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 can find episodes and more at Think Like a Game Designer. 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 and 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, Spectromancer, 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. 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 Soul Forge 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 Keyforge, 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 it.
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 chock 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... I always start the podcast every time I get a new person on here, especially someone who's had as much success and notoriety in the industry 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, 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 a 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. Soon after that, I 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 it come to life. And how did you get connected to Wizards of the Coast? Peter Atkinson originally. 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, something I was interested in the history of and the study.
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 RoboRally. And 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 would 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 me.
with Roborelli, and he took it upon himself to get it published. 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 of the Coast. 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.
Dungeons & 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. uh game session so to speak uh 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 uh it blew me away it made me think that uh 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 really what... put me into games. That's wonderful. There's pretty common stories here. I want to underscore one point from earlier, and then I'll come back to Dungeons & Dragons. The fact that you started on this path with no expectation, 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. by working on the craft and creating things that were so much fun, you almost got pulled into being published by other people is a pretty, you know, fascinating aspect of it. And I actually find is often very true. And a lot of 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, I've talked to a lot of different designers. 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, 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 pretty enormous. 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...
of game designers? Uh, well, it was, uh, it, 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 feet. 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. uh something incredible and sort of to be able to so to be able to lay some important stones in that edifice of uh games is uh 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 for forever but so it feels like it the the rate of evolution has increased
dramatically in our lifetimes and uh it's it's been a really exciting time to be in the craft and let alone the 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 written books about it and you can like really try to create a language that we can have this conversation about.
different styles of play and what, you know, what, why we play and how we design and what, you know, the purpose of that is. I think it's a really fascinating time that that's something else that you've been really involved in is, 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... It's been amazing to watch it grow up back in the 70s.
looking 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, the 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 people don't leave a lot of records of games, even though there's evidence that they're sort of part.
part of humanity's existence for a long time, an 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, 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 extend the games has been terrific. Yeah, I think that in addition to sort of like now having this craft and tons of, you know... like shoulders of giants that we can stand on now like read about and learn about and there's youtube channels on game design there's all these things that exist there's certain kinds of traits that i find really help for somebody that's gonna
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 into 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 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 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 counterexamples 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... 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. way the game is played and the sort of spaces it defines. But I don't think... I don't think that will be universal. I think there are 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 shaping 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. 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 keyforge which we can get into to different expand game models to subscription models all the whole world of 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 and and what they get out of how that helps their or hinders their game play experience uh so 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 of 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 broken combinations, that when people discovered them, they'd play with them, but then they'd discard them. do something else after all that's what I did with another very influential game for me which is Cosmic Encounter There were lots of busted powers there, busted combinations, and we sort of rolled with it. That never caused us any problem. But my...
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. 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. I aimed for having 75% of the power you could get, 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... 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 Keyforge, and they're very powerful. People's first...
impulse in looking at the decks in Keyforge 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 Keyforge a little bit. So just in case there's some people listening that aren't familiar with the concept of Keyforge, you want to give a quick kind of top line what Keyforge is and how it works, what differentiates it from other games out there? Sure. Keyforge was inspired by a very early play of Magic where we would run leagues where you would get a deck and maybe a couple boosters and stamp them.
It 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, how 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 card backs were different so that you kept a deck together? Because one of the problems with playing with it this way with Magic is that... Any trading card game is that after the evening is done, your cards sort of disappear into your mass of cards and you can't revisit them. So relatively recently.
Printing technologies 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, and there's no real chance that it would get.
lost among your other cards because it's a a single unit uh and uh and that's what keyforge is so when you're uh and i mean the instant i saw this game i 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
uh 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 but they can come in in totally unique combinations um as you were building this did you ever consider
the cards themselves modifying um was there a was that just not possible from where the printing was at like what where did the you decide on sort of the way that this unique combination was going to come together and how many different versions of it there 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 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 can talk a little bit about that later. But that's clearly a short. short-term problem not a long-term problem um uh very early on though i i wanted uh i set this framework where uh every deck was unique but it was mostly uh 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 could 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 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 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 play 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 um you know i can more quickly grok what's happening and play a a strategic game but on the flip side you know there's something that i experienced when i first started playing magic which is has in many ways for me at least personally since disappeared where
I would play against someone and I would have no idea when they would play a card, what that card even existed. You know, 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 that was truly unique.
unique deck game with unique cards is that like that experience of discovery could happen all the time because all the cards you never know what you're going to see um was that just the the craziness behind that too much to sort of you ended up opting for this idea of like more grokkable, more strategic, but easier to wrap your head around. And I'm curious how much that trade-off 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 and then move on or do you think that the being too crazy is just going to be too much of a price to pay uh in a game like this yeah in the long run i don't think it's uh too crazy uh um i 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 in how much you want to spend. And I think – 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, that's what, you know, this new twist is what we're going to add.
Now we've got all these concepts which are understood, and then it's less of a reach. Although I will say that for Keyforge, 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... 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.
to 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 we have, 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...
After 10 years, you're going to have something where you understand most of the current environment. 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 the rarity with which they will happen will be such that I'm hoping that there will be a little bit of that fairy dust in there. That's wonderful. I think I also – I just want to –
to pause and underscore because I think there was you 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 points uh 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 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, doesn't mean much but then the more you hear it the better it gets and so uh so when you have a culture of game
game players where they play a game once and then they say oh this isn't so good or uh oh this is okay but i want to go over to this next game then 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. As a game designer, when you over-innovate, what you're doing is you're putting...
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... that's a really fascinating point and it 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 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 than 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 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, 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 games that are being made. I really have to teach myself to discipline myself to go back and 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.
more than once for a new designer uh yeah it's it's it's i mean it's hard for me as a uh established designer uh often uh to to get attention i did this uh this game uh spy spy net which 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 uh depth that teach you
is played where sort of the appealing to the same group of people who like to 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 that I couldn't I couldn't get attention for it so there is the possibility of course that I overestimate how
how good a game it is uh but uh but i really think uh it's because uh but but a part of me thinks and i think i think at least part of that is because uh 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, you know, 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, and, and just getting the word around with Facebook. So, so, you know, and we recently did a trivia game, Half Truth. In our campaign, we employed a company that specializes in doing Kickstarter programs, Studio 71 for that. 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, yeah. Yeah, that's funny. I actually worked on a project with Studio 71 in the past also. They definitely know that marketing side quite well.
So how did that go? It went well. I was more in the background on that project. 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 um and i see yeah and it went it went it went well it was a good uh project although it was an interesting process because that was a while ago and they
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 uh and make it make sure that it was going to be good but it was a the you know the project did well and funded and um 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
the program and create a connection and sense of ownership of 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 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 um
So the more I think about it like that, the more I kind of can wrap my head around it. And 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... is a part of it that I think designers can really play with and have more fun with. And 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 there's like i'm no expert at that i just know that uh know that there's a lot going on and there's a lot of different threads to pull and that studio 71s if they're working for you 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 um so so the flip side of that is is i would encourage new designers to as much as they can and 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 uh complaining about uh spy net that was done through a publisher so they they can't uh they 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 and 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. So every time I get the game back, I look at what they've said because usually they're very thoughtful about saying why it didn't work for them. And I ask myself whether there's –
some improvement I can make based on that. And sometimes I think that it ends up with like... just making it a better game other times uh 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 uh 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 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, you know, 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 uh excited about the uh the the whatever they picture the game you're gonna present is going to be rather than what it is
yeah and that it's funny because i was gonna you know it was one point i was gonna ask about about failures and setbacks and how you deal with them and i think this is 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 people is like, you know,
No design 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 being 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 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 can control how you take that in and how you can update your process. your design, your learnings is just such a critical paradigm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're always going to get this feedback.
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 Spynet. that there's you know there you made this sort of comment that like the depth of play is incredible 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 and 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.
forge every deck is unique what i just buy one and i can just play it and that's what 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 me i know what's going on or i see something on the table at a convention or a you know whatever something that draws you in uh 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 ways at least as important as designing for depth and uh you know a lot of people don't want to hear that but it's a pretty critical part of like 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 a 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 gotta i asked for um on on social media for some fan questions and people and without fail a lot of these questions
involved 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 could talk about for hours but uh 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 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 uh what they're referring to when they talk about game balance um uh and and uh but uh so so there's like the balance of uh
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 uh but but something which uh 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 you've got this person...
who criticizes based on the fact 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 oftentimes 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 uh and and uh 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 that how often that is the reaction, because because one of the. The thing which makes games wonderful to me is that they are so hard to predict and to understand. And that even no matter how good you are, you cannot get... the nth degree into 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. 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.
Tom Vassell 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 hadn't played it 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.
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, it's like 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 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. uh 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. 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... 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 engineers and the designers as being like the architects. And there was this notion put forward that every band... or a rotted card should uh should be a ding for the performance of the developers and i Put forth and strongly believe that that's you know That's the wrong way to measure performance for your developers because if you do that then
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 it's like you should... aim for one banned card a year. Then you know they're taking chances. 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 time to time. Right. 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. But if you're never failing, you're not trying hard enough. 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 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 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 um take you know skipping turns or destroying lands or whatever that 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 curse cards 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 and 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 cards that you can acquire that go up like those I'm willing to push a little bit further. So that's one kind of example. of like a rule of thumb do you have any 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. 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. the next generation of developers and designers really pushed back on that for the reasons which you cite, and I think correctly, to make it so that while... resource denial was in the game it wasn't it was conservatively enough presented that
it was really unlikely that it was going to make a strategy unto itself. But I wanted to... I'll mention one other thing. I've got this wonderful story of Game Balance, which I'd like to share with you 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 design for the best player possible, because we don't know who the best player possible is. So I think there's two mistakes presented there. One is we don't 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 balance 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, to appreciate how well balanced it is. So. So I did this game Spectrum Answer with another designer from Belarus, Alexei Stankovich. And in...
Spectrum Answer, 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 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 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, you know. 44% is terrible. And that's because there was, you could, 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. And so that, in a lot of ways, exemplifies how I think about balance, which is that The situation with Spectromance was really what I would have wanted had I had I. done it intentionally, which was there was more than one class that was good for beginners and intermediates and 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 they're 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. And if you can't, then you're just never going to hit and you're wasting a lot of your time. The first time I play a lot of online games, I gravitate towards the characters.
that moves slow because i know that i can't take it this is 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
least until i learned the game yeah and that and that i mean i really so this is sort of another principle of 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
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 as much damage as possible and like Being able to make sure that those, you know, 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, building, designing for the best players versus designing for... the broadest audience or the range, you know, beginner, intermediate and advanced. Um, I think that it's really, it depends a lot on the game that you're making and the, 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 high level, then the experience of the high level players is far less important. Yeah. Yeah, that is true. If you're not backing up your game with something that 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 um 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 wanting to kill monsters. That was the first thing they wanted to do. And so 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 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
Yeah, that's an excellent illustration of that. I find that all the time. 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 that 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. 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 one point with a friend.
where he took the long-term strategy and I took the blitz strategy and I crushed him. 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 it 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... 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.
Man of Screw, 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 mana screw 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 um so that the psychological out or the extreme scenarios are actually a good thing to have in games
And then there's this this second point of like being able to when I when I think about when I creating different. uh 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 like.
curb the worst of of unbalanced uh you know degenerate strategy options yeah no that's a that is a uh a strong technique uh and it uh 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. 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 i worked i i the game uh deck building game i released last year shards of infinity um i really focused on that counter strategy idea of the game uh 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.
of the the there's this very aggressive counter strategy that can happen between players where if i know you're going down a certain route then i can try to beat you on the other route or i can do certain things to that's very much a back and forth of play which is one of the things i love
about you know i really tried to build in especially strongly into that design uh 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'm very... I enjoy games that are less interactive. So, for instance, I like Yahtzee.
Yahtzee 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. So rather than directly affecting another player, I'm doing 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 I long for a good interactive experience that you get with a game like... poker yeah or shards uh for example so um i i i recognize we're running short of time and this this development question i 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 keyforged 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? That just fascinates me to no end how you balance that. Well, you... You don't. I was afraid that was the answer. How to best balance a game like Key Forge is sort of a... it really becomes a separate question, which is there's – you want to make sure –
You would absolutely cut into the variety of decks too much to actually make a serious attempt to balance it. So I knew going into it that there were going to be better decks and worse decks. This was okay with me because, for me, it was the price of admission. 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 crushed somebody a few times, a lightning bolt. Mountain deck. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And brush 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.
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 uh as much as i can i try to encourage people also to uh not make the game about finding the best deck and using it to beat everybody uh 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 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... uh 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 we're driven to do but it's it's a very sensible
Because when I play Civilization online, I don't set it on easiest so I can beat it every time. I set it on as hard as I can manage because I want a challenge. It's the same thing in a game like Key Forge. 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 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 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 DAC that don't exist. For example, you can make it so that the 50th percentile DAC
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, 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 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 uh and and so if 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 limitations on creatures in the game.
for instance, that you could come up with a creatureless deck. And my reasoning for that was I don't want to cut out variety in the game at the cost of... 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 the spectrum of decks and say, were 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 could come in the deck, I would say, is it possible that... 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... to putting in those now later on uh 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 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. Um, and so then we, we, uh, so I would take things like that and, and, uh, and feed it back into the deck design algorithm and, uh, and, uh, Anyway, it's something constantly tinkering 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 opponent's human. Yeah, no, it's fascinating and obviously a hugely complex problem with a lot of ramifications, which I'm happy we've been able to touch on here, but can't go.
Can't go through it all. So one thing you mentioned that I actually do think will 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, 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 pre-constructed 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
And it was all about that different local culture. How do you think about building culture for your games? Or how should 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... Kony 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, they're sort of spreading that among themselves. And I may not have thought of that. I have certainly played that.
away 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.
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 what you know the right way to play because they're saying we're going to give you all this money if you play this way.
But even there, players ultimately are always in charge of their play experience in the sense that it was after that 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 cars you have laying around. We're drafting. People make their own cubes to draft and things like that. There's so much players can do in any game they love.
play it the way they want. The only time they have to listen to the publisher is when... 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 the best player with the best deck gets the prize and gets money, you can do other things too.
You know, Warhammer is pretty well known for this, where they're 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 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 to design culture. And of course, the game mechanics themselves and the game cells 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 trying 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 Key Forge,
I came out with lots of guidelines for how to apply handicaps to decks. So 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 – certainly the suggestion and detail of 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, 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 – how people – what – what actually works for people another example of culture from the early days i was like i i had the culture of anti for magic where you stake a card every time you play that 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 uh this was a way for their decks to change over time and it's probably just misguided uh certainly 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 digging 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 spotty-maintained Facebook webpage, 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, whatever. new project comes out or there's a major sort of change to one of the ones that's out there I post. 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.
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I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast Think Like a Game Designer In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at thinklikeagamedesigner.com or wherever fine books are sold.