Easy to Learn Doesn't Mean Easy to Master
There is a moment we like to see when someone plays Monsters, Magic & Mayhem for the first time.
At the beginning, they're reading everything.
They pick up a card, read the effect, look at the Strength, and put it back in their hand. Then they pick up another card and do the same thing. When they finally choose one, there's usually a little hesitation before it goes down.
That's understandable. Everything is new. They don't know which cards are dangerous, which effects are worth saving, or what the person across the table might be planning.
A few minutes later, something changes.
They're no longer trying to understand how the game works. They're trying to figure out how to beat you.
That's the moment we're looking for.
Learning the Game Shouldn't Be the Game
We've played plenty of games where the first session feels like training for the second session. You spend half the night learning rules, checking charts, asking what symbols mean, and discovering exceptions to rules you thought you understood ten minutes ago.
There isn't anything inherently wrong with a complicated game. Some of our favorite games are complicated. When you sit down for an evening specifically to play one, learning all those systems can be part of the experience.
MMM was never supposed to be that game.
It started as something to play while another game was being set up. Later, we realized it also worked during all the other little gaps that appear in life—a few minutes at a restaurant, time at an airport, a break at a convention, or ten minutes before everyone has to leave.
A game built for those moments can't require a twenty-minute explanation.
If someone asks, “Want to play?” the answer shouldn't have to be followed by, “Sure, but first let me teach you for half an hour.”
We wanted players making meaningful choices almost immediately.
That meant the rules had to get out of the way quickly.
What we didn't want was for the game to get out of the way with them.
The First Game
A new player tends to see MMM very differently from someone who has played it several times.
During that first game, Strength is easy to understand. Bigger numbers look better. If one character has more Strength than another, the new player naturally notices it.
Effects are a little different.
They read them, of course, but they don't yet have any history attached to them. A particular effect may sound useful, but they haven't seen the situation where it becomes really useful.
So they play.
Maybe they win a room because they had more Strength. Maybe an effect suddenly changes the outcome somewhere else. Maybe a card they dismissed as weak causes a problem they never saw coming. Then they look at the card again.
“Oh.”
We hear that a lot. It's one of our favorite words in playtesting.
The Second Time You See a Card
The card hasn't changed. The player has.
The first time you see an effect, you're reading what it does. The second time, you're remembering what it did to you.
That's a very different kind of knowledge.
Now you might hesitate before committing your best character because you remember what happened last time. You may hold a card instead of immediately playing it. You may put something into a room not because it's the strongest choice, but because you think it will create a problem for your opponent later.
Nothing new has been added to the rules. You're simply beginning to see possibilities that weren't obvious before.
That's the kind of learning we wanted in MMM. We didn't want players spending game after game learning how they're allowed to play. We wanted them learning what they could do with the things they already understood.
Then You Start Recognizing Trouble
After several games, another change happens. You begin recognizing cards you aren't even holding.
Perhaps your opponent places a card somewhere and you immediately start wondering what it could be. You've seen this player use a certain monster before. You know which effects would be especially nasty in that room. You know what's already been played, and you know what's sitting safely in your own hand.
Suddenly you're not just thinking about your cards anymore. You're thinking about theirs.
That was something we discussed in the last Engine Room article. MMM doesn't use dice, but that doesn't mean it lacks uncertainty. Much of that uncertainty comes from another person making decisions you can't see.
Experience doesn't remove that uncertainty. It changes your relationship with it.
The first time you play, you don't know what's behind the door because you don't know the game very well. Later, you may know exactly what could be behind the door. That can make opening it much worse.
“You're Going to Do That Again, Aren't You?”
Eventually, players stop learning only the cards and start learning each other.
This is where things get personal.
Someone discovers a combination that works beautifully and uses it against you. The next game, you remember. When they begin setting up something that looks suspiciously familiar, you start preparing for it.
They notice. So next time, they make it look like they're doing the same thing.
You prepare your counter. The room is revealed. They did something completely different.
There is usually a smile involved at this point, and it's rarely a trustworthy one.
This is where we think a lot of the replay value in a small game comes from. The deck hasn't suddenly doubled in size. We haven't introduced seventeen new rules to keep experienced players interested.
The players are creating new problems for each other. Once that happens, the game can keep changing even though the pieces haven't.
The Strongest Card Isn't Always the Best Card
This is also where Strength becomes more interesting.
When you're new, playing the strongest card available often feels like the obvious choice. Sometimes it is the right choice. Strength exists for a reason.
But using your strongest card here means you don't have it somewhere else.
Perhaps your opponent wants you to commit it. Maybe winning this room isn't as important as it looks. Maybe the card's effect would be far more useful later.
Or perhaps you've spent so much time trying to be clever that you leave an obvious opening and your opponent simply hits you with the strongest thing in their hand.
That happens too.
There is a special kind of humility in spending two minutes constructing a brilliant theory about what your opponent is planning only to discover that their entire strategy was basically:
“I thought this monster would beat you.”
And it did.
Learning a game doesn't mean every decision becomes more complicated. Sometimes experience teaches you when not to make something complicated.
We Didn't Want a Game You Had to Study
There's a difference between depth and homework.
We didn't want players to feel that they needed to memorize the deck before they could enjoy MMM. You should be able to sit down, learn the basics, pick up your cards, and start having fun.
If you play once and never play again, that first game still needs to work.
But if you play a second time, we want you to notice something you didn't notice before.
By the fifth game, perhaps you're saving a card that you used to play immediately. By the tenth, you may be watching another player's habits almost as closely as you're watching the cards.
None of that requires a new rulebook. It comes from familiarity.
That's a useful distinction because sometimes designers try to create replayability by continually adding more things for players to learn. More cards. More abilities. More exceptions. More combinations.
Those things certainly can add depth, but depth can also come from giving players enough room to become better at using a smaller number of things.
We wanted MMM to reward experience without requiring study.
A Ten-Minute Game Can Still Have Veterans
That idea became particularly important because MMM is short.
A game may only take around ten minutes, but that doesn't mean the experience has to be disposable. In fact, short games have an interesting advantage: you can immediately play again.
Veteran players also tend to get faster. Once they know the cards, they spend less time reading and more time playing. During one playtest, we watched two experienced players finish an entire game in less than three minutes. That might sound too fast, but neither of them was ready to stop. The loser immediately wanted another game for revenge, while the winner was just as eager to play again so he could win twice and rub it in a little more. Within seconds, the cards were being shuffled and they were right back at it. For us, that was a pretty good sign that a three-minute game didn't necessarily provide three minutes of entertainment, it could just as easily become three games in a row.
The first game ends and somebody says, “Again?”
Now both players know something they didn't know ten minutes ago.
Maybe you discovered a nasty card interaction. Maybe you learned that your opponent likes to bluff. Maybe you made one terrible decision and have already spent the last three minutes thinking about how you should have handled it.
So you shuffle up and try again.
The rules are the same. The cards are the same. The opponent is the same. But the next game isn't. You bring what you learned with you.
Easy to Learn Is an Invitation
When we say MMM is easy to learn, we don't mean there isn't much game there. We mean we don't want the rules standing between you and the game. (A core Dreadnaught Publishing policy)
There's a difference.
A player shouldn't need to understand every possible interaction before placing their first card. They should be able to learn by playing, make mistakes, discover combinations, recognize patterns, and gradually start seeing more of what's happening on the table.
That first game begins with questions like, “What does this card do?”
A few games later, the questions sound more like, “Why did you put that there?”
Then eventually you get the question we really like: “What are you up to?” At that point, nobody is learning the rules anymore. They're learning each other. And for us, that's where a simple card game starts becoming a strategic one.
Next from the Engine Room
There is one more side to making a game this small.
Every card, rule, and component has to earn the space it takes up. When you deliberately refuse to solve design problems by simply making the game bigger, some uncomfortable decisions follow.
What stays?
What goes?
And how much game can you actually squeeze into a box before “small” starts working against you?