hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3141.txt

Episode: 3141
Title: HPR3141: Lessons learnt from Magic the Gathering game design
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3141/hpr3141.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:43:34

---

This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,141 for Monday 17 August 2020.
Today's show is entitled, Lessons Learned from Magic the Gathering Game Design, and is
part of the series' tabletop gaming, it is hosted by Klaatu, and is about 38 minutes long,
carries a clean flag. The summary is Lessons Learned from Magic the Gathering Game Design.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting
with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15. Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
You're listening to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Klaatu. This episode's about game design.
This is a hobby, I guess, of mine, officially. I guess I'll call it a hobby, which is to just kind of
think about how games are designed, which I've been doing publicly on HPR for a while. You can kind
of go back into the archives and uncover thoughts on games that I've had recently, and I've been
meaning to do more, actually, but I guess this one counts as one in a way. And what I want to talk
about today really are some game design experiments, or some thought experiments, really,
about rules and how they can be applied to different processes in maybe some unexpected ways.
So this was all, it all started when I was shuffling a deck of Magic the Gathering cards,
kind of thinking about, I shouldn't say shuffling, I mean, you know, kind of flipping through
a deck of Magic the Gathering cards, and thinking about how many, how each card was its own rule.
People kind of say that Magic the Gathering is a very complex game with too many rules,
or they say that it's a simple game, but it just happens to be really, really difficult to master.
And, you know, I have lots of thoughts on that as well. I've looked at the design document
for Magic the Gathering. It's really, really long, so saying that it's a simple game that's
difficult to master, I think, is probably not super accurate, not just my opinion, and there's
different ways to look at that. But the thing that stands out to me about Magic the Gathering
is that the core mechanic, which is you pay mana, or, you know, some value of an imaginary currency,
to send your cards that you have in a deck into battle. That's the core mechanic. If you really
think about Magic the Gathering, I don't know if that's what the Magic, if that's what Magic the
Gathering designers would say, is the core mechanic. That's what I'm going to say it is, though,
because that really is, that's the thing that remains consistent throughout every game no matter
what you play. I mean, every game of Magic the Gathering, no matter what kind of deck you bring
to the table. The thing is, each card offers a new opportunity for you to be surprised by some
new rule that you didn't know was going to be in play before you drew that card. Every time you
draw a new card from your Magic the Gathering deck, you don't know if it's going to be just a thing
that is, you know, a bear that's got two power and two toughness, or whether it's going to be something
with the flying quality, so that such that the creature is now out of reach of other creatures
on the battlefield, or is it going to be something that literally makes it impossible for you to lose?
There's constant oscillation between playing by the rules that you know, and legally breaking
a rule, or many rules, with every deck you play. And then on top of that, there are new ways to
break rules, or new rules, if you prefer that, to look at it that way, with every new set of
Magic cards released each year, or multiple times a year. I don't know how often these things come
out because I don't actually buy them. So that idea to me kind of was intriguing, and I thought,
well, I wonder what other mechanics from Magic the Gathering, that one included, but I wonder
what kind of mechanics and what we can learn from Magic the Gathering mechanics, what can we learn
about game design from sort of really, really thinking about, or thinking about game design from
a Magic the Gathering perspective. So for instance, what if the Magic the Gathering team,
Mark Rosewater and his team, what if they had designed, let's say, Blackjack? Blackjack played
with a simple, a normal deck of cards, the game ostensibly is quite simple, and it's a good one.
It's a very flexible game. I happened to actually quite be quite fond of Blackjack. I think it's
I think in terms of simple games, I think it's quite nice, but it's also flexible. I guess it
doesn't have a whole lot to do with strategy, but I guess there is some. So the goal of Blackjack,
if you've never played it, is to get a hand of cards that is the closest to 21 without exceeding
21, and that is possible. So if it's a single player game, then you can just draw from the deck. You
say, okay, well, I just got a six of hearts. Okay, so that's six. I just got a four of diamonds,
so that's 10. I've got an ace here, which I guess is a one. I don't really know. So let's call that
11, another ace. So that's 12, and so probably, probably draw. Yep, nine of clubs or clovers,
whatever those things are, and it's 21, exactly 21. So I won. That's pretty phenomenal. Actually,
that's really weird that that was a random card. I mean, that literally just happened.
Like I was literally drawing cards, expecting not to get exactly 21. That's not usually how Blackjack
goes. The point being though is once you get to a certain point, like I'm drawing again now,
seven and eight brings me up to 15. So that's a little bit a little bit dangerous, right? I could,
I could maybe say, well, that's really close to 20. It's pretty close to 21. If I draw too high on
the next one, I will, I will be out. Now I'm shoving the deck trying to, or kind of rummaging
through this deck, trying to find something that'll actually push me over the edge here. Yeah,
so there's an eight. So that would have sent me over the edge, which would mean that I lost.
Now, if I had said, okay, well, that's my hand, and I'm sticking with it. Seven and eight for a 15,
and I won't go any, any farther than that. Then I draw that top card from the deck, and it's an eight.
So I know in my head as a single player that I've won, because I didn't draw that,
I didn't take that top card. I held before taking that top card. It's a two player, obviously.
It's just the same game, except when you're, it's the person who gets closest to 21 without
going over. So it's sort of a chicken run, really. It's player versus player to see who's
more daring than the other, and who's going to hold first, or who's going to go over 21 and lose.
So it's a simple, really, really nice, simple little game that is a lot more popular than it
probably deserves to be. I mean, this is obviously a game that is played in Vegas with lots of money
on the table, and it's kind of crazy that such a simple, such a simple little game like that
is enduring and very popular. But what if the Magic the Gathering team had come up with
Lackjack? How might they have designed it instead? Well, we know that in Magic, we have lots of
different card types, right? We've got creatures and artifacts and spells and enchantments and
instance and so on. With playing cards, we don't have that amount of flavor, I guess. But we do
naturally have a certain variety of cards here. We've got diamonds, we've got clubs and spades,
and what's the other one? That other one that I can't remember right now. Oh, hearts, hearts,
hearts. So we've got, we do have sort of different categories, and then obviously we also inherently
have two colors. We've got black and red. So we do have an overlay. We have categories and sort of,
I don't know, categories and type or type and categories or whatever. And what that gives us is
a little bit of flexibility because and instability for the players, right? Because now a hand that
got, for instance, what did I get last time? Seven of six, four, ace, ace, and a nine is no longer
just a six, four, ace, ace, and nine. Now it's a six of hearts, red, a four, red, an ace, black,
an ace, red, and a nine, black. So that's now that's more significant possibly. It gives us a
little bit of flexibility. So as a first pass, the idea that I had was, well, first of all,
the close, the proximity to 21, going over 21, ending the game, that seems a little bit harsh to
me. So I thought, well, aside from the completely random success that I had while drawing cards
recording this show and hitting 21 exactly, I think the likelihood of hitting 21 exactly is
generally pretty rare. So what we could do is make the absolute win condition be 21. If you go over
21, you lose your cards. You have to put them all away or something. You discard all the cards in
your hand. That's frustrating. But you're still in the game and that's significant because nobody
likes to be ejected from a game, especially if they haven't won. If there's no winner, you know,
if there's a winner, then everyone else should be losers or if there's a loser, then someone else
should be the winner. It shouldn't be one of those situations where, oh, you lose, you've lost
your game and now you don't get to play anymore. And that's kind of the model that,
well, you know, a lot of those old family board games took. It's one of those things where
you lose and then you just don't get to play anymore. You have to go into the kitchen and do dishes
while everyone else finishes up the game. That's never any fun. So we'll try to avoid that. So
the win condition is get exactly 21 in your hand at some point during the game.
Lose condition is someone else got exactly 21 in their hand during the course of the game. That's
it. The frustration is that if you go over 21, then you lose the cards in front of you. You have
to discard them there out of play. A tiebreaker should that somehow happen. I don't think that
should be possible, but I'm kind of spitballing here. Tiebreaker would be how close to 21 you
reach upon, well, yeah, sure, like if you run out of cards, right? Because this is a, this is
now a longer game. So if you run out of cards, then you're going to have to figure out, well,
okay, who won? Or just shuffle the deck and keep playing, I guess. But let's assume that if you've
gone through a whole deck, then everyone's going to be tired of playing by then. And the person
closest to 21 will win. So the idea with all the, with the, with the uniqueness of these cards
is that we can, we can assign certain attributes to the different kinds of cards. So for instance,
should you draw a club? Then maybe you could, I don't know, take one card from your hand and add it
to your to your opponent's hand or to one opponent's hand if it's a multiplayer game. So not just a
one on one game. So you can take any card. If you draw a club from the draw deck, that means you
can look at your hand and remove one from it and give it to your opponent, which could of course
push them over the edge, right? It could push them over 21. They'd lose their hand, bang, they're
starting from zero again. How frustrating would that be? Let's say you draw a heart. Maybe the,
the magic spell for the heart could be that you swap any number of heart cards in your hand
with an equal number of heart cards in one of your opponents hand. If you draw a spade, you could
sacrifice, because spades are like swords, right? In the tarot tradition. So you could sacrifice,
and by sacrifice, I mean, move it to the bottom of the draw deck. The card that you just drew
to move one card. So if you, if you do that, then you can move one card from one of your opponents
hand to the bottom of the draw deck. So it's give one, or yeah, sacrifice one to take one out.
And so on, right? So you could, you could do that for each, each suit of, of cards and shuffle your
deck. And now there's, there are these new rules that are only going to apply when you draw the card.
When you draw the card, then you have, you have that opportunity to expend the spell that's
associated with that card. And, and then it becomes a mundane card, and it just sits in your hand.
And that's how that works. And you could play that game. Now, as I do it right now, sort of,
as I'm recording this, I'm realizing the two problems. One problem is that this isn't single
player friendly. This, this wouldn't really, the benefits that I've thought of more or less
all depend on a multiplayer game. A lot of these benefits are meaningless. And if you don't have
anything to trade or to remove or, or whatever. So, or the strategy doesn't work. So that's one
problem. The other problem is that there are things that don't have suits, namely the Joker. They'll
use the, this, this Joker card that I just on the bicycle on a bicycle standard bicycle deck.
He doesn't have a suit. And the, and I guess the, the face cards are kind of, kind of being ignored
under my current rule. And so is the ace, really. That, that kind of, that seems like an obvious
one that could be, could be given something special. So a slight revision here will be that there
will be nine different effects. Diamond's clubs, Heart Spades, Queen King Jack, Joker Ace. And some
of those obviously will be a little bit more precious than others. So the, the ace for instance,
or not, not the ace, sorry, the Joker. There are only two of those. And even then, I mean, there are
only only two queens and two kings, I think, or they're, no, they're, they're four. What am I talking
about? Four queens, four kings, four jacks. But I mean, that's, that's different, certainly than
on any heart on any diamond on any club. And since face cards have both the suit and their face,
we could say that the player gets to choose between which, you know, between the two spells that they,
cast when drawing this card. And we could introduce completely new mechanics as well. For instance,
let's say someone draws a diamond, any diamond other than the face diamond. Well, including the
face diamond, but that, that would, that'll complicate things, because they might not choose
this particular one. So diamond, you get to tap, that is to turn a card horizontal into landscape
mode instead of portrait mode in your hand. Tap a card, or you untap, you, you get the choice.
A tapped card doesn't count toward your total. So if you draw a diamond from the draw deck,
then you have the option to look at your hand and tap a card such that it no longer counts
towards your, uh, am I over 21 count? To untap that again, you need another diamond card. Now,
I don't know how realistic that'll be. That might be too precious, you know, as people might not
ever want to tap a card because they know that the chances of them getting another diamond to
untap it is just too, too precious. Who knows? I haven't played, played tested this. I'm just kind
of making it up as a thought experiment. So clubs, let's say that we draw a club, you can take one
card from your hand and put it into your opponent's hand. That's pretty straightforward, I think.
We probably need to define trigger conditions, but we'll just skip over that for now. Hearts,
uh, we already said that. We said that hearts would swap. You could swap a heart for a heart
between hands, uh, I think, right? Yeah, you can swap any number of heart cards to equal
numbers of heart cards. Spades, you can sacrifice one of your cards in order to force an
opponent to sacrifice one of their cards, uh, queens. Let's make this a little bit memorable,
and we'll use the, uh, classic queen phrase off with their head. Uh, we'll say that if a queen is
drawn, then you can force someone to discard. Rather, you can, um, discard a card from your own hand.
Let's do it that way. So that removes it from play. You put it in the discard pile. The king, uh,
we'll do the opposite. Uh, that will force your, you can force your opponent to discard one of
their cards. The jack will say you can swap all cards matching the card that you, the color of
that card that you've just drawn with the same color of cards in your opponent's hands. So if you draw
a red jack, then you can swap, um, your, you can swap all of your red cards in your hand with the
red cards of your opponent. That might be Tunish. Maybe it'll be more like you can take any red card
from their hand. Who knows? But something will like that, right? Something to enable, play off that
color, um, because we haven't really used the color for anything significant yet and, and do
something with sort of stealing, um, for no good reasons. Just why not? Uh, and then Joker,
look at the top, some number of cards on your draw deck and, uh, place the cards anywhere back
on the draw deck in any order. And the number of cards that you're able to look at is whatever
number of cards there are, uh, whatever number of players there are in the game. So if you've got
four people playing, you can look at the four cards on top, reorder them in any way. You please
and then place them back on the top. And we should, there should probably be some function in there
where someone can somehow get around that, um, but I can't think of one right now. I mean,
that could be the function of the ace. You know, if anyone has, if, if someone draws or, well,
no, because the trigger condition is that you're drawing, um, we could expand the trigger condition so
that it's not only when you draw, it's when you take a card into your hand. When you, when you are
adding a card into your hand, the spell can, can go off. Uh, it doesn't go off if you're giving a
card to someone or if you're discarding a card, but if you are taking a card from some place,
whether it's the draw deck or an opponent's hand, then that spell triggers. That could be good.
That could work. Uh, and then the ace maybe could be something either having to do with, I don't know,
drawing from anywhere in the deck or something. That could work or it could be, uh, having something
to do with really screwing over your opponent by, you know, adding value to their card. So maybe,
um, we could just use counters like a D6, a, a, excited die or something, and you can add a counter to
one of your opponent's hands. So you're, you're giving them points where, um, you know, to, in some number,
I mean, obviously, it would have to be controlled, right? Maybe the number of aces you have in your
hand already. That's your max, um, because obviously if, if you could just give someone any number of
points, you would always give them six in hopes of pushing them over the, the 21 edge, but, um,
yeah, so it would be limited by something, maybe by the number of aces already in your hand. I
don't know, or, or like I say, maybe ace could just, could simply be, uh, you know, cut the,
cut the draw deck or, or shuffle the draw deck. Now you're not bound if someone just reordered the
top of the cards. You're not bound by that anymore. Shuffle the draw deck, take the top, or,
you know, and then, and then continue the game, uh, or, or, or cut the deck and draw from anywhere
in the deck that you please and then shuffle and continue something like that. And that's,
that's, um, that's a potential remix of Blackjack. It's not necessarily the most simple remix.
I mean, Blackjack itself is a beautifully simple and elegant game. So this, this is definitely
complicating it. And obviously, without any kind of clue as to which suit does what has what power,
that's a little bit difficult to remember. And it's probably not practical. And this is exactly why,
you know, card games don't just use poker decks all the time, or Blackjack decks, whatever these
things are called, you know, normal playing cards, right? They have fancy, cool looking cards,
and that's fine. With, with text on them to remind you what they do. Um, I mean, not,
nothing to stop you from writing hints to yourself on a deck of cards so that you're, um,
adding to the rules of, of a game, or identifying the rules of a game. But, um, that's, that's kind of
that's an idea for Blackjack. Another idea that I had for Blackjack, which was, it's a lot more
random is just to make a chart of effects, you know, just, I mean, some of the effects that I've
already listed, you know, for the, for the, the different suits. But it could just be other stuff too,
like shuffle the draw deck, swap all red cards with your opponent, or with one opponent. Um,
take one card from, um, from your opponent, take one card from your hand and put it in the hand of
your opponent. They, they cannot refuse, uh, send all active face cards to the draw deck,
shuffle the draw deck, that sort of thing. Um, just make a chart, you know, and, uh, every,
at the end of each round, I don't know, count up the, count up the, the, um, you know, the first two
cards of, of each player's hand and, and apply the effect that that equals, or something like that,
or, or, you know, count the, um, I count the cards in the discard pile and apply an effect,
something like that. I don't know. Um, that was another idea that I had, and I think, I think
there's something there too, because that idea that just random, dropping a bunch of random rules
in the middle of a game has sometimes can have just really great effects. Um, I mean,
it's a little bit, it's just chaotic, right? I mean, it is just saying, it's just silly,
it's just saying, okay, now we're going to throw out all the rules for a moment,
introduce something new that, then you won't ever have to worry about again, and, okay, now we'll
continue to play. But I mean, games have been designed around that principle, you know, we,
we've seen that sort of thing, um, with, uh, what is it, uh, flaming kittens and, uh, flux,
and things like that. I mean, there's totally, and even the wild magic charts in D&D,
there are, there's definitely a, a game mechanic for chaos monkeys to just come in,
disrupt everything, and, and, and make the game a different game for a moment, and then everything
resume back to normal, back as you were, and then the chaos monkey comes back in, and everything's
disrupted, and, and so on. It's, it's, it's not a bad mechanic. Uh, it's a little bit messy sometimes,
but, but it is not a bad mechanic. So the, um, the other game that I, I decided to, to think about,
in terms of, okay, well, how could we make it more, more, um, maybe magical, more interesting,
was the old, reliable, um, what is it, Parker Brothers? So I think game, um, Monopoly. Monopoly
has been around since 1935, and, um, it happens to be about buying and selling, and mortaging,
and auctioning real estate. Um, it's sort of a feeding frenzy game, like the, the idea is that
everybody descends upon the game board, and just, it's just a grab. It's a grab for assets
before anyone else can get them. You, you grab up as much as you possibly can, and then you build up
your houses and your hotels, and you use the, the income from, from those things to, to, to get
money from your fellow players. You're just grabbing for as much as you possibly can for the whole
game, uh, and, and that's your motivation. You are compelled to buy as much as you possibly can,
and, um, the game doesn't end until all but one player is bankrupt, so that kind of does go back
to the, to the, this problem of, well, if you lose your game, then you have to sit out for the
rest of the time and watch your friends continue to play, and that's not very fun. But, um, there are
some modern, you know, what I would have thought were, were modern ideas in Monopoly, and, and for
this, I actually went back and read the rules from the Monopoly, which I think famously, not many
of us have done. I know that I hadn't until, you know, like the other day when I was thinking about
this sort of stuff, we all think that we know how to play Monopoly, because we kind of got taught
how to do it when you're kids, and so you just think, okay, well, that's how you play Monopoly,
but actually, uh, surprisingly, you know, if you actually sit down and read the rules, there,
there are a lot of sort of, um, subtleties there. So for instance, players can bid on an unwanted
property square in this little minigame. So if you land on a square and you don't want to buy it,
then everyone gets to bid for it in this little breakout auction round. Who's ever heard of that?
I didn't know that. Um, that mean maybe some people did know that, but I, I, I never, I never knew that.
Of course, there are two decks of special cards that provide random rule breaking surprises
throughout the game. So that's kind of cool, um, that I don't know that that feels very modern to
me, but it is something that I'm talking about, right? I mean, that's the whole idea of, hey, surprise,
there's this new rule that has suddenly come into play, or, or if you want to think of it as,
you know, a way to break a rule that there's now, you have now permission to break a rule temporarily
for a moment, and then, and then everything will go back to normal. And the board itself does have a
few potential pitfalls and misfortunes. Um, and it is the board itself is a timer in a way,
because once a player bypasses a square, you know, you don't land on it, but you're going past it,
then you don't get a chance to, to get that property until you, until your next round,
in your next time around the board. So there's a little bit of randomness in there, because you just
don't exactly know where you're going to land. Are you going to land on that property that you want?
Are you going to land on a property that someone else already owns, and then you'll have to pay rent
for it on, on that property? So that's, that's kind of cool. Like, that's built into the, the board.
That's the function of the board in a way. The board is, is, it is the, the resource manager,
or the resource to be managed, and the sort of an extra layer of randomness is providing,
but provided by the board. Um, so that's cool. And, uh, you know, the problem I think with it is,
aside from people being sort of ousted upon going bankrupt, is that maybe it's not very fun,
you know, like it, it's, it's, um, it's just not that magical, really. It is supposed to be a game,
so, um, it, it should be, it should feel a little bit more, uh, I don't know, magical for the
lack of a better term. I mean, it's kind of on brand for this episode to say that, but, but in
other words, it should feel more like a game and less like real life. And I think, um, whether to sell
board games or whether to give it that extra little boost of flavor and, and feel, uh, there have been
lately, you know, heavily themed monopoly editions. So you have, I don't know, like Harry Potter
monopoly and Star Wars monopoly and all these other things of, it's just monopoly, but with a different,
you know, different terminology for certain things and different little tokens that you move
around the board so that you kind of, you're supposed to, I guess, feel like you're playing a game.
Like, oh, this is a fun game and I'm not just moving an iron or a, um, a dog or a car or a thimble
around the board. Isn't that fun? So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of, of monopoly, honestly, and yet,
and yet there are elements there I realized as I was pondering all of this. There are elements
there that are, um, a little bit magic, the gathering. I mean, if you really think about it,
there's resource management, right? That's one of the core mechanics of magic, the gathering. You've
got, got these, these lands, uh, and not, not property, but, you know, a land card, uh, and,
and it's color coded, um, and you only have so much land and you know that you only have so much land
and you can only spend so much of that, of the mana that you derive from the land, you can only
spend so much of it per turn. So, I mean, you know, you can spend it all, but then that's all,
that's all you've got. So you have to kind of, you have to manage that mana, uh, in relation to
the, the creatures that you have summoned. There's color coding in, in monopoly. Uh, there's
potential for randomness. There are cards that break the standard rules and that's, uh, a pretty
good set of stuff to, to work with. So first of all, owning an imaginary title to an imaginary
property is not very exciting. Um, so in, in the revision of monopoly that we'll create here, uh,
is, and I'm just kind of going off some notes here that I, that I wrote down. I've not play tested
this either. I'm just thought experiment. Um, so in this revised version, if you land on an
unowned square, like an unknown property, then you can choose to purchase it as usual, uh, and what
you do is you place a token on it, like a glass token or something, a little bead, some, some,
not, not one of your player tokens, like something to represent ownership. So I guess a colored
glass token that's assigned to you. Uh, and so you place something on the square to show that
you own that square. Uh, we don't need the titles. We don't need the, the, the, the cards that,
that normally the banker player hands out to people. You don't, we don't need that for this,
this version because that's really boring. Nobody, nobody likes paperwork. So don't, don't hand
me a title for this property on the board. Not, not interested. And what you will get instead
is something that you can spend, uh, not money, but a, a, a card. So either a chance card or a
community chest card. Those are the two cards that get placed on the monopoly board. You draw it
from, at random, from a unified deck. So all the cards are just shuffled together. One big draw
deck. When you get a property, you buy it and you draw a card. You add that card to your hand.
You don't have to spend it right away. Should you land on property that you already own,
so it's already got your glass beat on it, then you receive a new card for free. So, so these
cards, they're, they're the currency in a way or the, they're the, um, they're the ammunition maybe
of the game and you, that you should get them fairly regularly. When an opponent lands on a square
that you own, you must give them one card of your choice and they must resolve the card immediately.
Um, alternatively, you may offer them cash instead. So should they accept your cash, then you
don't owe them a card. Uh, should they decline your cash, then you must give them a card. If you
have no cards left, then no transaction takes place. There's no penalty or anything, but, um,
that's, that's how that goes. So there, there's the, the randomness now is being introduced in two
different ways. Number one is where you land, whether you land on a property that you own or a
property that your opponent own or that no one owns and someone gets to buy it. But you also have
this randomness of, well, am I going to give the opponent a card with some crazy effect on it or
am I going to try to bribe them so that they don't take my card a little bit of uncertainty there.
The game ends when one player goes bankrupt. So if anyone goes out, if anyone runs out of money,
then everyone stops. That's the end of the game. Each player resolves all the cards in their hand,
good or bad for themselves and the player with the most money win. There, there's some detail there
that's a little bit missing. For instance, the, the color of the property doesn't really seem to matter.
What do you do when you land on a chance or a community chess square? Do you go to jail? How do you get
out of jail? Is that even a significant thing? Should we bother with that? Um, but the card gambling,
the card mechanic with a little bit of gambling with these proposed bribes, I think there's something
there. Um, the one, one major detail that's not here is how do you get more money? So I, I'm not
quite sure what the economy of this game would look like yet. I mean, it might be enough in the
community chess and the chance cards to generate income. Like I, I haven't looked at the game in
ages. I don't have a copy of it. So I, I wasn't able to look at it for, for my redesign of it,
which is not a great way to redesign a game. I don't think. But that was an idea that I had was just,
um, you know, it's just sort of like re, re-structure the game so that it's about the cards instead of
about the property really, uh, use the property purely for randomness and purely for, um, event,
event triggering and, uh, do something with money. I'm not, like I say, I haven't really thought
about that part yet. Um, it could be, it could be that landing on someone else's property,
generates income somehow, just like in the real game. I'm not really sure how in the real game,
you actually make all that much money either. Like, I mean, I, I know you, you buy a property,
and I guess you just keep, you keep buying property. I just don't know, like once all the money is
in the player's hands, how do, how, how is there? How do you ever get money out of the bank? That,
that's the part I don't quite know about from the game. I, I did read the rules. I just don't remember,
I remember it's saying anything about where new money came from. And that's fine. It doesn't,
it doesn't really matter. The, um, the important thing here is this idea of breaking rules,
creating rules to break rules and, uh, focusing the game on or, or, or restructuring the game,
such that element of surprises happen because surprises are fun. Like they're, they're terrifying,
and they're fun. And I think that games that leverage that frequently are, well, more fun to play
than for instance, games that, uh, model themselves out of, uh, off of like real life moments. And
some people like the real life stuff because they get to strategize in ways that, that, yeah,
maybe they, um, maybe they've, they've not really thought to do before. And, and if that's fun for
some people, then that's, that's great. That's really neat. But for me, that's not very fun. So, uh,
I think redesigning some of these games with, with some of the magic of the gathering mechanics,
I think it's, it's, it's a lot of fun. Uh, and I encourage you to take a game if you have game.
Take a game off your shelf and, um, and try to redesign it. Like look at the assets that they gave
you and then just start throwing things at it, whether it's a, a list of wacky effects to sort of
like add on to the existing game exactly as it is, or whether it's completely redesigning the game.
I did that with a, a game called Grim Slinger, uh, which was this, uh, card game. It was a Kickstarter
project and I picked it up in, uh, a gaming store while I was traveling because I thought it might
be cool to, to bring back home with me and, and play and, uh, we played it and it was really bad.
It was like really a bad game. And so I, I sat down with it finally one night and I just, I
using like this, this thought experiment and, uh, came up with a couple of different new versions
of the game, which I mean, you know, I think to some degree you're limited by the assets that
you have, you know, like this particular game was heavy on assets. Actually, it had like a
several different kinds of cards and I just, I couldn't, it was, there were, there were such diversity
in the cards that it was difficult then to create a system like the playing, a standard playing deck
of cards. I mean, it's just got to be one of the most perfect, perfect things in the world, right?
Aside from a tarot deck, a playing deck is just, oh, perfect because it's got the, the built-in,
thing of color. You got two different colors and then you got the four suits and then you got
number values and you've got a couple of exceptions with the face cards and a couple of exceptional
exceptions with the aces and the jokers. It's just kind of, kind of the perfect game design tool.
And if you're interested in this sort of thing, I do kind of highly recommend just grabbing a playing,
card, a playing card deck because it's, it really is kind of phenomenal what you can do with it.
I mean, it does break down after a while because the, the rules aren't on the media and that can
be difficult to then remember what the rules are if you're trying to design something very complex.
But as certainly as a prototype or as something where you don't mind referencing some papers on
the side, it's a perfect, perfect tool. But yeah, I do encourage you to take a game that you don't
like or game that you do like and try to redesign it and see what happens because it is a heck of a
lot of fun. If nothing else, it's a good evening of entertainment. So give it a go. See what you
come up with and if you come up with something really interesting, record a show on it or at least
email me and tell me about it because I, I might be interested. That's everything that I have to say
about this. Hopefully this was either, I don't know, interesting or, or inspiring and thanks for
listening. I will talk to you next time. Bye-bye.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org. We are a community
podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our
shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a
podcast and click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was
founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomicon computer club and is part of the binary revolution
at binrev.com. If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment
on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise status, today's show is
released on the creative comments, attribution, share a light 3.0 license.