to chat with you because there's so many fascinating things about this project and so many fascinating things about what we have chosen to do with how we've brought it back and the evolution of really the entire trading card game industry, frankly, and what has motivated us along the way. And I wanted to unpack that because I've gotten a lot of questions from people. And there's so much here that, you know, I've been trying to like explain in the elevator pitch and the kind of quick line, you know, couple lines to get to. But I really wanted to take a good amount of time with you and, and unpack like all of the details. So let's just let's start off with just Soul Forge, the OG, right?

You and I, we met up at at PAX dev in 2011, our first conversation there about this. And we were both excited about this idea of making a really a good digital trading card game. Because at the time, this was before Magic Arena. This was before Harstone. There really wasn't something like that on the market. And we were both pretty excited about making it. Yeah, that's amazing. It was before Harthstone.

It doesn't feel like anything was before Hawthstone. But yeah, that was. Yeah. And part of something that will become ironic as we go through the story, part of our goal was to build something that would have been very difficult to build in real life. That would have been at the time pretty much impossible to do as a physical game. We built Soul Forge with the idea that cards leveled up as you play them. Do you remember things about like what kind of that process some? Because I've, you know, got my own recollections, but we're talking about a decade ago now. So maybe you could talk a little

bit about what you remember about that and what got you excited about that mechanic. Well, I should add for context that one of the reasons we were talking was because I mean, I knew you from your days as pro with magic, but I caught up with you again because of Ascension, which was a design I admired, but also had a digital version, which was just so much better than most of the games out there, any game out there.

It was just like, it was perfect for it. And so that was one of the reasons why you seemed like a really good partner, to work with on a game which was intended to be just digital. Yeah, and I remember, I've told this story before, but for me it was, I remember, I came to one of your talks on at PAX dev and I, you know, I've obviously been an admirer of yours forever, magic changed my life and your, you know, design thinking influenced every project I've ever worked on. And then, you know, at the end of the talk, someone asked, what game were you

playing the, you know, and really enjoying right now. And you said Ascension and I literally like jumped up and went woohoo in the back of the room at the time. And we kind of all laughed and then got a chance to talk. So, yeah, the process of being able to work on games with you has been incredible. I've learned so much along the way. And, and yeah, that when we were kind of working through, okay, there's the challenges of executing something digitally.

There's the challenges of building a thing that really feels comprehensible from a trading card game. When you're building a digital game, they're not really cards that you're trading and selling, but we want to represent them as something that people can understand. Because when I tell you that this is a card, a collectible card, all these preconceived notions come with it, right? The idea that I can get these things out of a pack, the idea that these things will be shuffled together and randomize, the idea of like what it means, what information is going to be static about a, about a card or an object versus another. There's this interesting, like, cognitive heuristic, if you will, that comes with this idea of calling something a card,

even though it's purely a digital representation. Yeah, yeah. I remember we had some brainstorming sessions on what we could do digitally that we couldn't do physically and then deciding what we should do because that's, of course, a really different question. The digital, the capabilities you have working digitally are really quite large, but you don't want to lose the player's understanding of what's going on. That's often, I think, one of the things which separates the games which feel like analog games

and the games which feel like sort of a simulation online, which are often, you know, often excellent, both of them can be excellent, but when you play a Starcraft or what have you, it feels very different than playing a Scrabble. And we wanted to use the power that we had, but at the same time not make it so the player lost that tether with really understanding everything. Yeah, yeah. And I remember we experimented with a few, like, pretty, interesting ideas. You mentioned Starcraft. We experimented with a few game engines that used concepts

like fog of war, where you didn't, you know, your opponent could be playing things and you don't necessarily get that information right away and different ways to reveal that and exploration. Like we went, we had explored a lot of that space. But what we landed on was this, this level up mechanic, which is something I really, I think it really resonated with players at the time and it still resonates today. This idea that, you know, yes, you build the deck of cards, but as you play, you're actually building your deck as you play because every card you choose to play at the, you know, has three levels. And when you play, when you play the card, you get the level one function of it right now. And then the level two function gets added to your discard pile

and shuffled into your deck later. And so the cost of playing cards ends up being really an opportunity cost, right? Because I could play a very strong level one card now, for example, and then it might level up worse. And so the later versions are weaker than others might be, or vice versa, where I play a weak level one card now with the hope that I have a more powerful card later. And so we have no traditional casting cost or, you know, like other TCGs like magic, but we use this system to create not only a balance, but also this story arc and this texture for these different cards that end up being expressed in a far deeper way than you could do with just a single card or single version of a card. Yeah, yeah. It really hit a,

A lot of the notes which we had set out to hit with a digital card game, which is to say, the players understood mechanically what was going on. We made that very clear, even if the consequences of it were not clear. And it did something which would be awkward to do in real life. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a great point. make this idea that it's clear to the player what is going on, but the nuanced effects of it

are take a long time to unpack, right? So the basic rules of SoulForge is like you have a hand of five cards. You can play any two cards out of your hand into one of five lanes if they're a creature, and then the cards you play level up. And so it's very just, okay, pick two out of five, go and see what happens. At the surface level, you can enter the game and play that way. But then as you explore deeper, now it's like, okay, well, actually, I need to, I want to, to be building around this, you know, do I want to be playing for a late game? Do I want to be playing for an early game? What are the different, you know, interaction points about where these creatures are going to be played and how they match up against the opponent's creatures and

kind of all of these layers that that get unpacked? I think it's just really key for, especially any kind of collectible or expandable game where the, the, this, you need to be accessible when somebody's coming in the door, you need to be and have that like nice learning curve all the way along the way, all the way up to sort of expert level players, which, you know, you need to be very conscious of, and this is something you've always hammered home to me in our discussions and something I really appreciate that you want to make sure that that gameplay experience

is good for people at all tiers, not just people at the very high end or at the very low end. It's got to be a kind of good, smooth curve all the way through. Yeah, that's an easy thing for a lot of designers to lose track of because they play the games with the same people and they become experts over time and then sort of lose track of the journey and some fun things they had along the way

might disappear. It's an experience I have reasonably often where I play a game that I think looks like it was really fun to develop, but what's left is only fun if I've become an expert. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, keeping an eye on that. that is always been, is, is a good, good practice, which we have done.

Yeah, no, it's a great tip for, for, especially for aspiring designers out there, because I know my very first designs and games I worked on back in the versus system, trading card game days, I absolutely fell into this trap. And I came at it from, as a pro magic player, like, I knew what top tier play should look like and what, you know, and so, but all I could think about was balancing for that. And so the game became very flat and very, like, uninspired. for people moving their way through the curve. And, you know, I learned that lesson eventually,

but hopefully listeners can learn a little more quickly than I had to. Okay, so we've gone and we covered, you know, SoulForge. We, you know, we ran a Kickstarter for back in 2012. We launched the game. It lasted for several years. We launched a bunch of expansions. But eventually, you know, as a digital game, we couldn't continue to keep it up. And it went down.

And since then, we've been trying to think of ways to bring it back, right? What does a new version of SoulForge look like that can exist in the modern era? Because this is one of the things that I think drives both of us as designers was, right, we always want to kind of push the boundary of like, what's the next thing? Like what, how do we say something as designers and, and make something that, that contributes to the overall discussion of, of games and, and bring something new to the table? And you, of course, are probably more influential than anybody else on the planet when it comes to this by creating the entire trading card game genre with Magic the Gathering. But then also why we did SoulForge was to be able to build trading card games into the digital space in a way that hadn't been done up to that point.

But now it's been done very well. As you said, it's hard to imagine a world before Harstone. Now with Harstone and Magic Arena and, you know, Rinterra, and there's plenty of, like, good, successful games. You've launched several of them. that, you know, and, and there's a lot, that space is well explored. But, yeah, what we're talking about with SoulForge now is this exploration engine of new space, which is what we're calling a hybrid deck game. And some of the origins of that are in the unique deck game category that you also originated with KeyForge.

So maybe you want to talk a little bit about that and kind of what, how that leads into, into what SoulForge Fusion is. Sure. Yeah. So Key Forge came out a few years ago and we called it the first unique deck game, as you said. Although I think I kind of want to call it random deck game now because of reasons. But in any case, what happens with Key Forge is that players get a coherent deck and they're not allowed to, they don't construct it. And they just play what they've got. And if they like their deck, They play with a more, otherwise they might get a different deck. And it was made because I really think that there's a lot of gameplay that's lost when you start introducing deck construction. There's a lot of variety that's lost in this sort of decks which become playable. And I was thinking back to the early days of magic where we would play these leagues and you would get a set of decks and some boosters, and that's what you were stuck with in weeks.

And it was a lot of fun. And I wanted to get a similar sort of experience where you had to make the most of the tools you got, and that was what the game was about, and that everybody's tools were unique, which was how I originally thought of magic, but the way it's played often that promise, which a lot of people see at the beginning is not maintained,

because at the beginning everything's unique, but then as they become more and more serious, they end up playing more and more net decks, and everybody starts playing sort of a more similar tableau of decks. With the Key Forge-style approach, you've got the capability of making it so that doesn't happen. Everybody's deck truly is unique. Yeah, and I think for those that want to have a deeper dive into Key Forge

and some of the logic behind that, we talked about that quite a bit actually on our first podcast recording. which will link to, people can link to from the Think Like Game Designer page, because I was fascinated by it. And as part of what I was like digging into was like, okay, well, what would this look like if we wanted to evolve it further? Right. So the advantages of the unique deck game or random deck game or whatever you want to call it is this, this feeling of playing with a limited subset of options, which is part of what makes the,

what's called limited formats in magic or in TCG is so much fun, right? the idea that when I get either a league and I have a small set of cards I have to work with or a draft or a sealed deck or something where it's like I'm forced to work with a smaller subset of fixed things creates more game variety creates more interesting situations forces you to play with and adapt to more of the cards and scenarios than then typically will happen like what what naturally tends to happen in a constructed TCG environment is things always coalesce around one or a few different deck archetypes and everybody kind of builds to towards those and they get so hyper optimized that variance and interesting play space is severely

limited. That's kind of the top line of like what's value about it. Now, there are other challenges that come up from that and things that started to become noticeable as, you know, from Key Forge's experiences as the kind of leader in the space. And, you know, one is a, how often does your variety become unusable or what are the acceptable types of variety, right? If I have a deck that has for, you know, using a zombie lord and no zombies, yes, that's variety, but it's also just sad variety, right?

Like there's certain types of scenarios that, yes, it's variance, but that's not a good kind of variance. And so I know Keyforge did some things to correct for that, and Soulforge Fusion has taken a lot of steps to correct for that. And then there's the other piece of it, which is this feeling of ownership over your deck, this feeling of,

I made this thing. I have some influence over this thing, which is a challenging thing for the unique decks. In that world, I feel like I just bought it and I can master playing it. Maybe I get some ownership out of playing it particularly well, but I know a lot of people that miss that ability to sort of customize and own things. And so that's been another sort of tension point around what, you know, can you get the best of both worlds? And I'm obviously seeding this one teeing it up to you.

But if you want to talk about how we tried to solve these problems with Soul Forge Fusion. Yeah, I should first say that making this game from the start was something I was skeptical about. But Justin kept coming back at me with it. And after playing it a bit, I decided, yeah, he really is onto something and maybe really could do this. part of what made it mechanically feasible was the fact that we could print decks which were coherent as opposed to make it so you had to construct decks along with all their level up cards, which would have been very hard. But, yeah, that's a great.

That's a great point. And just, yeah, just to sort of reemphasize, right, like why? Because the natural, the natural question for people that are, we're fans of original SoulForge and that were like, why didn't you just print this as a digital trading? card game just or sorry as a physical version of the same digital trading card game and and that reality of it is that it's very difficult in a game with multiple cards let level every card is multiple cards to level up having to collect and customize and create individual on an individual card level is very cumbersome like we did a lot we did research it for a while and it just felt like too hard to make it work um and so the this model works particularly well for something like

soul forge fusion yeah and and uh i mean and even when you have it running just verifying your opponent's deck is legal or your deck is legal is a real chore. And so, so yeah, this was a really nice solution to it. But then you took it one step further and added this this unique hook, which is that you've got this little bit of customization introduced by the fact that that rather than having a single random deck, you've got a random deck, you've got a random half deck and you choose what other random half deck you want to made it with. So you have the preconstructed element, but you also have this little bit of customization, which is, of course, quite powerful. You get to choose which two partners you want to bring to the table. Yeah.

And this one, and again, this is, you know, just as design tips for people, a lot of times, really just the concept A that you like plus concept B, that you like with your own unique spin on it is a great recipe for designing new games, right? And so in this world, it was the game smash up was my inspiration behind the, you know, take any two decks and shuffle them together. Like that is just a, and it was amazing to me playing it. How much, again, variety and ownership I felt playing that game, even though I was just taking two pre-built mixed decks and putting them together, the difference between zero

customization choices and one customization choice from an emotional standpoint is huge. And then combining that with this idea of the unique kind of algorithmically generated decks like from Key Forge with the Soul Forge game engine really started to kind of gel together or something like, wow, this is something new and special that hasn't been done before, even though again, it's just based on the building blocks of what came before. And no matter how original the idea seems, right, even it very often is that. I know you've talked about this before in interviews where magic, the idea of customizing came from cosmic encounters was a big inspiration and being able to play something that you could play at the, you know, Dungeons and Dragons kind of table in between rounds. You were able to kind of bring things together that then obviously turned into a great new category that then became the thing that other people built off of.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, this simple twist is a really strong approach. and it's worth noting that a lot of times in design, what you should do is take a back off of the, you should take a look at what your innovations are and ask if they're really pulling their weight. Because what you don't want is to have a game full of innovation, but the innovations aren't really adding anything to the player. They're just giving them different crap to think about.

And that's, I, I kind of think of that as being about the designer and not about the player, like, oh, there's all these fancy things I can do. Look, we can change all the rules that you're used to and make them all different. But at the end of the day, if all that happens is they learn all these different rules and they end up with a game which is similar, then it's not worth it. And so focusing instead on these smaller innovation twists and building off stuff and then trying to keep things similar where you're not really getting a lot of value out of it.

I find that to be a useful framework to work in. Yeah, I think that's great. And it underlines what is, again, a very counterintuitive but really important point that innovation for innovation's sake is not valuable. In fact, it can be a negative. That if you innovate too much, becomes harder for people to learn and kind of grok what's going on in your game. and that focusing on a few key innovations, sometimes even just one key innovation, can be enough to really, you know, hook people and then just executing that well and communicating it clearly can be enough to make something that's really special.

And it's actually really, it's been really interesting here as well because we've, you know, I've wrestled with that a lot. And sometimes it's actually even hard to explain some of what's going on with SoulForge Fusion because we have the, you know, the, the, Every half deck is unique, combine any two half decks to play. That's the kind of new innovation here, and that's relatively easy to push across. We have the level up mechanic, which is not an innovation for SoulForge Fusion, but was an innovation for SoulForge originally. And so for people who weren't familiar with SoulForge, that's another kind of, it's new to them, right? It's a new innovation.

And then we have the process of really, we kind of took it, took the process of digitally creating cards even a step further, right? So in KeyForge, the decks were algorithmically generated, and sometimes some cards can like add icons or slight modifiers to other cards. But for the most part, the set of cards is coherent in each set. And you're just picking from that subset of, I think it's a couple hundred cards that build each of the decks. And in SoulForge Fusion, we actually took the idea of fusing cards together and took it

to another level where I can now combine. kind of the base of a card. So if I have like a Yeti creature, and then I can combine a modifier and fuse those things together. So I could have an aggressive Yeti or an Ice Yeti or a Flame Yeti, and each of those things would be a different card. And that is something that was never really been done before as far as I know. And it's allowed us to have, you know,

over 17,000 possible unique cards in set one alone. And that's something that you and I talked about a little bit because it's, that sounds really cool. And we've used it in marketing and there's a lot of really good things about it. But it also has challenges that come with it, right, trying to understand a set of that size. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the upsides and downsides of and how we thought through that approach.

Because we talked about that for quite a while. Yeah, I should begin with saying that that is certainly something I aimed for in Key Forge. And it was something I shot. I really wanted to see procedurally generated cards, which is how to think about them, I guess. And I wasn't really super happy with how they were done in KeyForge until later we came up with some good techniques. But one of the things I kept running into was this tension between wanting players to understand the environment, know the cards that are out there, and wanting to give them this variety on more than just a card-to-card level. And so the concept of giving them basically an adjective and a noun, your cybernetic Yeti or your zombie dragon,

allows players to get a step in that direction where they can begin to understand what to expect from particular adjectives and what to expect from particular nouns. And then there is still a challenge to understanding the environment because it is so much bigger than really any other card game. I think that's true, at least for the first set. But at the same time, there's a huge amount of variety and that tool of being able to understand it, at least on a adjective noun level helps a lot. Yeah, we ended up in a space.

I think we were doing the math, and it was like more, you know, we have more unique cards available than, than like the first 20 years of magic or, you know, any other, any other card game.

But, but, but, yeah, you're highlighting, I think what's, what's important is that, that you want to make it so that people can,

can wrap their heads around what's going on. And variety for variety's sake is not a good thing, right? Not necessarily, like there was, um, there was a game, I was tangentially involved with, but only kind of on the sidelines was a chaotic,

which was a kids TCG that had, it had random powers on the card. So like you would have some, one version of a monster would be stronger than another, the exact same card. He just have to look at it to see what the stats were. And it would just be kind of all over the place. And it just wasn't, you know, it just, all it was was kind of a driver that got people to collect more if they wanted to get the highest power version of these.

But the rest of them, you just got a worse version of a card or you could never know what a card was going to do by just seeing the name. And so it became very difficult for players to understand and interact with it. Whereas with the way we've done SoulForge Fusion, you know, if you see the name of a card, you can know exactly what it is. The same name card, the zombie dragon will always be the same zombie dragon, but that you could also run into a cybernetic dragon, which is going to be different. And so even though, so that 17,000 number really comes from a permutation set of like 200,

adjectives and nouns that combine together in various ways. So it's, I think, a good way that we were able to get the best of both worlds. And the other thing that it influences is just like when you think about variety in a digitally printed game like this, it's not just about the rarity of the cards, but because the cards are pre-built into half decks, that's really the proper unit of rarity to think about. Like the context of the zombie dragon when he's in a deck full of, you know, other zombies and zombie lords versus when he's in a deck of, you know, some dragons and some other kind of synergies is very, very different. And so that's been some,

that was the biggest eye opener for me, I think talking to you when we're, you know, I've been in, in the trading card game space my whole life and developing them both playing, whether it's playing on the pro tour or developing them for, you know, for high level play forever. But it just completely changed the equation when I think. thinking about how do you develop a hybrid deck game where the chunks are kind of predefined in a lot of ways? Yeah. For people who are entrenched in trading card games, it's just, it's such a different way

to think about the games. They think about a particular card they like and they look for it. And it takes them so long to realize that that that may, you know, they may end up with something that's fun when they find it. But the fact is that the collectible is, you know, the thing you're, you're playing with is, is a unit, which is this whole deck. And you just can't separate, you know, the context of that card from the rest of the deck. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really a powerful, it's a powerful frame reshift.

And it creates a couple of interesting things. So one, you know, to that we, we have built into our algorithm. I think we alluded to this earlier, but we built in a lot of tools to the algorithm to make sure that each deck comes with a certain amount of synergy already built in. That it won't like, you won't get a zombie lord without zombies in the deck, right? You won't get something that's going to be sort of, this doesn't make any sense. This is the bad kind of randomness. So we filter that sort of stuff out, but we still give quite a range of possible outcomes

that you can discover. And so Ford Fusion as a hybrid deck game gives you that additional excitement of saying, okay, cool, I've got the dragon, you know, the zombie dragon I want, but now I want to go find and pair it with something else that can work well. And because you can customize by choosing the two half decks

you want together, you still have this interesting ability of like saying, okay, cool, if I can find another half deck with this piece, then I can make the, the combinations that I want coming in and coming together. So there's really this fun, there is that fun, you know, looking for the right, you know, shoe to fit the glass slipper or whatever. Yeah.

Now, that's a powerful thing to have in your pocket. I know that when we, when Key Forge was first out, I, I aired, as I'm sure I mentioned on the last podcast, on the side of variety. And it took me basically the first release before I realized, oh, you know, I've really got to take a little more responsibility for getting those combos in the deck and make it so that that variety is good variety. And the fact that you, that with Soul Forest Fusion, we can put some of that on the players that they can find the deck that gives them, that makes their combos work is good. I don't, you know, we don't want to lean on it entirely. We want to make it

So that half deck still has a good feeling to it, but that they can bring that out with the right choice of half deck of a partner deck is terrific. Yeah, yeah. And I really just can't wait to kind of unleash this on the world. Obviously, one of the things that's actually been cool is that players can actually play the game right now if they want to for free. In fact, you know, is one of the side effects of the side effects

of the pandemic is that it forced us to move all of our testing into tabletop simulator. You know, we couldn't meet up in real life. And so we started playing our games in the background on tabletop simulator. And this was during our first Ascension Tactics Kickstarter last year. We were originally planning to market the game, you know, the way we normally would go to conventions, do physical demos, like, and then all of that shut down. And so we said, okay, well, maybe we should just make our tabletop simulator version. available online.

So people could actually just play exactly the thing we've been playing. And that was such a breakthrough for us that people could join us in our Discord and give us feedback and play with us and play with their friends for free. And so it was kind of a no-brainer to bring that to Tabletop Simulator for SoulForge Fusion. And in fact, it's how you and I, I think it wasn't until, what, two months ago that we actually played a game in real life for the first time? Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty recently.

You know, Tabletop Simulator was certainly what sold me on the idea. You had sent me some prototype cards earlier and wasn't really enough to convince me. I did play around with those with my son and thought that there was some cool stuff going on. But when we sat down and did a session on tabletop, it was a lot of fun. Yeah. So for anybody that wants to see more about the game,

You can play it right now for free if you have that program. I think the program is usually $20 or goes on sale for 10 a lot. And then it's also provided a hook for us because a lot of Soul Forge players really, you know, they know, they joined the game when it was originally just a purely digital game. This is a game that we really wanted to be physical first using this, you know, digitally printing technology and being able to do things we hadn't been done in the physical space. But also, we also recognize that building these communities and being able to play together, online is important. And so not only can you play kind of demo versions of it on tabletop

simulator right now, but one of the other things that we've done is we've made it so that every deck can be scanned. Every physical deck has a QR code and an alpha numeric code that you can enter into our database. And then we will export a deck for you that you can play your deck in tabletop simulator. And so we can actually have tournaments. And one of the things that we wanted to do as, you know, have real community and real play, not just in local game stores, which are, of course, important at conventions, which, you know, we're going to be doing all of that stuff. But so that, you know, you can play even if you don't have a local community and we can all get together and your collection means something, even if you don't

have a local group to play with. And I think that's just, it's like a really powerful thing that I know I, and I don't know where you came down on this, Richard, but I was so against tabletop simulator two years ago. I was like, it's too clunky. It's not. same. It's not, you know, and I, it wasn't, but for the pandemic really forcing me to get past that mental block and, and building this community, I never would have gone there. So it's been, it's been an incredibly powerful tool and been a great way to connect with people. Yeah, no, I'm similar. When Tabletop Simulator first came out, I was excited about it enough that, that, that I bought a few copies and gave them out to friends that I hadn't, and family that I haven't been able to play

with for a while. But in the end, it turned out to be more work than it was worth the prototype with or playtest with. But with the pandemic forcing my hand, I got past that hump. And now it's, you know, regardless of how things develop in plague world, a tabletop simulator will be part of my arsenal. Yeah. And it's one of those things where for, you know, a very common question I've been getting from original SoulForge players is will there ever be another customized app for SoulForge? And certainly it's something I want to build. I've learned a lot over the years. It's very expensive to build and maintain.

And so having this as a tool that can be kind of this bridge solution of like you can build a physical game, play your physical game, and then have some way to play online. And then, you know, hopefully down the road, we can build our own custom app again. But for now, it's just a, it's a great way to connect and a great way to be able to play a game in whatever format you want to play it. That's definitely been, you know, it's the other side of the equation with physical games and especially trying to launch a game, you know, like this. If you don't have a community to play with, it's like you might as well not have it, right? Like it's you need people that can play the game with you. And if it's a solid local community, then it's fantastic.

But here, at least you can have an online community. And I've noticed a lot of other publishers that have really shunned things like, like tables, they'll shut down, you know, any mods that they see online. They try to shut down the capacity for people to play their game online because, well, you know, in theory, they're not paying for it, which is true. But I found that, you know, it's largely the opposite. Like, if you let a community grow and thrive and let them play your game, enough people are going to want to support it and actually buy it that it's worth, it actually is the best thing you could do for, for the long-term health of a game that you care about.

Yeah, certainly. I am there. If people are playing the games, I think that you're all set. That's going to be great. Because it's like it's just building that community is the most important thing. And that's the best way for people to know what they're getting with the game and to know that it's right for them. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. You can test it and see, like, do I like this game? If so, cool, I'll buy it. If not, great. You got to learn that without having to spend a dime. And that's also fantastic, right?

You know, you want, I don't want people buying my game that don't enjoy it. I want everybody to get, you know, a huge amount of value out of it that's there. And so this is a, it's a great way to let people do that. And maybe it's worth us talking a little bit more about community in general. And, you know, maybe some of our, you know, we've, we've talked a lot about organized play and what does that look like in the world where you have a hybrid deck game. And it's it's just something that just feel so central to anything like this being able to be a long-term, like successful game and property.

Maybe we can kind of riff on that a little bit. Like what what does it take to build a good community for a game like this? Well, that's certainly a big topic, but one of the things that I would look for is that players can engage with the game in a lot of different ways and looking for different things. So if everybody is engaged with the game on a ladder, which is constantly giving you a rating, then it's sort of strictly one-dimensional, serious play. But if there's environments where people can play casually, play with their friends, pick up games, tournaments that don't necessarily carry a huge weight on their overall standing, things like that. it allows for people to play the game for other purposes than just being the best in the world. And so, so yeah, I look for, I look for lots of different ways for people to play the game.

Yeah, I think that's a, I think that's a great insight and that it appeals to sort of different, the psychographic profiles is a kind of buzzwordy way to say it, but, you know, different, different player needs, right? That I, you know, want to be just hanging out with my friends and playing around the kitchen table versus I want to prove that I'm the best in the world versus I want to build the coolest, you know, Yeti deck and have all the Yetis or I want to be able to, you know, like have different modes of play, right? So I think something that Key Forge did a lot of innovation in is like, what does it mean to have a

balanced matchup between different decks where you could play, you know, you'd play, I'd play your deck and you'd play my deck in a round and see who could play the pilot the decks better. It wasn't about the deck. It was about the player. I think there's, and it's something I'm actually excited about when it comes to building this game via Kickstarter and being via our Discord and play testing with people like you. There's been so much action in our Discord of people giving us feedback on the rules and

templating and different ideas for cards. And I think the same thing is what I'm looking for when it comes to organized play. We're going to have league-based events, and we have a storyline events plan where people who care about our lore and our story can influence the story based on what they do and performance in tournaments. We have like an app we're developing that allows people to, when you play in a tournament, you scan your deck in.

And then you can actually, based on which forge-borne you're using, which is like your forge-borne avatar, you'll then get an opportunity to vote on what your character will do in the next version of the story. And I think some players are really into story. Some players are really not. And that's like not going to be their thing. But it's a very cool thing. And also lets us react much faster because digitally printed cards,

we can make them much faster so we can have things be reflected in the card pool even much more so than I think would have been possible in any other game category. And we're also experimenting with different, different cool ideas for how you balance the, if you're playing the same decks against each other. You know, Key Forge had this concept of chains where you would, you know, have some restrictions on your card pool or number of cards in hand. SoulForge makes it, I think, even easier by, because your health totals are so critical to the game. So you could bid health for the different half decks.

We can have things like sideboarding where you can, because you have half decks, you could have your main deck and even sideboarded in different half decks. So we've built in tools for if any particular archetype becomes dominant, there's tools to attack that archetype. And there's so many different interesting little ways we can play with what the organized play looks like. And for those of you that are out there and participating in our Discord or participating in our Kickstarter, you can help give us feedback and help us build that out because it's not going to launch until 2022. So we've got time to really finalize those details. Yeah. And exploring a really varied organized play is much easier to do with physical product than it is.

is digitally. The games that are purely digital do, you have to work very hard to make them not one-dimensional focused on the top players. But, yeah, when you've got a physical component to it, you've got the locality of it allows you to really explore different ways to play. Yeah, yeah. People just take ownership of it.

And they'll just, they're going to play in ways that we don't expect right now. You know, I mean, one of the other things that is, um, is certainly possible for people, though it's not what we're trying. You know, because in, you know, Key Forge, every deck had a unique back, right? Because they couldn't be customized at all. Um, Soul Forge because, SoulForge fusion because they are customizable, well, the cards have a common back. And so I've already had people that are messaging like, oh, I want to custom, you know, actually build this like it's a TCG and build my own deck.

I'm like, well, that's not how I envision it being played, but you could do whatever you want with it. Right. is your physical decks and that's certainly a possibility. And I'm sure that the fact that people can take ownership of it in such a deep way is something that, you know, is exciting. And it's just, you know, they're your cards. You can kind of play with them as you as you see fit. Yeah, absolutely.

And then we'll see. You know, so I think it's really illustrative the story of magic commander format, right? That was not a format. Maybe you should tell that story because it's pretty interesting. Well, Magic has had many, many formats over its lifetime, but certainly the commander format, which is a five-person free-for-all. Is that any number free fall?

I think it's any number. Any number. So that was the one that really took hold, and the players really began to coalesce around, and eventually it did become a formal part of the game. And that's terrific. I'm all about players taking ownership of their own play experiences. And if enough people go in that direction,

then that can become part of the formal experience as well. Yeah, it was really that the fan-created format that was, it became so popular and so supported just by fans that then, you know, then Wizards started actually making products specifically for it and started really catering to that part of the community because the fans told you what they want. And so that's something that I'm looking forward to as we get SoulForge into more, SoulForge Fusion into more and more people's hands of seeing what they resonate with, what formats are they excited about?

How can we continue to improve the game and make, as you start talking about, innovations that matter, right? Innovations that meaningfully improve the experience. And we're designing. Use the many tools, which you have available with, the framework which has been designed. I mean, there's so much you can do. Yeah, yeah, we've already, you know, as people may or may not expect,

you know, we're already well into working on set two designs and developments because that's how you have to do to work. And it's, there's so much space that's still left to explore here from the game design perspective. And then the list of experimentations and things we want to do with organized play and different formats of play. And so, you know, particularly interesting and innovative ones that,

that you've come up with that I'm not going to spoil here, that we're going to try testing out, is, there's just so much really exciting stuff that, you know, we're just kind of scratching the surface of. I mean, and the,

what can be done with the digital printing technology and the way that we can get, you know, a lot of like very rare case things to happen and having, you know, actually maybe this is worth exploring a little bit. Let's talk about like set design and making new sets in a game like this in a digitally printed game and a hybrid deck game compared to a traditional TCG. Because you've also taught me a lot about how to think about that.

And I bet that would be pretty interesting to people. What do you think about when you're creating new sets in a game like this compared to traditional card games? Well, a lot of what I'm thinking is the same, although there are some differences. but of course there's a lot of extra opportunity. But certainly the main thing I do with most massively modular games, which is how I sort of categorize all these games, is look at what strategies I want to play and try to figure out how to make them come out in the mechanics

which we're using and look at which strategies I get frustrated by and try to add some mechanics, which frustrate those strategies back. But then the opportunity, which has opened up with unique deck games and further with procedurally deck-generated cards is that you can create these situations, which these you're doing more than just creating a set of cards, you're creating sort of machines.

Because in a game like Magic, you just, you know, you create all these cards and people figure out how to put them together. But here, not only can you create a card, you can create, you can create, you can have that influence the rest of the half deck and influence all the cards up and down the level up queue. And so in a sense, the dimension of the machine you're working with has grown a lot. And that allows you to do things like, as you like to say, tell a story. You can make it so that the level up tells a story.

You can also make it so that the way one of the cards touches another in your half deck tells a story. Yeah. So let's, you know, let's flesh that out with some illustrations, right? So there's a, you know, one of the sort of most iconic cards in, from original Soul Forge, which is also in Soul Forge Fusion is Crogeus. Krogius starts off as this little, the smallest possible creature is just like a little one-one, cute guy. Then in level two, it becomes this cocoon defensive like wall creature.

And then in level three, it's the biggest monster we have. It's just giant, you know, comes out of the cocoon is this giant beast that crushes things, right? And that's like this, this arc of a card over, over time or a dragon, egg that turns into a dragon wealth that turns into a giant fire breathing dragon, right? You can kind of see the evolution across a card. And then when you talk about things like horizontal influence, right, like there's this, I think the example that we've talked about is, you know, there's maybe this, you know, the, the cursed witch and that will, the cursed witch will turn another creature into now

a toad at level one. And now that other creature is like a toad yety. And then later, and that so it turns into this little, the level one is like really weird and small, but then now the level two gets a bigger bonus once he transforms back from a toad into a Yeti. And, uh, you know, and so that the fact that there was this cursing witch in your deck influenced it laterally or, you know, a zombie bite turns another creature into a zombie. So you have more zombies in your deck. Um, and so there's this cool, like influence across cards that tells a story, uh, that's also really like, yeah, just the, the possibilities there and how you, how you do all that stuff and the types of things you can make happen is really, really cool.

Yeah. And there's different ways to, well, I guess I better, I won't, I'll refrain from spoiling much along those lines because we don't know where we're going to go with that. But it's enough to say that there's a lot of things you can do with both horizontal and vertical. You've got now two dimensions where he only had one before. Yeah. Yeah.

And there's something else. So I want to talk about a couple of things. is one of the comments that you made to me that kind of blew my mind, right, in the way we think about different factions and how, so, you know, every faction in, or, you know, category in one of these, actually we call this sort of massively, what was it, what was the phrase you used to describe this, the category of games? I'm calling them massively modular games. Massively modular games. Okay, cool. So in, that one of the tools for building a massively modular game is you build, you break things down in the categories, right?

colors and magic, factions and SoulForge Fusion, and that each category is defined by certain traits. What is this good at? What is it bad at? What types of things should I expect from there? And that helps me as a player, so as a designer, to understand, you know, even though there may be, you know, thousands of pieces in individual components, I can kind of group them together and understand them. One of the challenges in a traditional trading card game is if you ever make a good card in a certain faction, that faction is now just good at that. Right. So if I'm, you know, and we use magic as an example, right, if, you know, red is the faction that's good at doing direct damage, but I make a one good direct damage card in green, which isn't supposed to be able to do that. Now green is suddenly good. Everyone that plays green will all play that good direct damage card. And so the color pie, the breakdown between the different factions is ruin. But. Right. So note there that the reason why that that's happening is it doesn't matter how rare you make that card, which originally, of course, was. one of the ways we tried to control it. Because it's a constructed game, often a constructed game,

players who want that will get it, which means that it's effectively not rare. It's just what you see all the time if you're playing green and they have any use for direct damage, which they generally do. Right. But in a hybrid deck game like Soul Forge Fusion, that's actually not the case, right? because not only you can get, you might go chase after that one super rare card, but what that's going to mean is it's going to be in the context of the other cards that it comes with. And so it will forcibly,

getting one copy of a card that's good at a thing in a given faction is still very different than if another faction's very good at that same thing. You're going to get multiple copies of cards that could do direct damage in the case we're talking about. And so the idea that a faction can still, have elements of effects and abilities that aren't traditionally its strength is actually really interesting and allows you to be a lot more granular in how you define and develop each faction and each identity over time.

Yeah, it's a, it's really liberating as a designer. I noticed in Key Forge that we launched with seven houses in Key Forge and have introduced others, you will likely never see more colors and magic except just sort of as a novelty thing. It really undermines the rest of magic to begin adding a new color. It would just make the overall game worse. The overall game experience worse except for novelty. But with Key Forge, you could design a house or color much more like a character where they you know they act you know they're mostly this way but a little this way right in in books you can have nuanced characters in lands described which are not just black and white always the same and and so we found that that

you could bring that range of personality to factions and And yeah, it didn't break anything. It just meant each of the houses had its own personality, which sometimes overlapped and sometimes didn't. So it's a lot easier to design, yeah, really flavorful houses. Yeah. So, you know, Soul Forge Fusion has four factions at launch, but it's definitely something that's opened up my mind to being able to expand that more

than we were ever willing to in original SoulForge, because that was more of a traditional, you know, trading card game and another thing. So I think that's one area of real interest. And also we haven't really talked about the forgeborn at all here, which is another kind of new thing in Soul Forge Fusion. In an original Soul Forge, the Forgeborn were kind of our iconic marquee characters. And their differentiating factor was that they had four levels,

whereas everybody else just had three levels. But that was, while cool, because you could design these level four cards that were really powerful and cool looking, they very rarely came into play because they were, you know, most games ended before you would get to shuffle your deck enough times to start playing level four cards. And now we've made the forge one far more front and center. They're actually were partially inspired by the idea of the commander,

the commander game where you, you know, vary into magic where you have a kind of avatar type character that's always out in front of you. And so maybe you want to talk a little bit about that and how that kind of evolved. Yeah, certainly from the very launch of magic, people have talked about wanting a character that they were playing, a focal point. And in early design, it never really panned out, never felt, I never had anything which really felt good. But in a commander, they have a technique which works well. I actually forget how it works, but you nominate a card, and maybe you can tell me how it works.

But I think it's like whichever card you have dictates which colors you're allowed to play. So the colors that are present in whatever your commander creature is. So typically you pick a multicolor one. I think dictate what colors are allowed to be in your deck. And then you can summon the commander as though it was in your hand. And every time it dies, it goes back to your command zone. And I think costs you, correct me if I'm wrong, I may be wrong, but it costs you more every time you want to resummit.

I'm not going to correct. Yeah, yeah, you're not going to. I'm talking to the audience. Maybe forgive both of us if we get the gist of it wrong. This is the gist of it. We've got the gist of it right. At the end, we certainly might have had details wrong. Yeah.

Anyway, choosing the commander is really fun. It sets up, I mean, in more than just a mechanical way, it sets up the personality for your deck, but it ties in in this really nice mechanical way as well. Yeah, yeah. And so with the forgeborn, we ended up taking it in that each deck, that each half deck comes with a forgeborn

that's sort of the commander of that deck. It's the thing that's tied to those pieces. The forgeborn starts in play, and it gets powers that you can use every time you level up or you reshuffle your deck. So it has no power. is it the first couple turns of the game. Then after he shuffle, he gets access to a level two power.

Then another three turns go by. Then he gets access to a level three power. Another three turns go by, he gets access to his level four power, which should generally be ending the game pretty soon thereafter. And so those are, it's a very cool way. And this is actually, you know, we talked about how we, how we used the procedurally generated process for the, you know, the kind of fused creatures with the adjective noun.

But we've also procedurally generated these forgeboard. And this is actually a process we, we went through quite a few different takes on. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how these guys are being generated and what thoughts went into that. Yeah. So as Justin said, that there's level one, there's nothing and then there's three levels where you have these different powers.

And it is pretty, you could just take these random powers like and bang them on and get something, get, make, so they get, generally more powerful as they go up. But that approach feels kind of, it's hard to design to, and it's hard for the players to get their head around exactly what the Forgeborn is doing because it does three random things every time. And so what we had some luck with was making it so that each Forgeborne has a small set of powers which they can access.

I think we're going with four. Yes, that's right. It's at least four. We could do more, but the more you do, the sort of noisier it gets. It's nice to look at a forge-borne and know about what it does. And so you're going to get three of those four power tracks, and then you're going to get a second-level version of one of them, a third-level version of one of them,

and a fourth-level version of one of them. So, for example, if you've got somebody who's a next- acromantic inclination, they might have a power which raises the dead. And if they have access to that track, they'll have a level two raise the dead, a level three raise the dead, or a level four, just one of those. And similarly, they might have some sort of drain life ability where they do some damage and gain some life. And so they'll have one of those appear.

And so when you opposite them, you know about the sort of things they do. And it becomes easy for the players, easier for the players to look at it and sort of get their heads around what they're being opposed by. Oh, they've got the raised at at level two. So you can sort of play around that, that sort of thing. Right. And again, it speaks to the point we talked about earlier. It's like we're trying to balance this ability that we have to have so much variety in these procedural generated cards with the need and the desire for players to be able to understand what's going on and to be able to see a card. and kind of at a glance, understand the gist of what's happening.

And I felt that pressure even more so with the Forgeborn than with other cards, because the Forgeborn are kind of our iconic characters that are part of the story. They're the things that are going to be in play 100% of the time. And so it was very important for us to make them understandable, right? And the difference of, okay, this is kind of a necromancer lord. So, yeah, he's going to raise zombies and drain life. and, you know, kill, kill things instantly, right? That all kind of fits around this concept of like, okay, he's a necroman's Lord versus, you know, this guy is a, you know, hyper-aggressive fighter.

And so he's going to give your creatures a bonus to attack or do, you know, move things around or, you know, make them aggressive, right? That the powers, even though there's a wide variety of powers and combinations, that they fit within a understandable heuristic that makes the character come to life and be understandable both from a story and gameplay. perspective. No, that's something during development. We kept coming back to, kept coming back to. It's this tension between variety and accessibility. It's no fun to sit down to a game where every time you see a card, you've got to read it completely, and you can't sort of look at the title and get an idea of what's going

on. But at the other hand, you know, the variety you've got available, you really want to make the most use out of it possible. And so you end up with solutions like that where you've chosen this chunk of variety that has a lot of different possibilities, but at the same time, people can hopefully get their head around and sort of at a glance know kind of how it works

after playing a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And it's been a real joy and a real interesting set of challenges that we have worked through to kind of get this game to where it is and get it to the point where it's, you know, something that I know you were very skeptical of at the beginning and with good justification that we could take this, this level up mechanic and this purely digital game and turn it into something physical and turning into something that really evolved on your concept of the unique deck games and creates new procedurally generated

technologies and really, you know, again, like we talked about it earlier, it's like this, taking something that is that is familiar that we you know the elements of games that we both love and and applying like meaningful innovation that really hopefully takes the industry forward and gives people something exciting and fun to play with and and as the time that people are going to be able to hear this uh they can go check it out and back it uh back it live on kickstarter so i think that uh we will uh you know we've covered a lot of the major stuff there's still tons of details that we could pack into, but I know we're a little short on time. So if anybody that wants to know more, you can go to stoneblade.com forward slash soulforge,

S-O-L-F-R-G-E, and that will not only take you to where the Kickstarter page is, to join our Discord and ask questions, so join the tabletop simulator mod, or we've built all the tools so you can play the game right away, and you'll be able to see what we're doing and still influence the game as it evolves. And that's one of the things that we're continuing to organize. As soon as we're done here and getting this thing out the door, we're working on set two and working on cool designs. And there's tons of different things we haven't even talked about,

that we've been playing around with things like solo and modes and ways to play against, you know, kind of cooperatively and all kinds of other ways that this can go, that we want to see what fans want and how we play, how this game evolves, how this community evolves, what does organized play look like. So I strongly encourage everybody to, come join us, come check it out, come let us know what you think.

And Richard, I cannot thank you enough for coming on this journey, for helping to create so many amazing games and being able to work on yet another amazing game together. Well, thank you for getting me involved. It's been a lot of fun, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how this exploration of this space goes. All right. Well, as my first ever repeat guest, I think this was great to be able to deep dive into our mutual project together. And I can't wait to see what we get to talk about next time. Thanks.

Always good to talk about games, especially with you, Justin. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews

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or wherever fine books are sold. Thank you.