jack

Recently wizards of the coast have been running the Great Designer Search 3, a competition to choose someone to potentially work in magic the gathering research and development. It's interesting because it says a lot about how they design such a complex game.

But occasionally frustrating when the competition is a bit arbitrary. I may have ranted about the preliminary multiple choice test before: it was done pretty well, but designing multiple choice tests well is hard, and a few "guess what the judges were trying to ask" questions slipped through the net.

After the multiple choice and essay rounds, the top 8 went through a series of design challenges, which are fairly interesting. They were quite intense, each lasted a few days with a week or so inbetween, and the candidates needed to design 8-15 cards meeting some set criteria. IIRC the challenges were design a number of cards for a previously underappreciated creature type, design N cards from the list of circus themed cards, design a mechanic that could be a major mechanic in a new set, design a series of cards using these pieces of art and meeting these descriptions, and design a booster-pack's worth of cards that could be added to an existing set.

The challenges end up testing multiple things at once, needing both "wow judges with fun ideas" and "understand what existing magic cards are relevant to this, and what abilities can be used and which shouldn't be".

From what I read on twitter, the "who did best, who got knocked out" judging was done based very much on candidates overall submissions. But there's also a card-by-card review published on wizard's website, which unfortunately does suffer a bit from "obvious problems jump out to the judges, overall quality of the card only stands out if it's especially good"

And partly because writing clear requirements is hard, and partly because the candidates were under a lot of pressure, there was also a steady trickle of failing to meet requirements by mistake. E.g. the tribal challenge required the Ooze (or whatever) cards to all care about other cards being oozes, whereas it was very easy to design an ooze that synergised with the abilities on the rest of the cards, or created extra oozes, etc, without explicitly caring about it.

At one point, I wrote a comment to one of the candidates when they were posting retrospectives on the Goblin Artisans blog, which had truth I wish I'd been better at seeing all my life.

I was talking about following the letter of the rules vs the spirit, and said, sometimes bending the rules is appropriate and sometimes it isn't, usually depending whether it shows the judges what they're looking for. But they don't usually TELL you explicitly what they're looking for (because they don't know consciously, or because they need to set objective requirements, etc), you need to intuit that and then design for that.

But a LOT of life is like that. Often doing what someone SAYS is only a proxy for doing what they WANT. There are exceptions, where they explicitly want you to NOT think about some things and just obey -- again, judging which things are which is difficult but what you need to try.

So sometimes, people are looking for ingenious solutions and bending the rules to get them is great. And sometimes they're looking for something in the spirit of the rules, and bending the rules produces something useless. And often they don't know themselves. But you can often guess.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70919/takenoko

Ghoti showed me the Bamboo/Panda game! It was really nice. Each turn you have two actions, plus a random bonus. These can be, "Place new large hex tile", "move panda", "move gardener", "take irrigation", or "take goal card".

The board is completely symmetric between players, there are no pieces which are specific to one player, the only difference is which goal cards they drew. The hex tiles are paddies of three colours, which when irrigated, grow a stalk of bamboo of that colour. When the gardener moves, he/she grows more bamboo on that hex if it's irrigated, plus adjacent hexes of the same colour if they're irrigated. The panda eats one segment of bamboo (you get that).

Goals are either "these segments of bamboo" (which you trade in), or "this combination of bamboo stalks anywhere on the board" or "this arrangement of hexes (must be irrigated)". The last two, you can score on your turn whenever they're satisfied, it doesn't matter if you laid them or your opponent laid them or someone scored them earlier, just if they exist.

The towers of bamboo are really cute, little plastic segments which stack four high. The panda is very cute, though when the game was described to me, I imagined it a lot bigger :)

And after the first few turns, it started to go quickly, each turn, there's only a couple of things you can do so there's not that much to decide, but the aggregate effect of your decisions matters a lot.