What Do You Play While You're Waiting to Play?

Game night has started. Sort of.

Everyone has arrived. Well, almost everyone.

One player texted, “Be there in five,” which everyone knows could mean anything from five minutes to half an hour. Someone is sorting pieces. Someone else is building the board. Cards need to be shuffled. Characters need to be chosen. Tokens need to go in the right places. Then somebody gets up for a drink. Someone else decides this is the perfect time to get a snack. One player has disappeared into the bathroom and, judging by the amount of time they've been gone, may be destroying it. Meanwhile, the GM is digging through a stack of papers looking for the notes they absolutely, positively swear were “right here.” And everyone else is...

Waiting.

If you've played tabletop games for any length of time, you know these moments. They're the little gaps in game night.

Sometimes it's ten minutes before the game starts. Sometimes someone is late. Sometimes it's the middle of the evening and one person needs a break. Sometimes the GM needs a few minutes to figure out exactly what is supposed to be behind that door you weren't expected to open. You could look at your phone. You could argue about what to order for dinner. You could watch the GM become increasingly desperate about those missing notes.

Or...

You could play another game!
That was the problem that eventually became Monsters, Magic & Mayhem. A Game for the Gaps
We started with a simple question: What could the other players do while a game is being set up?

Not everyone needs to help with setup. In fact, sometimes having six people trying to help is considerably less helpful than having two people who actually know where everything goes.

But we quickly realized setup wasn't the only time this happened. Tabletop gaming has downtime built into the evening. You're waiting for another player to arrive. Someone is making drinks. Someone is grabbing food. Someone gets an important phone call. The GM needs a few minutes to prepare something. Or someone announces, “I'll be right back,” and vanishes into the bathroom with their phone.

The rest of the table doesn't necessarily want to start the main game without them. But nobody particularly wants to sit around doing nothing either. So the idea became bigger than something to play during setup. We wanted a game for the gaps.

That established some unusual requirements.

It had to be quick. It had to be easy to get onto the table. It couldn't require a complicated setup of its own. Spending fifteen minutes setting up a game intended to fill a fifteen-minute gap would be a spectacular design failure. It needed to be easy for people to join without requiring a lecture first. It needed to be interesting enough that people actually wanted to play it rather than simply using it to kill time. And we didn't want dice.

We weren't trying to make a smaller version of whatever everyone was waiting to play. We wanted something you could get out, play, and put away easily. A game that could fill ten or fifteen minutes without feeling like something you were only playing because you had ten or fifteen minutes.

That was the beginning of Monsters, Magic & Mayhem. It was considerably simpler then.

Strength Wins
The earliest version of MMM was about as straightforward as a competitive game can get.

Cards had Strength. You played your cards. Your opponent played theirs. Whoever had the greater total Strength won. That was essentially it. And you know what?

It was fun.

That's important. Sometimes designers can become so concerned with mechanisms, combinations, special abilities, and innovation that we forget the most important test. Do people enjoy playing it? We enjoyed playing this very simple version. The basic idea worked.

It was fast. There wasn't much setup. You didn't need dice. You didn't need to stop every few minutes and look something up. It accomplished what we had originally set out to do. There was just one problem.

We'd Already Played This Game
After playing several times, you started to understand the cards. You knew what was strong. You knew what was weak. You knew what you were likely to do. The game still worked, but the decisions began to repeat themselves.

The first few games were fun because you were discovering the game. After that discovery was over, there wasn't enough underneath it. The game had replayability, but not enough of it. That presented us with an interesting design problem. How do you add more game without adding more stuff?

We could add a lot more cards. We could add dice. We could introduce charts. We could create several different resources to track. We could make a larger game. But none of those answers addressed why we were making MMM in the first place. This was supposed to be the game you could play while waiting for another game. Making it bigger wasn't the answer. So instead of adding more cards, we made the existing cards do more.

One Little Rule Changed Everything
We gave the cards effects. Strength still mattered. But now it wasn't the only thing that mattered.

A card that wasn't particularly powerful on its own might change another card. A character might interact with a monster in an unexpected way. An effect might make something valuable in one situation that wasn't valuable in another. Suddenly, the strongest card wasn't automatically the best card. And that meant players had decisions to make. Do I use this card here? Do I save it? What might my opponent be doing? What combination gives me the best chance? What do I think they think I'm going to do?

The game was still small. It was still quick. It still didn't need dice. But now it had something the original version lacked. Strategy. That single change made MMM considerably more replayable because the cards weren't merely numbers anymore. They were possibilities.

The Other Player remained hidden
Another part of the game began doing more work than we initially expected. Players set up their characters or monsters in rooms without knowing what their opponent is doing. That changed everything again. You weren't simply solving a math problem. If you could see everything your opponent had played, you could calculate the best response.

But you couldn't.

You had to make decisions with incomplete information. Maybe that room is heavily defended. Maybe your opponent expects you to think it's heavily defended. Maybe they've sacrificed that room so they can concentrate somewhere else. Maybe you're about to discover that the character you thought was perfectly positioned has walked into exactly the wrong monster.

You don't know. Then the room is revealed. That's where MMM found another important part of its personality:

Surprise.
The uncertainty creates tension without requiring a die roll. The game doesn't need a random number to tell you whether your plan worked. Your opponent provides the uncertainty.

Randomness Without Dice
We deliberately wanted MMM to work without dice. That doesn't mean we wanted everything to be predictable. Those are very different things. Dice create uncertainty by generating a result neither player controls.

Hidden information creates uncertainty because another person controls information you don't have. That's a very different experience. You aren't wondering: “What number am I going to roll?” You're wondering: “What did they put in that room?” That question is much more personal. You're not playing against probability. You're playing against somebody sitting across the table, and they're trying to figure you out at exactly the same time.

More Cards Aren't Always More Game
There's a temptation when designing card games to keep adding cards.

More characters. More monsters. More equipment. More combinations. More variety must mean more replayability, right? Not necessarily.

A large deck can actually make strategy harder to develop because players don't see individual cards frequently enough to learn how they interact. MMM's relatively small decks turned out to be an advantage. You begin to recognize the cards. You remember what they can do.

You also know something else: the cards in your hand aren't in your opponent's hand.

That turns your own cards into information about theirs. If you're holding a particular character, monster, or effect, you know your opponent can't be planning around that same card. As you learn the deck, what you're holding—and what has already been played—starts narrowing down what could be waiting for you in those unrevealed rooms.

You still don't know what your opponent has done. But you can make an educated guess. And, of course, your opponent is looking at their cards and doing exactly the same thing to you.

That makes the small deck part of the strategy rather than a limitation. The better you know the game, the more information you can squeeze out of every card you see, and every card you don't see. And because you know what's possible, you can start thinking about what your opponent might be planning.

That knowledge doesn't eliminate surprise. It makes the surprise better. If there are 500 possible cards, almost anything can appear. If there are a relatively small number of possibilities, you can actually try to anticipate them.

“I know what they could have put in there...”
Now you have a decision. Small decks also help MMM accomplish its original purpose. There isn't an enormous box. There aren't hundreds of cards to organize. There isn't a twenty-minute setup. Get it out. Play.

The Game Before the Game Became a Game
There's something amusing about all of this. Monsters, Magic & Mayhem started as something to do while waiting to play something else.

It didn't need to be ambitious. It just needed to fill that awkward period when some people were setting up and everyone else was waiting. The first version accomplished that.

Then we played it. And we liked it. So we changed something. Then we played it again. And changed something else.

Strength gave us competition. Card effects gave us strategy. Hidden placement gave us uncertainty, bluffing, and surprise. Small decks made learning the cards possible and helped turn that knowledge into part of the game. None of those changes required MMM to abandon the original idea.

It stayed quick. It stayed compact. It stayed dice-free. We didn't make it better by simply making it bigger.

We made the pieces we already had matter more.
That's probably the most important thing Monsters, Magic & Mayhem taught us during its development. A game doesn't necessarily need more rules, more components, more cards, or more time to become deeper. Sometimes it just needs to give players more interesting decisions with what is already there.

Monsters, Magic & Mayhem started as the game you could play while waiting for the game. Somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened.

We stopped waiting for the other game.