ranzware
What can we learn about games by comparing the thrill of a nailgun kill in Quake to the elation of triple word score in online Scrabble? For Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and KeyForge, it’s actually quite a bit.
Taking place over progressive rounds in which you’ll pick and assign your force to capture victory points over an expanding tileset, Vanguard Exiles exists because Garfield is “smitten” with autobattlers, a love he traces back to an “epiphany” he had in the 90s thinking about the different roles a computer could play in both natively digital games and what he calls “paper games”.
“Yet they were both games,” Garfield tells me over call, “I was playing them both digitally. The computer is vital. It serves a really good purpose, and yet, when you play [an autobattler], it feels like you’re playing a paper game. You can sit back, think about your moves and understand really everything about the game before you execute, which is not the standard in a lot of digital games.”
But he wanted autobattlers to be more ambitious. He wanted to see one where deploying your army was as exciting as building it. “Deploying was always interesting,” in games like Auto Chess and Hearthstone Battlegrounds, “but took second place to building your army. A distant second. It was an order of magnitude less interesting”.
Vanguard Exiles’s proposed solution are its dungeon layouts – mazes with victory points and different room effects. A favourite I’ve found so far features a neutral, angry bear that attacks anyone who enters, but joins the team that holds the room when the round finishes. These rooms encourage players to think about unit distribution. “Do you want to put them all in the most valuable room? Well, if I know that, then I’ll counter by taking everything else”. He says this leads to a style of play he hasn’t seen other autobattlers explore.
“This pattern of play, you can make your move in the same sort of time frame as a paper game, then sit back and watch how it resolves. So there’s no real downtime. The resolution is a time where you can chat with one another: talk strategy, trash talk, boo, cheer”. With games like MOBAs, says Garfield, there’s no real decision making stage in the same sense as with most paper games. “That’s good for community building and for gameplay”.
“With most auto battlers to date, you’re either you’re drawing from a common deck or a duplicate deck. That’s the same for everybody. Now, people have been playing with that formula a bit recently, but Vanguard Exiles does really dive into that hardware.”
Speaking of hardware, I’m interested to know how heavily Garfield’s long career in tabletop plays into digital games like Vanguard Exiles. He’s a fan of physicality, for one. “The analog of that in the digital world is just a, you know, really good interface where you get good feedback to what you’re doing”. But he’s mainly interested in transparency – “being able to understand the system and have interesting and manageable decisions that you make because of it.”
“So, this is one of the dangers. The computer is an amazing tool for game making, and there’s all sorts of things you can do with it that are difficult to do in the physical world. But one of the things – which is a mixed blessing – is that it can do a lot of calculation and management in a black box. And the consequence of that is that in many games, players aren’t really playing in the same way that they are with a paper game. In a paper game, you have to understand everything, because you’re playing the part of a cardboard computer. So you have to understand the program you’re running.”
He gives the example of Civilization. “An excellent game, but the first times you play it, there are a lot of systems which are kind of black box. You don’t know how it’s making decisions. You don’t know what’s guiding the probability. If you’re very old school, like me, you’ll very early on try to read the manuals or whatever information is there, to get you into that frame where you really understand what’s going on and can play it in the same way you do a paper game. But a lot of people play it as a black box. That’s an experience which has its own qualities, but I think there’s a lot to be said for bringing in the paper sensibility of a player really understanding all the mechanics – that if the computer stopped working, they could get some dice and figure out how to work it themselves.”
Vanguard Exiles is set to receive a story campaign at some point, and I’m curious about this world Garfield describes as World War I fantasy. “I really like the process of re-imagining these fantasy tropes into this world”. The dwarves have a Russian slant, the elves have fur coats and employ radiation masters. “It feels distinctive enough to really amuse me, and I think drive a lot of interest in how the world develops. Similarly, you’ll see the other faction develop this way where it’s fantasy, but it’s on the brink of real technology”.
Is flavour something that Garfield usually brings in early? He says he loves thinking about it, and exploring it once it’s been nailed down. But at the same time, he’s very flexible. “So this experience has not been atypical for me. The early prototypes were pure fantasy, and I use that as a placeholder, because people could understand mechanics. If you put goblins, or elves or whatever, without much work they can give a little bit of flavour and carry a lot of information about the mechanics.”
You see a dwarf unit and instinctively know he’s sturdy and reliable, I suggest.
“Exactly,” says Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, which makes me feel very clever. “One of the games that best illustrates this was King Of Tokyo,” a Yahtzee-inspired board game that started out fantasy-themed. After finishing the design, “we came up with fighting Kaiju, so giant monsters tearing down Tokyo, and that flavour worked really well. We had this placeholder, we moved on to what the real thing was. [With Vanguard Exiles] I really wanted to do something that inspired the artists, because you’re going to get a lot more creative work.”
Still, he’s always wary of working in flavour too early that might limit the available mechanics, “or that when you start exploring certain mechanics, it’s going to feel like it’s stretching the intellectual property too far. Fantasy, in general, doesn’t do that. World War I fantasy wasn’t going to do that. It was going to be super flexible.”
Garfield designed his first game at 13 years old, and Magic: The Gathering debuted 32 years ago. With almost half a decade spent thinking about this stuff, does he still find players interacting with his games in ways that surprise him? Is he still learning?
“Oh, absolutely. I’m learning about games, and I’m learning about players all the time. It’s moving targets. I mean, I get better at it, but games change all the time. The more you know a particular game, the more it changes. Communities change what they’re looking for, what works for them and what doesn’t. So, yeah, I try to keep my attitude always as: there’s information out there that’s interesting for me to work with.”
It’s a rarity – “a real treat” says Garfield – to get the player feedback equivalent in the paper game space as he can from something like Steam early access. “I won’t say that any particular feedback has surprised me on the game so far, but it has illuminated me”.
An example is players coming up with more powerful combinations that the team expected. “That’s sort of typical development stuff, and something which is always fun, the players enjoy doing it. One of those combinations was, there’s a spawning device: one of the cards you can get is a construct you can lay down in a room and it will spawn creatures. A use of it that we hadn’t anticipated was the players taking over one of these high value rooms you can’t deploy in, and then putting that spawner in there. And now, it’s very difficult for the opponent to ever take that because they can’t deploy anything there, and by the time they get there, you will have taken control of it, and you’ll have a bunch of creatures there in addition.”
“Now, what you do with that is really an interesting question, because it has been my experience that a lot of games get over-developed in the sense that you see something like that, and you squash it, and then you see something else, and you squash it, and eventually get something where there’s no more abuses happening. But then players don’t have as much fun.”
“I don’t like to fix everything down to the point that is good for the expert. What I like to do is make it so it isn’t too broken for the people who are starting and it isn’t too broken for the people who are good at the game, and also leave some fun in the game. It involves making sure you always have fresh eyes on the game and you don’t belittle what [new players] see in the game because they’ve got fresh eyes. It’s definitely an art as much as a science.”
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Kurt Indovina
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