William Moran Game Design

This format can be played as an additional modification of any limited or constructed format. Use those deck rules and starting life totals. This is recommended for Two-Headed Giant play or 1v1.

Play Magic as normal except as follows:

Alt win objective: Obtain 10 victory points by controlling theaters of war (read on for this to make sense).

Set Up

Prepare a shared Battle deck (this is further explained in the Theater Battles section below). Draw a card from the shared Battle deck for each theater and place it face-up in the middle of that theater.

The battlefield is divided into three separate zones called theaters. In a nod to ancient Rome after which this format is named, the theaters are named Spain, Italy, and North Africa (specifically we're referencing the period and main theaters of the Second Punic War).

Before the game starts, each player secretly chooses a theater to act as their home base, then reveal their choices simultaneously. Opponents can have the same theater as their home base. In Two-Headed Giant each team chooses a single theater as their home base. Players can only be attacked directly by creatures that are in their home base.

Theater Mechanics

Whenever a player plays a permanent they must choose a theater to play it into. Creatures can only attack and block in the theater they are played to. If a player fails to clearly specify which theater a permanent is played to then it's assumed to be played to their home base.

Targeted abilities of permanents (triggered or activated) must share a theater with their target.

Targeted spells you cast can be used on a target in any theater but if a single spells has multiple targets, all those targets have to share a theater. If the spell can target a player then any other targets must be in the home base of that player.

“Global” abilities from permanents apply only within the theater that permanent is in (Lord of Atlantis in North Africa provides no benefit to Merfolk in Italy or Spain).

Global effects from spells effect the entire battlefield as normal (so Wrath of God will destroy every creature in all three theaters).

Non-targeted abilities and the mana pool are “global”—that is they aren't tied to a specific theater even if they came from a permanent in a specific theater. For example you could tap lands you've played in Italy and Spain in order to play a spell in North Africa or to pay for an ability in North Africa.

Players can battle to control these theaters. Each theater has a track with 13 spaces and a marker in the middle space. Dealing damage to the theater moves the marker that many spaces closer to the player doing the damage. If the marker is in any of the three spaces closest to a player, that player is in control of that theater. Permanents can still be played as normal to a theater even if you don't control it.

A player deals damage to a theater either by targeting it with spells that could damage a player or a planeswalker, or by attacking it with creatures. Your opponent can block such attacks by creatures if they have legal blockers in the same theater.

Finally, during a player's main phase that player may move untapped creatures without summoning sickness to any other theater. A creature that moves this way is considered to have summoning sickness.

Each creature moved can “carry” one other permanent from the theater it started in to the theater it goes to. A creature can't move more than once this way per turn.

Theater Alt Win Con

If at any point a player has 10 victory points they win the game.

At the beginning of your upkeep you get one victory point for each theater you control. Otherwise controlling a theater has no built-in impact on the game. (Other alt wins are still possible and it's also possible to make a player lose the game by attacking their life total directly in their home base).

Theater Battles

To construct a shared Battle deck, take 30 battle cards and shuffle them together (either have one player prepare it beforehand or have a selection of battle cards and let each player choose 15 to include).

One of these is placed in each theater before the game begins and offers another objective players can fight over. (Consider changing the win con to being the first player to win some number (10?) of these battles)

Follow battle card rules with the exception that both players can always attack these shared theater battles with the player who removes the final counter getting any bonus from it. Additionally that player moves the theater track marker one space closer to them.

When a theater battle is removed, replace it immediately. If there is an additional combat phase in that turn then the new theater battle is available to be attacked.

With sieges this means nobody gets any initial enters the battlefield effects or static effects, but the player to remove the final counter from it gets to exile it and cast it.

Mark Rosewater as done a whole podcast about why doing vanilla matters as a set theme is a problem. It’s #444 and you can find it here (just search for the word vanilla). But what if I told you all your prehistoric dreams could come true?

Mark goes over a number of issues this has as a theme, but I think it boils down to two overarching obstacles. The first is ASFAN--making sure enough cards show up in packs that the theme can work, especially in limited. The second is that vanilla creatures just aren’t much fun, to be perfectly honest.

Now before we get to my solution, Mark offered the following solutions:

Make the threshold for caring about it one. That is, you only need to control one vanilla creature for any cards looking to care about you controlling vanilla creatures.

More token making since tokens are often vanilla creatures as long as you don’t give them abilities.

Work with templating and maybe find a word that defines what vanilla means mechanically so instead of spelling it out you could just reference that word.

Make caring about all creatures a theme, not just vanilla creatures, since it overlaps and lets you put non-vanilla creatures in your deck.

Look at playing up tribal elements if possible but that likely fights the space you have to design cards that care about vanilla matters.

So how do you make a enough vanilla creatures to fill out a set’s theme while not making it the most boring, board-stalling set ever?

@markrosewater has been answering asks lately about unlikely planeswalkers and if we might ever see them. The three I see most requested are a sliver, an eldrazi, and some sort of non-sapient beast, typically a bear. Cool as these might seem at first blush, what would it take to make any of them a reality? (if anyone at Wizards is seeing this, I’ve avoided unsolicited designs here so it should be safe reading)

Planeswalker Rules

You gotta know the rules before you can break them. And given that you can break them with good reason, it might be more appropriate to call these guidelines. But the point is, barring some convincing narrative reason and a cool result from embracing that, these are the rules you go to as the base line for each planeswalker.

It’s a sapient being, which basically means it’s aware of itself as separate from the rest of the world. It has a conception of the self. There’s a whole bunch of philosophy to fall into here, but I feel that’s a succinct and useful way of thinking about it. This is the big rule we don’t yet have an exception to.

It’s born with a spark that’s ignited under extreme circumstances, usually great duress. Obviously we’ve seen that sparks can in some ways be moved from one being to another, even if that second being couldn’t have been born with a spark.

Planeswalkers can only bring themselves from one plane to another. Of course we’ve seen exceptions to this and while it’s been multiple exceptions recently, these are still quite limited.

A spark is unique to the person that carries it. That is, one being has one spark. The Kenrith twins share a spark. Bolas was trying to eat up a bunch of them. But nearly all planeswalkers in black border follow this rule otherwise.

The above four rules are the main narrative conceits used to define planeswalkers. The three oft-requested ‘walkers would all break some of those rules in important ways. Is it narratively satisfying and cool enough to be worth that? Does breaking the rules pay off?

Let’s examine them one by one.

Bear Planeswalker

I say bear, but you could take this to mean any non-sapient being. A house cat. Some other wild animal. An ooze or bug. Take your pick. The barrier to it is whether or not it pays off both mechanically and narratively.

For the narrative, for story telling, non-sapient beings present unique obstacles. What drives it? Well, for your typical bear, hunger and finding a safe place to sleep. Arguably some of the best story telling you can get here is a mother bear protecting her cubs, but that presents a direct obstacle to telling a story about a planeswalking bear that can move from one plane to another when her cubs cannot. Opportunities for good story telling are quite limited.

Mechanically, what do you do with a bear? These creatures (all I named above and most other non-sapient beings) are not spell casters and there’s a disconnect between what a planeswalker card does and the agency we would attribute to your typical bear. That is to say, it doesn’t make sense for most bears to be much more than a 2/2 for 2 and the game play of loyalty abilities just doesn’t fit well with most of what a bear would do.

These are major obstacles that make a bear planeswalker highly unlikely. I wouldn’t say totally impossible, but a major if.

Eldrazi Planeswalker

We’re really breaking rules here. Eldrazi titans were not born in any way that would make sense to us as far as we are aware. Even if they were, what sort of events would ignite the spark of such inscrutable beings? There’s no convincing story here and it’s a monumental task to try to convey this.

The bear breaks the sapient being rule. I’m honestly not sure if Eldrazi titans are sapient, but what we know of them is so alien from any other creature that I’m inclined to think that same disconnect comes through here.

But the biggest issue is rule number three, or what’s implied by it and what we know of the Eldrazi titans. A planeswalker walks through the Blind Eternities from one plane to another. The titans exist IN the Blind Eternities and only stretch their tendrils into planes. Not only do they not need to planeswalk, but arguably they wouldn’t be able to do it in a way that makes sense based on what we’ve seen so far. Eldrazi titans are like radio signals being broadcast all through the Blind Eternities and you’re saying “let’s write that down and ship it snail mail” when you ask for them as planeswalkers, while still expecting it to sound like a radio signal when the letter gets there.

Loyalty manipulation makes even less sense here. But the major issue is what you do for the loyalty abilities. The space you’d be working in is incredibly narrow and especially so when you consider it needs to be a colorless planeswalker that effectively conveys that it’s an Eldrazi titan, which have historically cost 10 or more. It’s such small design space and I’m not even sure you have enough there to make a good card that’s worth the trouble. Let alone the narrative problems this would create.

For this one, I’d say virtually impossible.

Sliver Planeswalker

Your typical sliver is a non-sapient member of a hive mind. It doesn’t think for itself and it exists as part of a greater group in much the same way that your finger exists as part of your body. A single one of these being a planeswalker makes pretty much no sense. It planeswalks to some place where it’s all alone and now it’s the weakest a sliver can be. So if we circumvent that by having multiple slivers share a spark, the issue becomes one of how many make sense for that.

So now you’ve broken both the non-sapient rule and the unique individuals have sparks rule, only to have a gaggle of slivers that’s still going to be limited when they planeswalk away from the rest of the hive. Luckily, there is at least one being that can follow all the rules we have for planeswalkers.

A sliver queen. We know from old stories that the queen seems to be a sapient being. This is also a unique and singular sliver, so no shared spark. But the sliver queen depicted on a card so far makes slivers. So there’s good reason that she could go from one plane to another and create a new brood there. Which brings us to the two main hangups with a sliver queen planeswalker.

One, story-wise, what happens when the queen leaves a plane and all the slivers she created there? Like, what happens to that hive when there’s no mind to lead them? I think we’ve seen this in story before, but I’m not sure it makes sense for a sliver queen to move from plane to plane making broods just to leave them to wreak mindless havoc on the plane. I’m doubtful that’s a fulfilling story and it occupies a similar story space to Eldrazi in some ways. There are enough narrative solutions to this that I won’t go into it, but I do feel you can create something meaningful with this.

Two, game play-wise, how do you make her feel like a sliver still? Slivers as a tribe are defined by granting other members of their ilk their abilities. A card that’s flavorfully a sliver but mechanically doesn’t play in this space is a big disconnect and I think would be a disappointment. I think Gideon cards are the way too look for guidance here. Maybe even such an ability that’s always on, making it a Sliver creature as well as it being a planeswalker. I’m skeptical of just about any other execution.

So Unstable gave us these glorious bastards.

[Image is of two Magic: the Gathering cards. “Extremely Slow Zombie” with the ability last strike, and “Three-Headed Goblin” with the ability triple strike.]

And of course we all want this in black border Magic, but as Mark Rosewater has said a whole lot, the rules rework isn’t worth the headache. There are various concerns, not the least of which is how you handle creatures gaining and losing a whole slew of new strike abilities as within a big ole combat damage step. We’ve now got to resolve first strike damage, double strike damage, triple strike damage, last strike damage, and normal combat damage. And that’s not to mention combinations like first strike and last strike, or what if a creature loses last strike before last strike damage would be dealt, or what if a creature gains triple strike after you’ve already done first strike damage?

But what if it actually was kind of simple, really? What if the answer wasn’t adding paragraphs upon paragraphs to the comprehensive rules? What if it only roughly doubled section 510.5 of the combat damage step rules from 121 words to 249 words and accounted for everything above?

Here’s my answer to those quandaries.

Let’s establish three clear combat damage steps and label them. Here we have steps A, B, and C. If any creatures with the relevant abilities are attacking or blocking as that combat step begins, then you do that step and resolve the combat damage before moving onto the next step.

If there are no attackers or blockers with the relevant ability as the combat damage step for that would begin, then you just skip it. Normal combat damage is always done during Step B. If there were no attackers or blockers with first strike, double strike, or triple strike as the combat damage step begins, then you go straight to step B and do normal combat damage. Then if there are no attackers or blockers with triple strike or last strike, you move on to the end of combat step.

This means a creature in combat that has double strike only ever deals combat damage during steps A and B. If it only gains double strike after step A combat damage has already been assigned, then it assigns combat damage in step B but it will not assign combat damage in step C (assuming there is a step C) unless it somehow gains triple strike or last strike before step C begins.

That’s pretty easy, right? Literally all you need is that little six cell chart above showing in which steps everything deals combat damage. And if you want a more nuanced approach, below the read more cut I have the current rules for 510.5, followed by my proposed rewrite of those rules.

But all of this leads me to say...

TEAR THIS TO PIECES

Find corner cases. Break it open. Show me flaws. Did I fail to account for something? Is my rewrite not as simple and intuitive as I think? Ask me questions. Bring up examples. Is my proposal going to grant as three wishes (as in, the wishes are to deal damage once, then twice, then a third time), or have I struck out?

This is a modification of the rules of RISK and Catan to combine them into one game a la Riskopoly. Having played Riskopoly, I enjoyed the idea of an economic system to moderate how armies are raised. But Monopoly is a fundamentally broken and unenjoyable economic system. Catan is the superior option.

Rules for Catan and RISK are each the same as before except where noted below.

Set up and Winning

Set up the Catan and RISK boards next to each other on the table so that all players can easily see them.

A player wins by controlling a predetermined number of territories on the RISK board (on a typical RISK board a short game would be 21 territories--50%--32 territories for a longer game--75%--or of course total domination at 100%) at the end of their turn.

Begin the game by placing starting towns and roads as you normally would for a game of Catan. Then shuffle and deal all RISK territory cards equally to each player. Players start with one army in each territory they were dealt. Then reshuffle the territory cards and set in a central location on the table.

Turns

On each player’s turn that player has a normal Catan turn. They start by rolling the dice and everyone gets resources or the robber moves. They can then do trades or purchase upgrades as normal. As in Catan, the turn ends when they pass the dice as normal.

During a player’s Catan turn that player can also purchase and place armies and take a RISK turn. Normal RISK rules apply to moving armies and combat. The player can take their RISK turn at any point during their Catan turn. If they engage in and complete a trade (some combination of cards are traded) in the midst of a RISK turn then that RISK turn ends immediately and they return to their Catan turn. Any armies in an opponent’s territory must immediately be retreated to an adjacent friendly territory or else removed from the board if that for some reason isn’t possible.

The game is different with regard to how you acquire armies, what the robber does, what territory cards do, what kind of trades can be made, and what development cards do (nothing as they aren’t used in Catan: Risky Business).

Development, Armies, and Territories

During a player’s turn they may purchase armies or territory cards by spending resources to buy what would be Development Cards in normal Catan. Development Cards are not used here. As you spend a sheep, wheat, and ore to make a purchase, you decide if you want to draw a territory card from the territory deck or if you’d like to place three armies onto any number of territories you already control.

If you only have, for example, two armies left in your reserves and you decide to purchase armies, obviously you can’t purchase three. You pay the normal price and place the two remaining armies. The third army doesn’t exist, can’t be placed, and you aren’t compensated in any way for that.

If you purchase territory cards, those remain secret and go in your hand. At any point on your Catan turn BEFORE you start your RISK turn you may reveal and discard any number of territory cards. You immediately place two armies from your reserves on the territories revealed this way. If there are opposing forces in those territories you immediately resolve combat until only one player’s forces remain (either play may choose to retreat their armies to an adjacent friendly territory if possible after the first round of combat). The player who played the territory card is considered the attacking force. Resolving combat from a territory card does not count as a RISK turn.

The Robber

On a Catan turn, if the robber is rolled you do the normal robber stuff (move it to a hex, steal from an adjacent player) but in addition to that, you can remove a single army from the RISK board of any player who has a settlement on that hex. You may choose not to remove an army.

Trades

In normal Catan you must trade cards for cards. You can’t just hand cards over to another player. In Catan: Risky Business this is not the case. Trades can take any form, including promises of peace, extortion under threat of invasion, or anything else. Trades can still only occur during a player’s Catan turn and must take place between the player whose turn it is and any other player in the game.

Promises made for deals are in no way enforceable and it’s entirely up to the player in question if they honor their word or not.

Questions? Comments? Share your experiences playing this!?

Thinking about this post at work today and about how this could just go all in on politics. This mechanic idea come from it and I’m going to outline it generally below then provide how I think it would fit into some sort of game inspired roughly by the post I linked.

For this mechanic you would have certain dice that are mostly set (either predetermined or rolled and then stuck with from there) and which are mostly manipulated as a way of tracking resources. So when you gain resources, instead of collecting cards or tokens or something, you’d change the number showing on the appropriate dice.

Then you would have a bag building aspect of some sort, where you want to get certain dice into bags, which would then later be drawn from (and rolled) to determine other aspects of the game. The way you would get dice into those bags is by reducing the value of one of the resource tracking dice at certain points. Typically a reduction of one pip on a resource dice would allow you to put one dice into a bag.

The post in question wants to incorporate politics somehow but that’s often difficult to implement satisfyingly in a game with only three to five players. My thought here is that the bag building would represent campaigning, building up support leading up to the polls. You expend resources (exactly what those resources are and how they are obtained, I’m not sure, a note on that and why I want the same dice to be used for that in a moment) in order to have a chance at the polls. Then when it comes around you draw a certain number of dice from a bag (likely not even all the dice in the bag) and roll them. This represents voter turnout and while you can improve your chances in any given election/vote, you never have full control over it. Likely there would be other aspects of the game that could help manipulate this (like a card called Voter Suppression that lets you reduce a rolled election dice by 1 or 2 or something like that). But the bulk of it rests on putting in work leading up to the election.

Specifically drawing on the idea of a game somewhat like Viktory II.

In Viktory II there is a limited form of this mechanic where you get an additional combat dice if you attack a hex from at least two different adjacent hexes. Focusing in on that, I’m imagining a game with more potential mobility and more emphasis on projecting force over the game board.

By default combat would provide a single dice (D6) and that hits on a roll of one. Not good odds. You increase that by one for every hex adjacent to the one being attacked that you have a unit in. This naturally tops out at hitting on anything six or less if you completely surround the attacked hex (attacking from one hex and friendly units in the other five around it).

I’ve made some progress on this recently and really need to start a mock up for play testing. Here’s the gist:

4 card types:

Aliens, Magic, Relics, and Wizards

Aliens cards are monsters you summon to fight for you. They have an attack and a defense. I’m also toying with the idea of every creature (every card?) having a third stat called mana or something like that. Not one hundred percent on that.

Magic cards are one-use spells. They do something and then the card’s gone.

Relics are magical items and “ideas.” So everything from a big sword to a magic mirror to a space ship to more abstract things like the feeling of anger or a curse. These things stick around.

Wizards are powerful cards and the namesake of the game. I’m really enjoying how they function so let me lay it out in more detail.

Wizards enter play with a six-sided dice set to a specific number. Each turn the player controlling the Wizard can do one of two things to that dice. Increase or decrease it by one, or roll it. Then for whatever number it’s showing, you do the corresponding effect. Most Wizards would have three effects and two numbers corresponding to each effect by default though that could change.

Additionally, Aliens can attack Wizards and whenever a Wizard would take any amount of damage from a source, you reduce the D6 for that Wizard by one. If it would be reduced below one, the Wizard dies. I’m trying to figure out if this means lower numbers should have more powerful effects since staying down there makes the Wizard more susceptible to removal, or if the higher numbers should have more powerful effects since your enemy can damage the Wizard to try to prevent you from getting there.

Resources:

Space Wizards has four resources, all represented by their own six-sided dice. Each player starts with their own set of four different colored dice each set to one. On each turn they can increase one resource dice by one.

Each card has a cost to cast. So a card may require three green mana (or whatever I end up calling these resources) so you need the green resource dice to be at three or higher to cast that spell. Players can cast one spell each turn if they have the resources for it. Casting a spell by default doesn’t reduce your resources at all.

To cast additional spells on a turn you need to do something and I’m currently debating what that thing is. My two main ideas are that you need to discard a card as an additional cost to cast extra spells OR that you have to reduce a resource dice by one and then can cast another spell you can afford with that new resource total showing.

Both have design issues to keep in mind. The first adds powerful to card draw, already typically a very powerful mechanic. The second strengthens any resource acceleration I might include in design. And confining any of those to a particular color would thus seemingly advantage that color over the others.

This also means the highest possible cost for a mono color spell is six of a color. The most expensive possible cost under this design is a total of 24, a card that costs six of each color. Which also presumably means a 24-turn game barring acceleration mechanics.

Creative:

Game combos to explore:

Catan: the Gathering - use Catan resources to buy Magic objectives (draw a card, destroy a creature, etc) and use mana (like 5 to 1 or something) as Catan resources. You take your Catan turn and Magic turn simultaneously, rolling dice and doing all trading during upkeep. Draw signifies all Catan trades are done. You can trade Magic cards and permanents?