Think Like A Game Designer - Richard Garfield — Delving into Game Narratives, The Essence of Memorable Gameplay, and Building Bridges with Fellow Designers (#11)

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

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. I am so excited to introduce today's podcast guest. I got to tell you, there is nobody that I prefer talking to about game design than this man. And frankly, if you're listening to this podcast, the odds that you don't already know the person that I'm about to introduce are incredibly small.

But on the off chance you don't, let me tell you about Richard Garfield. Richard created the entire trading card game category with Magic the Gathering. It has gone on to design countless incredible trading card games for both physical and digital, including Vampire the Eternal Struggle, the Star Wars trading card game, Spectrum answer, artifact, Key Forge. We worked on a digital card game Soul Forge together, and he's done. tons of other things in addition to that. Lots of great board games, including Robo Rally and Bunny Kingdom, a lot of amazing stuff.

He has a career that has not only created tons of incredible invested players and really buoyed the entire tabletop gaming industry, but he's actually created tons of incredible designers. We talk about in this podcast about the radioactive spider bite that gets you to become a game designer. And for him, it was Dungeons and Dragons. And for me, it was Magic the Gathering. If it wasn't for Richard, there's no chance that I would,

be here talking to you right now. And since we got a chance to work together back on SoulForge days, I've gotten to really see the insights of how he thinks and the way he processes real rigorous principled ideas around game design. And it's what got me thinking in a much more principled way about design. And so being able to now share his insights with you, I am so excited if you can't already tell. So things we talk about, principles of innovation and how innovation can actually hurt you. We talk about why your game shouldn't be balanced and who you should really be balancing a game for. We talk a lot about Richard's newest category of game with Key Forge, a unique deck building game and the challenges that come from building something that really evolves on

the collectible card game category into something that's very different. And we just talk for a ton about all kinds of really fascinating subjects. We were pressed for time, so I had to cut it off earlier than I would have normally wanted to. But this is shock full of goodies. And I know we're going to get another chance to talk again. But in the meantime, I know that you'll enjoy all of the incredible design insights, all of the great conversation that I was able to have with the man, the myth, the legend, Richard Garfield. Richard, it is awesome to get to speak with you again. Hi, Justin. It's good to be talking. So I always start the podcast every time I get a new person on here, especially.

someone who's had as much success in notoriety as you to sort of tell their origin story. You know, what's your hero's journey that got you to designing games and kind of got you to realize that this was a career path for you? Well, it took a while for it to become my career path because I looked at what the world of games was and came away feeling it was pretty much an idiot's. move to try to make a living off of it. And back in the 80s, when I was probably considering it, but this probably was true statistically.

And so I decided to go into, even though I loved games, I decided to go into math instead. And it was during the course of doing my PhD that I came up with this game concept that not all players had to have the same deck. and that really excited me. And soon after that, had a prototype of magic,

which was sort of built on the bones of games that I had been working on for the previous 10 years just as a hobby. Wizards of the Coast was looking for an interesting game to publish, and so that connection helped to come to life. And how did you get connected to Wizards of the Coast and Peter Atkinson originally. So, as I said, I was not looking to be a professional game designer,

but I did take game design seriously, both as an academic interest, you know, something I was interested in the history of and the study of, but also in sort of a sense of being an artist, I wanted to create things using game design. So one of the many games I created back in the 80s was Robo Rale, and that in my intent at that point was all these creations I made were just for the entertainment of me and my friends. And if they found a publisher, that'd be fine, but I wasn't going to work to find a publisher. But I had a good friend I met at Bell Labs who fell in love with Roborale, and he took it upon himself to get it published.

And I think he worked through over seven publishers over the course of about seven years before he found, this little startup, which was just doing role-playing games, Wizards the Ghost. That's great. I would like to circle back to the very start of the origin story because I want to give kudos to Dungeons and Dragons as being really the radioactive spider bite that turns people into super game designers, at least it did for me. the Dungeons and Dragons blew me away when I was about 13. Before then, I liked games, but Dungeons and Dragons really makes you into a game designer,

and it teaches you to be responsible for your own game session, so to speak. And so it teaches you a lot about all sorts of things about games, and it also presses the boundaries of everything you know about what makes. a game and it blew me away it made me think that if this crazy thing which was so far out of my understanding of games existed what else is possible in games and what else exists that I don't know and that's that's really what what put me into games that's wonderful so I actually so there's there's pretty common stories here I want to I want to underscore one point from earlier and then and I'll come back to

Dungeons and Dragons, you know, the fact that you started on this path with no expectation or certainly no reasonable expectation at the time of it being a career or trying to get published, but that you had this sort of love of the creation and that success was defined really as having something that's fun for you and your friends to play, and that by working on the craft and creating things that were so much fun, you almost got pulled into being published by other people as a pretty, you know, fascinating aspect of it. And I actually find is often very true. the people that are end up being successful are not starting out as I'm going to make a career. It's I love doing this.

And then, oh, okay, wait, I can actually make a living doing this. That's awesome. So I think that's an important sort of lesson to be drawn from that. And then with Dungeons and Dragons, there's, you know, I've talked to a lot of different designers. And there are generally two, as you called it, radioactive spider bites that almost every single one fall into. and the first is Dungeons and Dragons and the second one is Magic the Gathering. And I certainly fall into the latter category.

There's no way I exist as a game designer without Magic's influence, and both addicting me and turning me into a pro player traveling around the world, and then as an inspiration and jumping off point, I assume at this point you've got to realize how much of an impact that you've had, but it's a pretty enormous, like,

what does it feel like, or when did you first start to realize how much your design was now creating the entire next generation of game designers. Well, it was sobering for a long time and sort of scary to look at how popular and influential magic was becoming throughout the 90s. And certainly gratifying, but not really expected. I knew that I had a really good game with some really amazing hooks that people hadn't seen before.

But I had also seen so many games through the 80s and late 70s as I explored games that were excellent and really interested me but had no feat. They were small games or my parents hadn't heard of them even though they were reasonably popular. And so I knew going into this that there was a very good chance that my game would end up in the same category that it would find some small audience, but not blow up like it did. So it's been an unexpected and exciting journey, and it's been really nice to contribute to the world of games. I often liken my attitude about games to my attitude about math and sort of building any sort of cultural creation. I don't think it's a one-person thing. I think of it as something where we're all sort of working together

to create something incredible. So to be able to lay some important stones in that edifice of games is, is wonderful. Yeah, that's very well said. I think that's kind of all of us as designers. We're all sort of like taking the building blocks that were handed to us before. And then, oh, hey, if you put these two blocks together, it creates this new thing.

And then somebody else can take that and then build the next thing. And then there's this just amazing tower that's been constructed. And really, I mean, just so much so over the last even 50 years that it's blown up and changed. Obviously, gaming's been around forever. But so it feels like the rate of evolution has increased dramatically in our lifetimes. And it's been a really exciting time to be in the craft. And let alone the idea of game design as a craft didn't even really exist back then, that where now it's sort of taught in schools and we've written books about it.

And you can really try to create a language that we can have this conversation about different styles of play and why we play and how we design and what the purpose of that. is I think it's a really fascinating time that something else that you've been really involved in is teaching and and writing about design. How do you find that craft of sort of the educational process of training new designers and talking about design has evolved? Oh, it's been amazing to watch it grow up back in the 70s. We were looking in in sort of despair at what there was written on. game design, or, you know, games in general. You could find, you know, books on histories, history of games and so forth. But even those were few and, and often so drenched in,

they, they didn't, they were inaccurate. There wasn't much to go on. So, so people don't leave a lot of records of games, even though there's evidence that, They're sort of part of humanity's existence for a long time and important part, but people don't write about them. And so there's not that much – rather than finding a set of rules and a set of all the games people played, you'll find some pieces and sort of have to put things together. Maybe it'll be mentioned in a poem. Anyway, that's getting off track. But yeah, the seeing games grow up to this level where back in the 70s and 80s, you began to see, you saw schools dedicated to this relatively new art form of film and the serious study of that. And to see that sort of extent to games has been terrific.

Yeah, I think that in addition sort of like now having this craft and tons of, you know, like shoulders of giants. that we can stand on and now like read about and learn about and there's YouTube channels on game designers, all these things that exist. There's certain kinds of traits that I find really help for somebody that's going to, you know, become a game designer and really try to make an impact. And we've kind of touched on some of these things, you know, appreciating sort of mechanical structures. And as you sort of talked about this, you know, similar to mathematics and having the ability to sort of see systems and build things. And there's also some other things that I've noticed in your personality and a lot of the designers I talk to, there's this sort of go against the grain kind of nature to it, right?

When you play games, I've noticed that you will, you know, pick strategies that are the least common and find ways to exploit them and really upend what people are expecting. And if they aren't working, then change the game to make it so that they do work. Right, right. And so that is that, you think that that kind of contrariness or that pushing to the edge is a key part of being a designer or maybe just a key part of your style? or do you think there's something universal there? I've never heard it characterized as something that might be universal.

I can't think of any counter examples to it, but I haven't asked that question much. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of designers who did not have that bent. For me, I'm very interested in the system of a game, And so part of learning about a system is sort of learning the really the extreme points and playing around with those. And I love playing with the framework and seeing how that changes the way the game is played and the sort of spaces it defines. But I don't think that will be universal.

I think there are some other designers who are driven by very different things. and are more interested in putting together a very tight engine that they understand and that carries whatever sort of simulative properties they're interested in. And so it's less for them about looking at the crazy points that come about than maybe shaving those. Or the only reason they look at them is not because they're fascinated by them, but because they want to sort of shave them down so that the game. is more of a beautiful gem than sort of a crazy gem mine. Right, I like it.

That's sort of that elegance as a primary driver or being able to build that concrete thing. Okay, well, this I think sounds like a great way to transition into pushing at some of these crazy edges of games. So one of the things that I really wanted to talk about was kind of the interaction between business models and, game design. Obviously, Magic was a, you know, sort of innovated this entire idea of the collectible card game and created a whole world where now the design obviously has to be very influenced by that business model. And since then, the world, you know, both exploded with those and then has evolved into a ton of different kinds from, you know, freemium games online to, you know, things like Key Forge, which we can get into, to different expandable game models, to subscription

models, all the whole world of business and design. And how do you, you know, obviously the things really interact with each other, but I guess I'd like to just sort of expand a little bit on how you're thinking about that today and where you see the industry moving as far as that connection. Looking at the connection between your revenue model and the game is certainly key, especially these days where there's so many different crazy examples and crazy possibilities with digital play. It's really interesting to look at what people are investing in and what they get out of how that helps or hinders their game play experience. So one of the earliest examples of my thinking about that would have been with Magic, or even before Magic, where I was sort of conceiving of this concept. trading card game, where I was really worried about the person who bought the most cards always winning. Now, while I was worried about that, the way I viewed games at the time

was that you have to take some control over your gameplay experience. And so I figured that if there were, if there were broken combinations that when people discovered them, they'd play with them, but then they'd discard them and do something else. After all, that's what I did with another very influential game for me, which is a cosmic encounter. There were lots of busted powers there and busted combinations, and we sort of rolled with it. That never caused us any problem.

But very early on, I came up with this idea that, you wanted to make the common cards, the most powerful cards, or at least the broadest cards in general. And then the rare cards being narrower and more flavor driving. And so the idea about that was that if you invested some modest amount into a game system, if you get more cards, you're always going to have a better chance. because you have more decks to choose from, but you can make it so that the decks you're choosing from, the advantage you get diminishes over very quickly.

So you get sort of a logarithmic curve of your aggregate power increase rather than an exponential curve or even a linear curve. So if you buy 10 booster packs, you've got whatever. Yeah, yeah, I aimed for having 75% of the power, you could get, right? Something like that, as opposed to 10% of the power you could get. And so that was an example of looking at the game, the revenue model, which was very new at the time, and trying to figure out how that should impact the design relative to the player.

And it's still something that drives me today with KeyForge. you look at the common cards in Key Forge and they're very powerful. People's first impulse in looking at the decks in Key Forge was to sort of count up how many rare cards they were, and that's how good the deck is. But that is not at all true. It might be sort of make it very interesting and have this really weird play style or something like that.

But it's no accident that the common cards are things like complete board wipes and immense creatures with crazy abilities. Yeah, so let's dig into Key Forge a little bit. So just in case there's some people listening that aren't familiar with the concept of Key Forge, you want to give a quick kind of top line what Key Forge is and how it works, what differentiates it from other games out there?

Sure, KeyForge was inspired by very early play of magic where we would get, we would run leagues where you would get a deck and maybe a couple boosters and stamp them, and they could only be played in a group. And I found this really interesting because you learn everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses, and you learn them over a long period of time, how best to play against each other and how to play the best to use the strengths and weaknesses you have.

And so a long time ago, I began thinking, what if you could print these decks in such a way that the cardbacks were different so that you kept a deck together? Because one of the problems with playing with it this way with magic, or any trading card game, is that after the evening's done, your cards sort of disappear into your massive cards, and you can't revisit them. So relatively recently, printing technology is caught up to this idea,

and I was able to make a game where, every deck that was printed was unique and in fact had a unique name and that name appeared on the back of every card. And so when you started playing that deck, you would learn what its strengths and weaknesses are. There's no real chance that it would get lost among your other cards because it's a single unit. And that's what Key Forge is. So when you're, and I mean the instant I saw it. this game I think I messaged you right away. It was just like this is this is awesome. This is something that we've kind of like the culmination of stuff that like a lot of us have been thinking about for a really long time. And it's really cool to see it see it implemented. When when you were building this game, one of the things that I thought was going to be happening when I first saw it was that actually each card would be unique or within that the cards themselves would change. And and in reality for this game that the cards, there's sort of a fixed set of cards. cards, but they can come in totally unique combinations.

As you were building this, did you ever consider the cards themselves modifying? Was that just not possible from where the printing was at? Like, where did you decide on sort of the way that this unique combination was going to come together and how many different versions of it that were going to be? I think that's a really natural expectation from this game form. And I'm hopeful that we'll see something like that in the future. There's a couple of reasons I went with this format. One of them was technical, although that wasn't the main thing.

I think if I pushed at it, we could have changed that. It's been really hard to make procedural cards, but it's becoming easier. We could talk a little bit about that later. But that's clearly a short, short-term problem, not a long-term problem. Very early on, though, I wanted – I set this – framework where every deck was unique but it was mostly unique as a collection of

disjoint things that you understood and I did that in part because that way players who played the game a bunch would be able to sit down and understand

all of a deck or 75% of a deck that they're up against quickly rather than have to learn about every card individually along the way, which I thought might slow things down. Now, I think there's probably some clever ways you can do it where learning your opponent's deck every time wouldn't be – you have to do something smart in order to make that experience fun and quick, but I think there are smart things you can do. but for my first foray into unique deck games,

I thought that it would be safest and best for the players if a fireball was the same in every deck and that if there were procedural cards, that they would be pretty rare, and that that would help people get into the strategy of the game and understanding the world a lot faster. So it's interesting because I feel like there's two forces at play here, right? The one that you just described where it's like, all right, if I'm going to play against someone and there's sort of the competitive or the, you know, I'm going to sit down and you actually, Key Forge, you actually have a sort of deck card that gives you the contents of each deck that's like starts out in place.

So you can actually look at your opponent's deck list and know what's in it before you even start playing. So there's this, you know, I can more quickly grok what's happening and play a strategic, game. But on the flip side, you know, there's something that I experienced when I first started playing magic, which has in many ways for me, at least personally since disappeared, where I would play against someone and I would have no idea where they would play a card, like that card even existed. Now, of course, the internet and previews and everything, I know all the cards before I start playing. But one of the things I thought was a cool potential that could come in something what was truly a unique, unique deck game with unique cards is that like that experience of discovery could

happen all the time because all the cars, you never know what you're going to see. Was that just the craziness behind that too much to sort of, you ended up opting for this idea of like more rockable, more strategic, but easier to wrap your head around. And I'm curious how much that tradeoff you feel like. Is that just because this is the first one, you wanted to start kind of safe or safer at least and then move on? Or do you think that being too crazy is just going to be too much of a price to pay? game like this. Yeah, in the long run, I don't think it's too crazy.

One of the things I like to think about is how much complexity in design is how much you want to innovate. Innovation is a good thing. It gives us new games. But every time you innovate something, you cost your players because they have to unlearn something or relearn it. And so I tend to like to think about this complexity, the cost of, you have a budget for complexity and how much you want to spend. And I think this idea of trying as hard as you can to get back to this world where everything you flip up is new and exciting and you don't know what's out there. I think that's a possibility, but I think that was going beyond the complexity budget I set for myself. And once this format is understood and you have people who understand what's going on,

I think that's sort of one of the great ways to sort of make a new design is to say, okay, well, this new twist is what we're going to add to that. Now we've got all these concepts which are understood, and then it's less of a reach. Although I will say that for Key Forge, my intent was that you do get some of that magic over time. Because just as in the first set, there's this sort of exciting notion of Mavericks. So there's seven suits or houses in the game. And sort of they're roughly like colors in magic. And one of the things you can do in a game like this is make it so that cards go into a house they don't belong in.

And that sort of breaks your expectation. And you sort of might know that intellectually that's possible. But it's super, super rare. So you do get hints of that sort of magic of discovery. And then over time, you get even more because with the second set, we've got legacy cards. And legacy cards are cards which are cards which no longer are being printed, but they exist in this one deck. And so over time, you know, after 10 years, you're going to have something where you understand most of the current environment. but there's going to be these cards that haven't been around for 10 years showing up in your deck.

And that should get some of the, and, you know, the rarity with which they will happen will be such that I'm hoping that there'll be a little bit of that fairy dust in there. That's wonderful. I think I also, I just want to pause and underscore because I think there was, you said not only a really important principle, but one that I think divides into two, which is the, there's the idea of complexity. complexity points, which I think is important for any designer. And actually, one of the most common mistakes I see in new game designers is they just try to throw way too much at the project. And it becomes too hard to grok everything that's happening and understand what's happening. And that's true, regardless of even if you're innovating greatly or just have a lot happening within a game. And then there's the idea that innovation is great, but too much innovation is bad.

That if you innovate too much, people can't relate to things that they know, they can't be able to, to get what's going on and you can actually be too far ahead of the curve when you're designing and so that you actually want to really focus on a core innovation or a limited subset that are related in a new project that will bring people along with you and then provide the foundation, like the building blocks we talked about earlier, to then build new things on top of that. No, that's super important. And it's something which is one of the things we are in danger of these days. is losing one of the most exciting things about games,

which is that a good game becomes better and better the more you play it, not more used up. So games, I like to think about games as books and movies and so forth, but they're very, very different. Games are more like music, because oftentimes when you hear a piece of music the first time, it doesn't mean much, but then the more you hear it, the better it gets. And so when you have a culture of game players where they play a game once,

and then they say, oh, this isn't so good, or, oh, this is okay, but I want to go over to this next game. Then you've got a culture of game players who are not getting what is absolutely the most exciting part of games to me, which is that the better you know it, the better it gets. And so as a game designer, when you over-innovate, what you're doing is you're making it so players can't bring as much expertise into the game so they get into that exciting part where they really know the game all that much slower. And so that really costs you. Yeah, that's a really fascinating point. And it dovetails into another challenge, which I hear a lot, both from a player perspective and a designer perspective these days, is that there's so many games. coming out so often, right?

On the sort of flip side, the dark side, if you will, of the fact that we're in such a renaissance of games, there's so much, you know, innovation and so much to build on and so much knowledge out there. And it's so much easier to make games that it's ever been before, that there's, you know, hundreds of games coming out every month. And so there's this tendency to sort of focus on what's new and just play the latest thing and that a lot of great games can kind of get lost in the shuffle because there's just, you know, the shiny new object that people are chasing after.

Is there, you know, do you put much thought into that? And especially when there's new, I really want to sort of tailor it to like a new designer, right? You put out a new game, everybody's going to pay attention. But for a designer that doesn't have the same notoriety, do you think of ways that they can kind of break through that noise or build something that's going to last longer than just whatever the most recent wave or trend is? Yeah, that's a really good question. I do think about that a lot. And because of my game consumption, I really like to find, to know as much about what's being done as I can.

Because it's part of my love of games is sort of I want to see all the, all the games that are being made. But, but yeah, I really have to teach myself to discipline myself to go back. I can play my favorite games again and again and give new games that come along that really shine a chance to get to that level as well, where I play them more than once for a new designer. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's hard for me as an established designer often to get attention. I did this game Spy, SpyNet, which is a who was done through Z-Man a couple years ago. It was a small two-person or two-team game where you do a Winston draft, which is a specific type of draft that I created for Magic originally. And I thought the game was outstanding.

I thought it could be played with the same depth that Tichu is played, where the sort of the appealing to the same group of people who like to play. play a card game and get into the nuances of the strategy over a long period of time. But, you know, it hardly made a blip. And it's just like no matter who I talk to to sort of get the word out or something like that, I couldn't get attention for it. So there is the possibility, of course, that I overestimate how good a game it is. But I really think it's because, but part of me thinks, and I think, I think at least part of that is because

the people who did try it tried it and were like, and they moved on rather than sort of go to this next stage of playing it a bunch of times and learning the subtleties. So if I have difficulty with that, you can imagine that somebody with less of a name recognition is going to have that much more. On the other hand, I'm kind of, I'm not. as plugged into ways to use social media to drive the game, both in terms of excitement on Kickstarter and just getting the word around with Facebook. So, you know, and we recently did a trivia game,

a half-truth. In our campaign, we employed a company that specializes in doing Kickstarter programs, Studio 71 for that. And they seemed really good at, you know, kicking that up a notch. So I think somebody who's more

savvy on the networking these days could probably do a lot more than I can do. And so, and so, yeah. Yeah, that's funny. I did actually worked on a project with Studio 71 in the past also, that they definitely know that marketing

side quite well. So how did that go? It went well. I was, you know, less, I was more in the background on that project. It was a, it was an influencer that was kind of their game and I was, you know, in the background making sure there was a real game there. And it went, it went, it went, well. It was a good project, although it was an interesting process because that was a while ago. and I was working with a lot of people that just didn't understand the games and the game audience, and so it took a lot of, like, heavy lifting

to get to the point where we could make the thing and make it make sure that it was going to be good. But it was a, you know, the project did well and funded, and it was a really fun, it was a fun project because it was like a kind of kinetic block-destroying kind of game with, like, cannons, and you actually, you know, throwing things around. And so it was a really fun.

It was a fun project for me to work on, and I learned a lot, yeah, about how they, that, you know, functionally, you need to be thinking about Kickstarters and marketing as its own game. That those things have, you know, you want to create different incentives for people to share and more exciting moments for them to unlock and reveal things and having different tiers where people can like, you know, earn status and show off where they are in the program and create a connection and sense of ownership with what's going on. So in my experience doing Kickstarters and working with other teams that have been very successful with it, That is just an entire game design project in and of itself. In addition to, of course, understanding the basics of, you know, social media and marketing and how to kind of get the word out on its own.

I think there's a real space for us as designers to be thinking about, okay, how do you make this fun and viral and something people want to share? So the more I think about it like that, the more I kind of can wrap my head around it. And, you know, we have a big Kickstarter. We're planning for the not too distant future, which I can't really talk about right now, but that is a part of it

that I think designers can really play with and have more fun with. There's this tendency to think of like, oh, sales and marketing, like I'm not really into that. That's not what I'm here for. But I think just like when we're talking about business models,

interactions with game design, I think marketing models, interactions with game design and how you want to build something is really important. It's crucial. It's so important. I think about it.

so much trying to get a game to get the attention it deserves or that I think it deserves. And for a new designer, I guess I would advise a new designer in two ways with the with the Kickstarter stuff and getting that media together. It's like I'm no expert at that. I just know that know that there's a lot going on and there's a lot of different threads to pull. And that Studio 71's, if they're working for you, that. That's great. If they're not, they're part of the problem because they're creating all this noise around other things, which is distracting from you.

So the flip side of that is I would encourage new designers to as much as they can, as hard as it is, go to publishers and try to use them because they are experts at getting the word out. Now, this game that I was complaining about, SpyNet, that was done through a publisher, so they can't, it doesn't always work. But working with them in general, they will have more resources and more experiences than a new designer. And I think a lot of people give up on the traditional publisher too fast in that they'll give them a design. it won't pass muster for the designer and then they might do that a couple times and then they say, oh, well, let's go to Kickstarter. I would, I get, my designs are given back to me from the publisher for many, many reasons,

very frequently. And sometimes it's just not what they're looking for. Sometimes they misunderstand the inherent brilliance in my design. Of course. But sometimes there are legitimate problems which need to be addressed. And so every time I get the game back, I look at what they've said because usually they're very thoughtful about, you know, saying why it didn't work for them. And I asked myself whether there's some improvement I can make based on that. And sometimes I think that it ends up with just making it a better game.

Other times it makes it a better game in a strange way where I don't. think it was a problem to begin with, but the fact that they saw a problem means, in some sense, there is a problem, right? Like if they say the person who goes first always wins, even if the person who first has a less than average chance of winning, there's sort of not a problem because what they're saying is false, but there is a problem because lots of people are going to say that if they say that. Right. perception is reality in many ways. And so, and so, whether or not what they're saying is accurate about your game, they are giving you a perception,

which is a reality. And so a chance to address that, either in just changing the presentation or changing the mechanics, so it looks like it's a little different. But however you deal with that, that's a real problem. But if you take that feedback and you say, I'm just going to go to Kickstarter,

well, you are sort of turning away from some really valuable neutral critique that you won't get from your friends and family and a Kickstarter crowd that's just, you know, really excited about the whatever they picture the game you're going to present is going to be rather than what it is. Yeah, and it's funny because I was going to, you know, it was one point I was going to ask about failures and setbacks and how you deal with them. And I think this is one of the key components, right?

Like even an experienced designer who has been doing this for, you know, 30 years is you're going to have designs that don't work. You're going to get rejections from publishers. You're going to have feedback that you don't necessarily want to hear. And the ability to take that in, listen to that feedback, decide if there's something that needs to be done. And if so, is it, you know, a fundamental thing or a presentation thing or whatever? And being able to learn from that is just so critical to being able to evolve. And so as a new designer, I always advise you was like, you know, nobody, no design is. is perfect. Assume that there are flaws there and if somebody can help you find them,

then that's a gift that they've given you. Whether it's a flaw of perception or a flaw of deep mechanics or whatever that you have that opportunity and me able to approach it from that perspective is a game changer as opposed to this like, oh, my ego is now on the line and I've been attacked and, you know, they don't know what they're talking about. Sometimes they don't know what they're talking about, but starting from the perspective that every piece of feedback is valuable and that you, you know, can control how you take that in and how you can update your your process, your design, your learnings, is just such a critical paradigm.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You're always going to get this feedback. Yeah, you can get value from the feedback, and so use that value. And there was another thing earlier, there was so much great stuff in that last segment. Another thing I wanted to underscore when you were talking about Spineat,

that there's, you know, you made this sort of comment that like the depth of play is incredibly, And once you start getting into it, there's so much that you can learn and explore and go, you know, find all these layers of what's happening. But possibly with that game, but I'm sort of making the principle more in general. If the surface level isn't appealing, nobody gets to the depth, right? And that one of the things when it comes to trying to make noise or be able to kind of be seen is you've got to have that surface level be shiny. You've got to have something that's going to draw people in, right? Like Key Forge is a great example.

when you first hear the idea of Key Forge. Every deck is unique. What? I just buy one and I can just play it. And that's what had like, you now have somebody's attention, you know. And so the fact that there's also a good game behind it and depth to explore, fantastic, that's what keeps people. But without that initial, like, you describe it to me, I know what's going on or I see something on the table at a convention or I, you know, whatever, something that draws you in, you're never going to get, no matter how deep and awesome your experience is,

nobody's ever going to experience it. So designing to the surface is, you know, in many. anyways, at least as important as designing for depth. And a lot of people don't want to hear that, but it's a pretty critical part of making sure that your game is going to be viral and people are going to want to pay attention. Yeah, that is absolutely true. Yeah.

So I'd like to pivot a little bit into a topic. I know we're both pretty fired up about, which is the concept of how to develop games, about balance, about being able to find ways to make, game the right level of strategic depth versus perceived balance versus all these things this is one of the most there's so many layers ways we can kind of dive into this um you know and i got i asked for um on on social media for some fan questions and people and without fail a lot of these questions revolved around balance what do you do about power creep and how do you feel about

the broken cards and and it's it's this fired up thing which i i i'm sure we can talk about for But let's just kick it off with this idea of today when you think about what does it mean for a game to be balanced and what are you what do you strive for in your designs now. Yeah, I think certainly a lot about game balance. So what people mean by game balance often is changes also. People aren't consistent with what they're referring to when they talk about game balance. and and but so so there's like the balance of oftentimes people will play a particular game and they'll say oh this game wasn't balanced and what they are saying when you dig a little deeper is that they wanted to do a trading strategy and the trading strategy wasn't as powerful as they thought it should be so therefore it wasn't balanced now it could be that the designer did not tend the trading strategy to be look a strategy unto itself but but something which is just augmenting other stuff because you can't actually have it so every single strategy is successful because then it doesn't matter what you do right there

has to be some some strategies that work better than others so when when you've got this a person who criticizes based on the fact that that that that that what they tried to do didn't work. I mean, obviously, that could also work because it's the first time they played. It's crazy how often times people will, how often people will say a game is unbalanced because in their first playthrough, something happened they didn't expect it. They lost the game. And rather than rolling with it during the game or learning from it after the game, the game is

unbalanced and then they cross it off. and it's it kills me that how often that is the reaction because because one of the I mean the thing which makes games wonderful to me is that they are so hard to predict and to understand and and that even no matter how good you are you cannot get the nth degree into a a reasonably deep game the first time you play it. I don't even try in my designs to do that because I make the prototype and play it. I do not try to think about it the first time

because it's just 10 hours of thinking about something is worth five minutes of play. Yeah. I sit down and play for five minutes and I understand it a hell of a lot better and then can sort of iterate from there. but something happened to me recently which got me rethinking some of my thoughts on balance which was that I was watching a dice tower review of the game Tapestry

and Tom Vassel liked the game and talked about all the exciting things in it one of the things that he was still on the fence about was balance And some of the aspects of balance, he said, weren't balanced, but you had some ways to address them in the game. And other aspects, he couldn't tell because he had to play to long enough, which are both reasonable things. But I found myself listening to that and getting excited by the fact that it might not be balanced or as balanced as is expected these days. And I think these days a lot of designers overbalance their games. They really try to take such strong control over the player experience that they remove a lot of these things which I like to explore in games.

And so hearing that about it made me think, oh, I really want to play tapestry because I want to see, you know, play through some of these sort of potentially broken characters. and see if I can't make the ones that are underpowered, make them work or kick some ass with the ones that are broken or whatever. Yeah, I think that there's this, I know, I know because I went through this exact process as a designer. You know, I came at it from, I started as a Magic Pro Player,

and then I started working on designing for the versus System trading card game. And I came at it as a pro player, your job is to break the game, right? Your job is to figure out where the thing is degenerate and then find a way to exploit that strategy as much as possible. And I took my job as a designer when I first started designing

as making my game unexploitable, right? That I was going to make sure that there was nothing degenerate ever and ended up paying exactly the price you're talking about, which is that there was a lot less fun. There was a lot less things you could do. There's a lot less discovery of the many possibilities that are out there.

And I learned that I needed to be afraid of my designs to make them fun. I needed it. It was an important lesson that a lot of people do not know when they come at it as a player first and not as a designer first. That's a really good way to put it. You need to be afraid of your designs. That's perfect.

A good illustration of that was back in the day in magic. I moved out of magic design fairly early, but I was in sort of general magic steering. for 10 years or whatever it was. And one of the things we were talking about is how to measure the performance of the developers. Now, the developers are similar to the pro players. Their job is to break the designs and then the designers working with the designers, they fix those so that the overall product is more balanced. I like to think of the developers as being like the engine.

and the designers as being like the architects. And there was this notion put forward that every band or eroded card should be a ding for the performance of the developers. And I put forth and strongly believe that that's the wrong way to measure performance for your developers. is because if you do that, then they won't be taking any chances and the game will be less fun. So I said, obviously, it can't be too many. But I went so far as to saying is like, you should aim for one band card here, right? Like, then you know they're taking chances. And I mean, they didn't do that.

But the spirit of what I was saying, which was that you need to take some chances here. And nobody is smart enough not to make. mistakes when they take those chances from top to top. Right. You always, you have to ride that edge to make the best possible game. And of course, you hope to stay on the right side of it. And, but if you're, yeah, if you're never failing, you're not trying hard enough. Is, is a kind of good rule of thumb that I use. But I think we can maybe dig a little deeper here because I think in my experience,

there are, you know, there are good bets and bad bets when it comes to kind of pushing, uh, quote unquote, unbalanced or, you know, designs or pushing the envelope as far as what's possible. And I'm curious, you know, so like, for example, one thing I always try on is like, you know, there are certain types of strategies that you tend to know provoke unfun play patterns, right? Resource denial strategies, things that prevent people from being able to play, take, you know, skipping turns or destroying lands or whatever. And so with those types of getting curse cards. Yeah, curse cards. Exactly. Yes. That's a great example. Right. Yeah. When I built Ascension, it was one of the things I hated in Dominion was that like you got cars and your deck just got worse. Like the whole fun of a deck building game is that feeling of like exponential progress as you're getting better and better in doing your thing, right? I don't want to be interfered with like that. It's not fun.

And so those types of strategies are ones where I won't push the envelope. You know, I will always be conservative. Whereas other strategies that maybe are sort of late game super dominant dragons or crazy you know, high cost cars that you can acquire that go out like those I'm willing to push a little bit further. So that's one kind

of example of like, like rule of thumb. Do you have any things along those lines that you think about as far as like where the safer places to push are or how you should think about creating that play space? No. I, well, I'd never thought about it in that way, but I think that's a good way to think about it. But certainly with Magic, for example, I made it so that a lot of those unfund strategies, I tried to aim to make them viable. And the next generation of developing, and designers really pushed back on that for the reasons which you cite, and I think correctly, to make it so that while, like, resource denial was in the game, it wasn't, it was, it was

conservatively enough presented that it was really unlikely that it was going to make a strategy unto itself. But I wanted to mention one other thing. I've got this wonderful story of game balance, which I'd like to share with you. Great. And your listening audience. So there's this question as to who you balance for. Because one of the things I go into, I've got such respect for

games that I often think that it's hubris to to do what I think is what people try to do, which is designed for the best player possible, because we don't know who the best player possible is. So I think there's two mistakes for that presented there.

One is we don't know what you know, how God would play the game. And two, that ignores a lot of your audience. A lot of people aren't your best player. Is there such a thing as balanced for them? And

I've talked to designers who feel very strongly that the, you know, just the top level, that's who you design for. Everybody else needs to get to, you know, get to that level to appreciate how well-balanced it is. So, so I did this game, Spectrum Answer, with another designer from Belarus, Alexei Stankovic. and in Spectrumancer, there were six different character classes. I might have that wrong, but one of them was given away for free, the priest, and the others you purchased as a digital game. And there was this belief online that the priest was the worst class. Now, I know that it wasn't chosen. to be the worst. That was the assumption because it was free. It was chosen because it had

sort of it showed the biggest range of possibilities in the game. It had flexibility. So then we did an analysis of the performance of the different character classes. And the priest had was had about a 48% win at the low among beginners. So it was very close to 50% which is even. Then it dropped to like 42%, so significantly bad for intermediate players. But then it went up to like 54% for expert players. And when you think about it, that makes sense because it was chosen for flexibility. Flexibility is skill testing. Experts are going to be able to take more advantage of that than beginners. And so you have this class, which is good for experts, but bad for intermediates.

So then another class, which was coveted by the players, was the Necromancer. And you look at the performance there, and it was like 52% for beginner. And it went up to like 56% for intermediate. So it was really good. And then it dropped to like 44% is terrible. And that's because there was, it was pretty easy. class to play. But when you were an expert, you knew

how to play around it. And so it wasn't that big a deal. That, in a lot of ways, exemplifies how I think about balance, which is that the situation with Spectrumans was really what I would have wanted

had I done it intentionally, which was there was more than one class that was good for beginners and intermediates, in more than one class that was good for experts, they didn't necessarily overlap. Yeah, I found this is actually especially true in some of the most popular games now.

League of Legends has this as a phenomenon. I'm not an avid player, but a lot of the people at my office are, where there are certain characters that are, like the top tier players are their best characters, but for the casual player, they're a disaster. Their win rates are terrible, because they require a lot of skill shots

and a lot of, like, good manual dexterity. But if you can do that well, then they're going to be the best thing possible. Yeah. And if you can't, then you're just never going to hit, and you're wasting a lot of your time. Yeah, no, that's the first time I play a lot of online games. I gravitate towards the characters that move slow because I know that I can't take it. It's the same thing as the skill testing. I can't take advantage of speed as well as somebody else.

So I want that exchange for something else, like extra damage. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, that's better for me at least until I learned the game. Yeah, and that, I mean, I really, so this is sort of another principle of, I think, of game balance and really design broadly too, which is that you want to be able to build things that appeal to each player demographic that you're trying to hit, right? Not necessarily every game should appeal to every demographic, but like that, yeah, okay, there's some players who really love the skill shot portion of this. So there's some players who really love having flexibility and being able to counter everything their opponent does, where there's others that just want to do it. as much damage as possible.

And being able to make sure that those psychographics or those player types all have something viable to do, that it's not necessarily the best strategy, but that they have a reasonable shot at succeeding with the thing they're looking for, I feel like it's an important principle as you're balancing the different components out there. Yes, yeah.

And that makes it very important to test with a broad range of players. because the ones that seem kind of disengaged with the design as it stands, you might be able to find that they respond to a strategy, which you just don't have in the game or at least not strong enough. Yeah, and I think sort of circling back a little bit to your comment about, you know, designing for the best players versus designing for the broadest audience or the range, you know, beginner intermediate and advanced.

I think that it's really, it depends a lot on the game that you're making and the, also the marketing strategy that you're building too, right? If a game is going to have high level tournaments and expect high level competitive play where there's a lot of money on the line and there's a lot of things happening and that's your strategy for like how you're positioning your game, then, well, you better be well developed for high level players because otherwise that experience is going to fall apart and you're going to be spending a lot of money on prizes that are not going to serve you. Whereas if your game is more just going to be played around the kitchen table and there's

no expectation of anything at high level, then the experience of the high level players is far less, far less important. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's, that that is true. That if you don't, if you're not backing up your game with something that, uh, really exploits high-level play, then, yeah, the balance, the effort you put into that may only serve to make the game worse for the casual player. Yeah. And then there's these things, so I'll sort of try to get the players, casual players' initial instincts to be generally correct when they first show up is something I've always been focused on. I'll tell the

story, sort of Ascension started out this way where, you know, for me, I love, like, long-term strategy and being able to build the best coolest deck possible and then eventually just win with an overwhelming force. And so the original version of Ascension was all about if you started buying power and trying to defeat monsters early, you were almost always going to get overrun by somebody who worked on first building up their deck and then converting into points and stuff later in the game. But the casual player, when I started testing it, was always just wanted to kill monsters. That was the first thing they wanted to do. And so that they would get rolled. over by these, you know, quote unquote experts.

And so I actually ended up rebalancing the game so that those casual players, those instincts would not be wrong and that you could still win with that just like, let's go fight some monster strategy. So I was misled by my own preferences. And so it was just underscoring that point. Like it was so important to test with other players and see what they, what they would gravitate to and then give them opportunities to then, you know, evolve into other strategies.

Well, that's a, yeah, that's an excellent illustration of that. I find that all the time when I, when I am testing a game that I'm working on. I'm very frequently the worst player at the table. And that is because I come in with a preconception of how it should be played. But that's not necessarily how the game, how other people are going to play it. And so if everybody plays the way I play, they'll probably have a fun time, but I've put all this flexibility in, and so I either have to remove that flexibility or make it so those are viable ways to play.

Right, yeah. If only I could get players to play the way I would play, this game would be awesome. That's right. So unfortunately, having to be a mind reader and get influence people who you will never meet to do the things you want them to do is the core of our job. It turns out not easy. Yeah, I remember playing a game at 1. one point with a friend where he took the long-term strategy and I took the Blitz strategy

and I crushed him. And he immediately thought the game was unbalanced because his strategy hadn't worked. And I was, on the other hand, very pleased because my first instinct in all these games is always to play long-term. but I overcame at this one time and managed to actually win. I think, yeah, there's just a lot of ways to go about playing these games, and that's what makes them... Yeah, well, there's two sub points to that that I think are interesting.

One is, yeah, a lot of times, as you sort of alluded to at the beginning of this discussion, when people say a game is unbalanced, what they mean is, bra! I didn't win. And there's this sort of psychological outlet of I don't have to blame myself and take responsibility for what happened. I can blame the designer. I can blame bad luck. I can blame, you know, Manus Crew, whatever, that it's not my problem. And that's actually, to some degree, a good escape valve, right?

I mean, I often have to give the same talk that I'm sure you give a ton, which is, no, no. Having Manas Crew, having the variety of those plays is actually a really good thing and critical to the fun of the overall experience. obviously within boundaries, but that's, so the psychological out or the extreme scenarios are actually a good thing to have in games.

And then there's this second point of like being able to, when I think about when I creating different power levels and different strategies, I always try, and you did this in the very beginning with magic quite a bit,

is to build in the kind of silver bullet options. That any given strategy, Maybe it's the best strategy, but if I know that you know it's the best strategy and you're going down that road, there's something I can do to counter it. And making sure that that's available is one of the best tools I know of to curb the worst of unbalanced, you know, degenerate strategy options. Yeah, no, that is a strong technique. And it is more satisfying, if well done, than the strategy of just removing that as a viable option. because people like having a lot of different strategies that have to follow. And so if you say this one's too powerful and you remove it,

that's not as satisfying as putting in sort of some counter strategy which people can employ. Yeah, when I worked, the game, deck building game I released last year, Shards of Infinity, I really focused on that counter strategy idea. The game, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one, but it's basically you're attacking the players directly as opposed to Ascension where you're, you know, kind of trying to get the most points. But there's two paths to victory. You can kind of increase your player level, your mastery level. And if you get it all the way up to 30, one of your starting cards can actually win the game by itself, or you can sort of attack a player directly. And a lot of the, there's this very aggressive counter strategy that can happen between players where if I know you're going down a certain route,

I can try to beat you on the other route, or I can do certain things that's very much a back and forth of play, which is one of the things I loved about, you know, I really tried to build in especially strongly into that design. So we can do like very degenerate things. And some stuff can go completely off the rails. But if I know you're going down a road, then I can be looking for tools to kind of cut you off before you can get too far down it. That sort of design direction is very exciting to me because it's so interactive. I enjoy games that are less interactive. So, for instance, I like Yatsi.

Yatsi is almost just a puzzle. The only thing that separates it from just being a puzzle is the fact that if I'm behind, I can press my luck. And that's just about it. But still, it's a good puzzle, and it's a lot of fun. But the standards for so many games these days are very, very far down the non-interactive side of the scale. In fact, I like to term them as being passive-aggressive because there's nothing I can directly do to you. But if I do this, then that's going to make it so that do this thing, which I don't necessarily want to do,

but it's going to make it so that you can't do this thing, which does, you know, so rather than directly affecting another player, I'm doing these second, these removed interactions, which is also quite good. I like Puerto Rico, for example, which is sort of a king of that.

But that's so standard that there's, that I long for a good, interactive experience that you get with a game like poker. Yeah. Or shards, for example. So I recognize we're running short of time and this development question has plagued me and I've actually wanted to have this conversation with you since the game came out. But how did you think about developing key forged? Like the fact that you are building not just cards that are evaluated on their own, but cards that get evaluated always within a specific context of a deck that you're procedurally generating.

What went into that? like that that just fascinates me to no end how you balance that well uh you you you don't i mean i was afraid that was the answer there's how to best balance a game like key forge is sort of a there's a uh it really uh becomes a separate question uh which is uh there's there's there's you you want to make sure it's you would absolutely uh cut into the variety of decks too much to actually make a serious attempt to balance it so i knew going into it there were going to be better decks and worse decks this uh this was okay with me because uh because i mean well for me it was the price of admission right i wanted to have a highly variable experience where

every deck was exciting and different, and that means they're going to be unbalanced. So for me, this returned me to the old days of magic, where people put together whatever, a lightning bolt mountain deck, and they crush somebody a few times, a lightning bolt mountain deck, yeah, yeah, that's right. And crush somebody, and then after a few times, they say, well, this is boring, let's make a real deck. And so where people had to take, control of their experience and handicap each other in some way. Either find two decks that balanced enough against each other to make fun games or handicap the stronger one in such a way.

So I came up with this idea of applying chains to a particular deck in order that players might make a fair game. And as much as I can, I try to encourage people also to not make the game about finding the best deck and using it to beat everybody, which is sort of the trope from deck builders, but instead get a deck and see what you can do with it. And this was, it's a very, it's a very hard culture to change, but it certainly is the case that in my group, when there was a powerful deck, my players did not say, I want to play the powerful deck.

They wanted to play the weaker deck in order to beat the powerful deck, which, is a very, you know, it's like it's again, it's not culturally what people what were driven to do, but it's a very sensible thing because you know, when I play civilization online, I don't set it on easiest so I can beat it every time. I set it on as

as hard as I can manage and because I want a challenge. It's the same thing in a game like Keyforge. If I'm playing with a pal and one of the decks has a 90% win rate against the other, you can be sure I want to play the one with a 10% win rate because I want, there's no glory the other way.

All that said, there were some balancing considerations in that what I did want to make was that that the lowest, the worst decks didn't get too bad. And I failed with, I did not do as good a job as I'd like at first, but we're getting better at that. But yeah, by making sure that there's enough creatures in the deck and not too many things which have hooks into other things in your deck that don't exist, for example, you can make it so that the 50th percentile deck when you pick up something from the 10th percentile that you've got a chance of beating it. You don't want to make it so that when you pick up a 10th percentile deck, you know, it's like you've got no chance of beating a 50th percentile deck.

So, yeah, controlling the lower end was where I spent most of my energy. And that was done through primarily managing the ratio of, like, kind of creatures, and making sure that certain cards that were very unique referenced would only exist if there was something that they referenced or something that they could connect to. Yes, I made, so the common cards, making it so that the common cards are powerful. which we talked about earlier, that's really important because it means that because the lower 10th percent decks

have a ton of common cards. And so if they in general are pretty reasonable, there's only so bad a 10th percentile deck can get. And then, yeah, make sure there's a lot of cards which interact with creatures. At first, I wanted to make no no limitations on creatures in the game, for instance, that you could come up with a creatureless deck.

And my reasoning for that was I'm very, you're just like, I don't want to cut out variety in the game at the cost, in the pursuit of balance. And so anytime you say you're required to have this, that cuts out a whole spectrum of decks. And then I looked at those spectrum of decks and say, any of those things that I wish were in the environment.

And if the answer was yes, then I was hesitant to do it. So when people started talking about putting restrictions on how many creatures were in the deck, you could come in the deck, I would say, is it possible that there are creatureless decks that are interesting, powerful fun to play? And the answer to me was clearly yes. So I was very resistant to putting in those. Now, later on, we started generating these. decks that were actually powerful with very, very few creatures, but they actually weren't all that

fun to play. And I realized that this, that, that, that may be, that maybe throwing away those decks in the mix were actually worth the, the benefit you get for making sure that there's a minimum number of creatures. And so then we, we, so I would take things like that and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, anyway, it's, it's something constantly taking. with I kicked myself every time there was something like a sacrificial altar which targets humans and there's no humans in the deck that's just a stupid mistake and an oversight in the algorithms and you shouldn't have that unless you can sacrifice your opponents humans yeah no it's it's fascinating and obviously a hugely complex problem with a lot of ramifications which

I we you know I'm happy we've been able to touch on here but can't can't go can't go through it all I So one thing you mentioned that I actually do think would be a great sort of final topic for us to discuss is the culture of your game. And like how powerful that is. Because that's the thing that, you know, one of the things that Key Forge presents is this idea of like, well, no, no, no, you just buy one deck and then you can play. Or you could have a culture that's like, no, no, I'm going to keep buying decks till I get the best deck or the deck that I need for me. Versus like even with magic, you know, a lot of times when I was not as, you know, not as focused on magic. I would, instead of sort of buying all of the cards and trying to build my best deck, I would just like buy the variety pack of preconstructed decks that all came out together,

play them with my friends. And that was a great experience. And I never felt like I needed to like constantly evolve it. And we could just pick which deck we wanted and play and then swap and play. And it was all about that different local culture. How do you think about building culture for your games or how should, you know, designers think about being able to build that culture where you can get that experience you want? Yeah.

I don't know the best way to build it. I know that what I've done is come out often and talked about cultures that work well for me with both trading card games and other games. And generally espousing the philosophy that players should not look at the game publisher as being the master arbiter of everything that's correct. they should take a game and play it the way they want. And so, for example, in Key Forge, Coney was looking over a bunch of the stuff that's coming out of Spain,

and there's a strong belief there that when you play, the first time you play, you should not look at the content of your deck. You should play it completely blind, because you're only going to experience that joy of discovery with that deck once. and that's a great culture, right? And the fact that they've sort of adopted that, and they're sort of spreading that among themselves. And I may not have thought of that.

I have certainly played that way from time to time, but I hadn't thought about elevating it to sort of a cultural standard until I heard about it. And so keeping your fingers in how people are enjoying playing and encouraging people to experiment with the way they play, makes for a really healthy community that is something we should try to keep hold of. Of course, all this is a little bit challenged

when you do try to make the game a game that's played seriously. So, for example, with Magic, a lot of that became challenged when we added the Pro Tour because there you do have to have the publisher be the master arbiter of what's correct and the right way to play

because they're saying, we're going to give you all this money if you play this particular way. But even there, if players ultimately are always in charge of their play experience in the sense that it was after that the whole... Like the commander and that kind of experience? Yeah, the commander and all sorts of homebrew ways of playing that are more casual, take advantage of cards you have laying around, where drafting people make their own cubes to draft and things like that.

There's so much players can do in any game they love to play it the way they want. The only time they have to, the only time they have to listen to the publisher is when the publisher is giving out a lot of money for them to play a particular format. And I think there's also interesting things, even as a publisher, as a designer, you can do to try to incentivize the things you're looking for. So, you know, in addition to the kind of standard trope of like the best player with the best deck gets the prize and gets money, can do other things too. Like, you know, Warhammer's pretty well known for this where they'll like, you have the best painted army and you have the most sportsmanship player award and you have the coolest story deck, you know, that you could put together and things like L5R and people really align themselves to like representing their clan. And I think that there are even tools while of course like the

local letting this be a bottom up thing, which maybe is just the right answer in the long term, where things like commander formats and other things come up from players. I still think there are tools that we have as designers, as publishers, to potentially even push people in that right direction and really like, no, no, we should, you know, care about story here, or care about building your local community or, you know, that the people that you play, the performance of the people that you play against ends up mattering in a different way. Like, I think there's a lot of interesting, again, design, ways we can try the design culture. And of course, the game mechanics themselves and the game sales model all feed into that. So it's just another really interesting

puzzle that I think a lot of designers don't put enough thought into that can really make all the difference in the world. I mean, a bad culture for your game can just destroy it and make it so that nobody wants to come play, whereas a good local culture can overcome enormous challenges with the game itself, but the culture is good. People want to be a part of it. No, that is true. My general guide of try to make it so people understand they're in charge of the culture,

certainly does not mean that you can't steer it, either take the best ideas from your audience or come up with good ideas yourself. So, for instance, in Keyforge, I came out with lots of guidelines for how to apply handicaps to decks. And I made this effort to try to create a culture where people would play decks and then after a bit when they understood which ones were more powerful

begin putting chains, which is a handicap on the ones that were more powerful. And I'm not sure how, now certainly the suggestion and detail that culture has made it so that more people are doing that than otherwise would have done that. But I'm not sure if that was the correct, you know, the best thing. So people are taking that and playing with that and coming up with their own. And so I want to be aware of what, you know, how people, you know, what actually works for people. Another example of culture from the early days, I was like I have the culture of anti for magic where you stake a card every time you play. That was a cultural idea which crashed and burned.

the spirit of the culture was that for people who did not want to trade cards or get new cards, this was a way for their decks to change over time. It was probably just misguided. Certainly it was misguided in the sense that not everybody wants to gamble their cards and that they valued the cards more than I expected. So there was a good reason for that culture to fail. Fascinating. I really would love at one point dig into the challenge of how you could make a culture like that succeed. But we're running out of time, so we can't get into that now, maybe in our next talk. So this is awesome. I always love talking to you and your insights on design and working together has been just one of the privileges of my entire career. So for people that want to follow you or find more things that you're doing or learn about your latest projects, where's the best place they can go and learn more about what you're up to these days? I have a spotally maintained Facebook web page.

So that's about the only recommendation I've got. Okay, so people just look up your name on Facebook, and every now and then they'll see something. Yeah, whenever a new project comes out or there's a major sort of change to one of the ones that's out there I post it. And occasionally I post some of my random musings too. I wrote an article on the freemium models and how they have the potential to abuse. players and also an article on universal basic income something, which I've given a lot of thought to. Ooh, okay.

I didn't see that one. I'm going to check that out because I'm very deeply interested in that as well. But so many topics for a future time, I really appreciate you giving me this much time for this talk. It's amazing and it is, I guess, just going to have to wait until next time for all these other fancy topics. Thanks again, Richard. Okay.

Anytime. That's fun to talk. 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 platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher,

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Think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from the game industry, these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or something.