3/21/14 Episode 106: Gaming with R&D

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So today, I have a little more offbeat topic. So one of the things that’s interesting is, I talk a lot, when I talk about the history of Magic, I tend to talk about the game itself. And I’ve talked about the people. But I haven’t talked about sort of the game-playing.

So when I first got to Wizards, I mean I was a game player, I’ve been a game player my entire life. But that one of the things about my early time at Wizards is I felt like I really got an education in games. And today’s going to be about sharing some stories of early Wizards days with a focus on game-playing. A little bit of Magic, but a lot of other types of games as well.

So anyway, this is kind of a reminiscent story podcast. Just talking about kind of where R&D once upon a time was. It’s different now. Or I’m different now.

But anyway, so when I first got to Wizards, like I said, everybody who worked in R&D when I got there, nobody was from Seattle. Everybody had come from somewhere else. And so really, everybody kind of—the social circle was the group of R&D. And we hung around together, and we played games together because we were gamers. And so a lot of my game education happened in my early days at Wizards. And so I’m going to talk about that.

And so the first thing that happened is, the way it would work is, we would work during the day, for dinner we would always go out to eat at some restaurant. In fact, I think I told the story of when I was dating Lora and she went to my cupboard to get some food and there was nothing there, and she opened the fridge and nothing there. There was literally no food in my apartment. And she’s like, “Where is our food?” And I go, “Oh yeah, I don’t eat here.” Because I ate out every single meal. That was my bachelor days. And R&D, we just hung out. So like, we’d go to lunch at lunch, and then at dinner we’d go out, and usually after dinner, we’d come back and we would play games.

And the ringleader of our game-playing was Richard Garfield. So, I mean I’ve talked a lot about Richard, but here’s an aspect that I haven’t talked too much about. Richard loves games. Loves, loves, loves, loves games. I have not met somebody who is as fascinated by games as Richard.

And not just… I mean, Richard loves the history of games. He loves breaking down games and understanding games, and he just loves playing every game he can get his hands on. And so when I first got there, Richard was very into German games. So let me explain, for those that don’t know your history.

Germany happens to have a culture that really highlights games as not just something for a subset of the audience. Like in the U.S., like there’s gamers, although even this is broadening. But it just, like you would go to the movies with your family, you would play games. It’s just something that in German culture is just very accepted. Game-playing is just something that all families kind of do. The biggest game convention in the world, called Essen, Essen Spiel, is in Germany. And anyway, Germany’s always had a great fascination for games. And because of it, there’s a lot of games that come out of Germany.

Now, in the last 10 to 15 years, there’s been companies that have finally started bringing those games over to the U.S. And so a lot of these German games now are very accessible and playable. But once upon a time, for example, when I started at Wizards… remember, I started at Wizards in 1995. Remember, there were no—none of the German games had been brought to English yet. Brought to the U.S. yet.

And so Richard had acquired them at Essen, mostly, and acquired them in German. And so what happened was, sometimes Richard would get like photocopies of English rules. But a lot of times he would just learn the rules and then he would just teach us how to play.

So for example, I remember him teaching a game called Siedler, which you guys might know as Settlers of Catan. So I think the German name’s like Siedler Die Catan [NLH-- Die Siedler von Catan.] Or something. But we called it Siedler. Because that was the German name. Siedler/Settlers, I assume. And I first learned that game, like Richard was telling us. And the rules were in German, so I had to trust that Richard told us correctly.

And it was fun. I mean, one of the things that was great is, Richard would just introduce us to games that we had never played before. And then, some of the time, he really introduced us to games that we’d never played before, because they were Richard’s games. Because Richard would play games with us, and then he would make up other games and play that with us.

For example, there was a game he made that was released under the name, “What Were You Thinking?” It was based on a German game, I don’t remember the name of the German game, [NLH—couldn’t find it] but it was influenced by a game he saw in German. And the premise of the game, for those that have never played it, is you get asked a question. And then you are supposed to match as many other people as possible.

Now, Richard, when he made the game, the playtest name was called Hive Mind. And so the idea was that you would ask the question, and then… so let’s say you said, “Name a flower.” Well, you… “Daisy,” or maybe “Rose” or… what do you think most people would write down? That’s what you’re trying to write down. And here’s the tricky thing about the game, which was very interesting, which was even if the answer was incorrect, if the most people wrote it down, it was still the right answer.

So for example, if they said, “Name an insect,” or “Name five insects,” or whatever, “spider” might be the correct answer. “But spiders aren’t insects!” That is true. But it didn’t matter, because you weren’t trying to correctly answer the question, you were trying to get the answer the most people put.

So one of my favorite stories about Hive Mind—so there’s a guy called Joe Grace, who if you’ve ever seen Timmy, Power Gamer  from Unglued, Joe was the model for it. His picture is on it. And Joe was the biggest Timmy you’ve ever met. He just, he loved playing for just the thrill and the experience, and he would play the giant creatures, and every sort of stereotypical thing you think of Timmy, Power Gamer, that was Joe.

But he was very, very bad at Hive Mind. For some reason, just he couldn’t quite click in. And so one of my favorite stories is—we used to tease him. I mean, playfully tease him about it. But one of the things that would happen is, we would play, and Joe would say, “Oh, I got it, I got it, this time I have it.” And then he would always miss.

So one time, it was “Name three dwarves.” So you had to write down three dwarves. And then Joe says, “I want to go first. I want to go first. I got this one. I got this one.” And everyone goes, “Okay.” And he goes, “Okay. Who has Gimli?”

And the correct answer, obviously, was like, Dopey, Grumpy, and… I think Doc was the third-best answer. But anyway, everybody else was writing the dwarves of the Seven Dwarves, and he was writing the dwarves from Lord of the Rings.

Another game that Richard taught us, I only know it as “The Goat Game.” I don’t know, it’s got a name, I know it as The Goat Game. So it was a game you would play that was very, very complex. And when you were learning the game, you thought that whoever was teaching you was punking you. Like, they were just making fun of you. Because like, “Oh no, there’s this rule. Oh no, there’s this rule.”

And so what happened was, when you play, the way the game worked is there wasn’t a winner, there was just a loser. And if you lost The Goat Game, the reason it was called The Goat Game is you had to make the sound of a goat. That was the cost of losing.

And so one day, we had a new person. And it actually wasn’t even from R&D. Andrew. Andrew Finch. Who was the Tournament Organizer for the Pro Tour for quite a while. Andrew had just joined, and we were playing The Goat Game, and Andrew loses.

And when you first play The Goat Game, it is truly—like you have no idea what’s going on, because the rules are coming, and there’s like stages to the game and each game works differently, and it is a complicated, confusing game.

So the first time you play, you’re like “I don’t know how I’m supposed to win this game, I don’t understand what’s going on.” And so odds are you lose the first time you play, because you have no idea what you’re doing.

But Andrew’s like, “I was just learning. I’m not going to make the goat noise. I was just learning.” And we’re like, “No, no, you’ve got to make the goat noise.” And Andrew’s like, “No, I was just learning, this is not fair, I believe I should have an exception here. I shouldn’t be punished. I didn’t know what I was doing! I should not make the goat noise.” And we’re like, “Andrew, you’ve got to make the goat noise.” And Andrew’s like, “I refuse to make the goat noise.”

So we’re like, “Andrew, let me explain what happens. Under the rules of R&D, if you refuse to make the goat noise, none of us can speak with you until you make a goat noise. That’s just the rules of R&D.” Andrew’s like, “I’m not making the goat noise.” So we’re like… my memory was, it was a couple days, maybe it was a couple hours, but we just didn’t talk to Andrew. Finally, Andrew’s like, “Fine, fine!” He makes a goat noise.”

So another thing. Let me talk about The Game. So R&D, there was just endless games in R&D. But one of the games we called, “The Game.” I think it was—so Skaff Elias, Skaff is one of the East Coast playtesters, he started the Pro Tour, Skaff had gone to Princeton with Jim Lin and other East Coast playtesters, and I think at Princeton, Skaff and some of his friends had made this game called “The Game.”

And the way The Game worked was, there were a bunch of rules. Now, you weren’t allowed to… I think you weren’t allowed to tell people the rules until they broke the rule, and then there were punishments for certain rules, like certain rules got you a punch in the shoulder, although we weren’t too hard about it. At college I got the sense it was a harder punch.

And there were other rules, but sometimes you did something and you couldn’t speak until—so there were a whole series of rules. In some ways it was probably a wide variety of games, but they were all woven together, and it’s called “The Game.”

And so for example, part of The Game was, there were certain words that you couldn’t say. One of the words you couldn’t say was “jinx.” Now, you can’t see me driving, but when I said that, I made air quotes. Because if you put it in air quotes—there were certain power words. And if you had power words in air quotes, then you were okay. But if you said the power word without the air quote, then you needed to be punished. Then you had broken the rule.

And so there were just words (???) that you couldn’t say. “Jinx” being one of them. I’m trying to remember the other words. Anyway, so what happened is, R&D understood, we were playing this game. Most of us eventually learned the rules. But other people outside of R&D had no idea the game was even going on.

And so what would happen was, you would try in the context of just normal life at Wizards, to get other R&D people to mess up and say words they weren’t supposed to, and so you would do things like—there in fact is a card… is it Homelands? [NLH—Yes.] There’s a card called Jinx. That like was literally made into a card name so we could mess with each other and try to get other people to say the name.

And there—like part of it was called the Circle Game, where if you made a circle with your fingers and it was at your beltline or below, and someone looked at it, then that had a repercussion. If two people said the same word at the same time, there was repercussions. And there were different punishments for different things you could do, like one of the ones if you did it then you couldn’t speak until someone said your name. And so you had to go around trying to get people to say your name, but R&D knew they weren’t supposed to say your name, so you’d try to get people who aren’t in R&D, so like one of the fun things was, I go up to somebody who has no idea what I’m doing, I can’t speak, and I’m trying to get them to say my name. There’s some tricks you learn.

There was a Doorknob Game, where doorknobs negated the power of certain things, so if you broke a rule but you touched a doorknob then you were okay. So like Richard for a while took a doorknob off a door and had it in his pocket, so he would break the rule and have people punch him, except he’d reveal he had a doorknob in his pocket, so they got double-punched because they falsely punished him.

Anyway, to give you a sense of the craziness, when I first got to Wizards—we don’t play the game anymore, but there was many years early on, maybe five years, where we were playing The Game. And it completely peppered the interactions and experiences at the time.

And my addition to The Game, I talked about this once before on the podcast, was the meerkat game that I learned from Roseanne, and we played that for a while. The meerkat game is where you perch up like a meerkat and everybody in the room has to perch up like a meerkat until everybody does, and then you break and don’t talk about it. We played that. That was my contribution to The Game.

The Game seemed to be ever-evolving, if it entertained us we’d add it in. But anyway, that was—like I always talked about how I’d love to make a sitcom of Wizards, the idea of a sitcom about a bunch of people from a game company. And if I did that, The Game would be in that sitcom, like absolutely positively 100% in the pilot, no questions asked.

Okay, other things we did. I think I might have talked about this one, but it’s funny enough I’ll talk about it again.

So some of our games were mental. But some of them were physical. So one of my favorite games is, we used to have this giant room that was meant for All Hands. But other than All Hands, in which they’d set up chairs, it was empty. It was a giant empty room.

So what happened was, when I first got to Wizards, we were in—so Wizards started in Peter’s basement, and then they eventually got offices which were—when I first worked at Wizards, we were in those offices. But like a month after getting there, we moved to the new offices. And then, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, we moved from the new offices to the new new offices. Which are across the street. So this is in the old new offices. So not the basement, not the first offices, but the second offices. The ones that are across the street from our current offices. And there’s this giant, giant, giant room.

So what we did is, we would take up our office chairs that were on wheels, or maybe there were office chairs up there. We’d get office chairs. And then we would get hockey sticks. And we got a little rubber ball. And then we’d set up—we might even have had goalposts, we might even have actually had like little goals. And so we would play office chair hockey.

And the way it would work is that we had two teams, you were allowed contact between chairs, although you weren’t supposed to hit people if you could. But you could check chairs, which we did all the time.

And the idea was that we played hockey, except you had to stay seated in your chair, and chairs could smash into each other. And we would play this multiple times a week. And it was full-contact—like, ou were sweating by the end of it. Because you were just—it was a big room, and you used your legs a lot because you had to push. And there was a lot of swiveling you had to do, when you would check people you would want to swivel back. And people would knock people out of their chairs, and it was full-contact hockey but in office chairs.

And then the thing, Barry was the guy who was in charge of operations, and Barry used to yell at us because we had a tendency to make chips in the ceiling. And we’d also make marks on the wall, but Barry could get the marks on the wall off. But he couldn’t get the chips in the ceiling out. And he’s like, “Guys, guys, just don’t… please don’t chip the ceiling.” That was his big note. But it was office chair hockey. That was a game that I always got a big kick out of. And like I said, we also did some physical stuff. 

So another thing we did is at lunch… so Bill Rose loves trick-taking games. In fact, Bill Rose met Richard Garfield in a bridge club. And so Richard and Bill—a lot of R&D folk that really love different trump games.

So a trump game is usually a card game in which you are putting down cards and picking up cards, and then different suits have different values at different times, or certain games, certain suits are trump.  But anyway, both Bill and Richard loved trick-taking games. So there was a period of time where we’d always go to lunch, and we’d play trick-taking games.

Now, you have to understand that—so when I got to Wizards, I talked about this I think before, but so when I got to Wizards, it was interesting in that I was used to, growing up, being one of the smartest kids in the class. Whatever room I was in, I was one of the smartest kids in the room.

And I got to R&D, in which every kid was one of the smartest kids in the room. That it was cool, it was very refreshing, but it was different. Usually if I had an argument, I could win my argument, because I could out-argue anybody who I would be in a room with. And then I got in a room full o people that learned how to argue really well, and took it to a whole next level.

Now, game-playing is similar, which was where I came from, I was one of the best gamers from where I came from. I was a very, very good gamer. But when I got to R&D, it was like, “That’s nothing. These guys are the best gamers where they come from.” And that in certain games I was fine, I could hold my own, but in other games I was way outclassed.

So one of them was trick-taking games. Like I said, Bill is so good at trick-taking games that you honestly think there’s a hidden camera and he’s just screwing with you. Like, you will play a game with Bill, and he’s like, “Yeah, on that fourth turn you should have played the Four of Spades.” And I’m like, “I didn’t even know I had the Four of Spades. Did I have the Four of Spades?”

Like, Bill would remember every move for every game and know everybody’s hand at the end of it. It’s like, “Why, on the fifth turn, did you not play the Two of Clubs instead of the Four of Spades? You were void, and you could have played…” like, “Was I?”

And what was interesting is, like when you would make a mistake, Bill would like identify exactly where you made the mistake. And so it was intimidating, because like I knew how to play, trick-taking games, with a normal audience I was okay, I wasn’t great, but I was okay, but with this crowd, especially Bill, I was—like we used to keep track. We used to have this score. And they still do this today. Today, Bill still does the trick-taking lunches, I just don’t play in them anymore.

And they keep track. Like there’s an ongoing score. And it was just pathetic because like, I was just outclassed completely. They let me play, but I was outclassed completely. And it was—I mean, I got better at trick-taking games, that’s for sure, I mean one of the things they say about how to get better is, “Play with people who are better than you. You will get better.” And so I learned, although I never learned enough to be in spitting distance of their game. So I do not play their trick-taking games anymore.

Okay. Another various fun opportunity, I’ll talk Magic. I finally get to Magic. Is one of the things that Richard loved to do was invent drafts. Richard would love to make drafts. Often they were two-person drafts, although sometimes they made larger ones.

And so like Richard—in general, let me (???) a little bit. Richard is a game inventor. Richard likes making games. So Richard was always making games. He’s always making games. He’s a game inventor. Every waking moment he’s making a game. And so Richard would often come to your desk and say, “Do you want to play a game?” You could tell, he had a tone he would ask when like, “Oh, okay, he’s playtesting, it’s one of Richard’s games.”

And what would happen is, people would always say to Richard, “Well, how long does it take? Do you know how long it will take?” And Richard finally learned that the correct answer to get people to play your game was 15 minutes.

Now note, that didn’t mean it was 15 minutes. It just meant you needed an answer, Richard would give you an answer, and so he would tell you 15 minutes because people would go, “Oh, okay, I can play.” And eventually you would learn… because Richard would have this game when he said 15 minutes, that if you knew him, like it was just his line. Fifteen minutes wasn’t the truth, it was just what he needed to say to get people playtesting.

And by the way, playtesting Richard’s games was a lot of fun. One of the things that’s very interesting, by the way, for those that don’t do a lot of playtesting in games, in that one of the things about playtesting a game is that it’s very interesting early on to see a game come together.

Like people ask me my favorite Magic games, and I love design playtests. Now, understand, the design playtests are rough. They’re not nearly as polished as the Magic that you all play, and it has a lot of quirks and there are bad moments that—way more bad moments, and there’s plenty of ugliness that comes along with playtests. Because you don’t have things right.

But there are just moments of joy, because you have—I mean, I guess on some level you guys experience the first time you play a card set, but when I play a set I have no idea what’s going on. And that even I, the person who made it, don’t really understand what’s going to happen until we play it.

Like, one of my favorite things is the very first common playtest. When you sit down, and you’ve never played before, and you’ve looked at the cards and you’ve thought about the cards, and you have a mix of things, and you have no idea what’s going to happen.

And sometimes it’s a horrible crazy train wreck, although the funny thing is, horrible crazy train wrecks are not bad playtests. You learn a lot. The worst playtests are ones where things are good, but could they be better? Those are the worst, where you’re not quite sure if you have it right, but you didn’t get enough bad stuff to know you need to change things.

Anyway, one of the fun game things at Wizards was playing with Richard. Playing new games. Like, name a game that came out while I was working there, like I played early versions of most games you can name that Richard did.

And that it was fun playing King of Tokyo for the first time. In fact, King of Tokyo I played at a Worlds. It was Yokohama, I think. One of the Worlds in Japan. And Wizards was not working at Wizards anymore, but he and I met up at Worlds and he had like on index cards and things, an early version of King of Tokyo, which is a game that my family and I play all the time now. And I was super tired because I was jetlagged, but I played, and it was a lot of fun.

Anyway, I’m deviating. So one of the things Richard would do was he would make up ways to draft Magic. And a bunch of the drafts, I mean if you know a lot of two-player drafts, a bunch of them started with Richard. Richard created them. And the funny thing is, I don't know what all of them are called. Richard had a draft called Let’s Make a Deal that R&D really liked. There was a bunch of different ones.

But what’s fun is that Richard always found a way to just take things and tweak them and try them in a different way. Oh, like another thing Richard would do—so not only did Richard introduce you to German games and stuff, Richard would introduce you to classic games. One of the things that Richard loved is,

Richard really loved introducing—like one day we would go to lunch, he goes, “We’re learning dominoes.” And like, I had played dominoes, but like did I know the real rules to dominoes? Not really. And Richard taught us, “Here’s the rules to dominoes. Here’s the variants. Here’s the things.” And it’s kind of like—Richard teaching a game was like this educational seminar.

And the thing that was awesome is, we would just play, like—“Let’s play checkers.” “Let’s play Chinese Checkers.” “Let’s play Othello, or Reversi, or whatever.” Let’s play some games that like, you probably have played, but have you really played? Did you understand where they come from?

And Richard would fill you in like where the game—Richard actually, at one point at the University of Washington, he and Skaff had a class in game history. That was about games, but it just talked about kind of like the evolution of games, and where they learned things… I never had a chance to go to it just because I had my family and at that point it wasn’t easy to get away, but I was very jealous of people that got to take that class, because I got bits and pieces of it over the years of Richard explaining things. But it was fun. Just kind of having a Games 101. It was Richard Garfield. I mean obviously, like, a pretty awesome experience.

I think I’m almost to work. The last thing I’ll talk about, this was not all of R&D. Richard was involved and a few other R&D people were involved. And some other people at Wizards were involved with this one.

So one of the things we did one time was, we decided that it would be fun to have a puzzle hunt. That we thought it would be good for morale. That it would just be fun for—the idea was, something unannounced, that it just happened. And so we decided to base it around Alice in Wonderland, for those that aren’t super familiar with Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll was a big fan of puzzles. There’s a bunch of puzzles woven into Alice in Wonderland, he did the puzzles afterward related to Alice in Wonderland, a lot of other puzzle people have done Alice in Wonderland puzzles, it’s a popular puzzle theme.

And so we decided we were going to do an Alice in Wonderland puzzle day. The idea was, it was a special event that we didn’t tell anybody about. What happened was, at Wizards, there’s a thing, I don't know if it exists anymore, but it used to be called “non-essential.” Where people could just post things and talk, and there were some chat rooms.

So we had Alice Liddell, which is the actual name of the character from Alice in Wonderland, pose as an employee and was saying weird things on the public employee channel. That was the only clue that something was coming. And a few people figured out that it was Alice from Alice in Wonderland,but only a couple.

And so what happened was, one morning I volunteered to be the white rabbit, so I put on a white rabbit suit, and I had my little watch, and I ran all over the building going, “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!” And I think I ad-libbed a bit about how late I was. And at the end of it, by the way, we had four buildings in the old one. They were like connected, like in a big square. I was so tired, I collapsed like at the end of it. I had to catch my breath.

But what happened was, there were scattered around the building all these Alice in Wonderland-themed puzzles that we had made. I don’t remember the puzzle exactly, I just remember the experience, and like people could go and find the puzzles, and it was just this bonus little thing we did, just like, “Here’s a fun experience.”

And I mean, there’s stuff like that nowadays, it’s a little different. Back in the day, Wizards was just a lot smaller, like at the time I’m talking about there was, I don't know, 150, 200 employees. Maybe 250 at most. It was a lot smaller. Now we have closer to thousands, I guess. And so we liked doing fun activities like that. I mean, we (???) all the time. And anyway. But it was fun. The thing that I enjoyed is, it was a great amount of fun making puzzles with all the different R&D folk and different Wizards folk.

So one of the things is, there is a bunch of people, Mark Gottlieb is a big one, there’s a guy who used to work at Wizards named Mike Selinker, Taylor Woodruff, currently right now, I mean, Mark Gottlieb still works there, Matt Tabak also, there’s a bunch of people at Wizards who are just really, really into puzzles.

So there’s things all around the country and world called puzzle hunts, where you go, you have to solve a series of puzzles and they lead you to other places. And like Mark Gottlieb, puzzle hunts are his hobby. He goes around the country doing puzzle hunts. Matt Tabak does as well.

And so a bunch of Wizards people were very into making puzzles, and so I both did the Alice in Wonderland puzzles, and then the National Puzzler’s League, the World Puzzle Championship was in Seattle one year, and we got volunteered to make a series of puzzles.

And the neat thing about it was that they had to be language- and culture-agnostic, meaning it had to be for anybody anywhere in the world, so it couldn’t rely on knowledge that you would only have if you were from a certain country. And so making those puzzles were very interesting. I remember I made a puzzle that involved dice. And if I remember correctly, like I crushed the Dutch team. Like, they got all the puzzles but my dice puzzle. And I think by the way, GAMES magazine actually published our puzzles at one point. [NLH—couldn’t find that, but here’s a write-up.] So for those that have a backlog of GAMES magazines.

Anyway, the point I wanted to get today, since I’m getting close to work, is that people ask me all the time, they say, “I want to be a game designer. What do I need to do?” There’s a lot of answers to that question, but one of the answers I always give is, “You need to play games.” Why? Well, you want to be a writer, read. You want to be an artist, go look at art. You want to be a game designer, play games.

And there’s a couple reasons. One is, you’ve got to learn what the tools are. Right? And the way you learn what can be done is by seeing what people have done. And maybe that inspires you to do something that hasn’t been done. But if you don’t know what hasn’t been done, you might do things that have been done and not realize that you’re doing something that someone else has done. Maybe learn from them.

Like one of the things I find of looking at games is, like I love playing other games because it’s a great opportunity as a game designer to go, “Hmm. How do they put this together?” Now, I have to admit, one of my things as a game designer is I’m more than willing to change games. For example, if I read a game and I go, “I think it would be better,” usually I will try to play it once the way it’s intended, but I will quickly tweak after playing. As I like to joke, I will iterate any game I get my hands on, not just my games.

One of the things that I think helped me a lot, that happened early on was my complete immersion in the world of games. And just all sorts of games. I mean, growing up I played a lot of games. Not like I didn’t have an education in games before I got to Wizards. But I feel like once I got to Wizards, my education just rose significantly.

And I played all sorts of games that I was not used to playing. Examples are trick-taking games where I wasn’t even good at. But I dove in, I definitely swam in the pool and I learned all sorts of games. And I think having that knowledge and that breadth of understanding of different games—and also having the history that Richard taught and learning where games came from, and just knowing the basics.

Like, it’s not a bad idea, by the way, to buy a game book of just basic, basic games. Of dominoes. Of checkers. Of games you think you know how they’re played, and play them.

Oh, another great thing, by the way, to do is, take a game you’ve played a lot, maybe since you were a kid, and read the rules. Very illuminating. Because Monopoly’s a great example. There’s so many rules to Monopoly that you think are rules to Monopoly that are not. That are just kind of house rules.

Like Free Parking, for example, they might have finally changed it. But Free Parking, for the longest time there was no rule that said you got money off Free Parking. That was just something everybody did. It was a good catch-up feature. But the game, at least maybe they’ve finally changed it, but for a long time that wasn’t actually a rule in the game.

So anyway, kind of the lesson of today, I mean A. I wanted to share some stories and just tell you a little bit about like what early Wizards was like. A part of my podcast is kind of capturing the history of Wizards and the history of Magic. And I just—I don't know, I’ve got a lot of feedback that you guys like hearing some of the stories, so today was a story episode. And I hope you had fun.

So anyway, I am here at work. I parked. And as much as I like talking about Magic, and other games, you know what I like even more? Making Magic. Okay, I’ll talk to you guys next time.