What Playtesting Changed in Monsters, Magic & Mayhem
Every game has a worst playtest. Ours had a very specific shape: a player looked at their opening hand, looked up, and said, “I don’t have a single spellcaster.”
What followed was a long, lopsided evening. Not because anyone played badly - because the game had already been decided by the shuffle, before a single card hit the table.
That night gave us the Spell Check rule: if you open with no spellcasters, you exchange your spells once from the leftover deck. It isn’t the most exciting rule in Monsters, Magic & Mayhem. It’s probably the most important one, because it encodes the first thing playtesting taught us:
Nobody Should Lose Before the Game Starts
A game can be full of brilliant decisions and still fail if the first five minutes feel unfair. The opening hand is a promise - you have a chance - and we decided that promise was non-negotiable. If the shuffle breaks it, the rules repair it. Once. Quickly. Then play.
That principle quietly shaped everything after it. Whenever something in testing felt like a loss before the game began, we treated it as a defect, not a feature.
Every Scary Thing Needs an Answer, Not a Ban
Then there was the thief. In an early version, a thief working alone could steal a room’s contents, full stop - and for a while, losing a room you’d clearly won felt terrible. The obvious fix was to weaken the thief. Instead, playtesting gave us a better one: the monk. A monk in the room stops the thief cold.
That started a pattern we didn’t plan but came to love. The wizard frightens orks right out of the battle - until a dragon shows up and frightens the wizard. Zombies remove the monk from a party. The swordsman doubles his strength against monsters, and the orks double theirs whenever anyone in the room uses a magic item. For everything scary, there’s something that isn’t scared of it.
We could have solved each of these by sanding the scary thing down. Instead we printed answers. Answers are better than bans, because an answer is itself a decision: do I bring the monk, or do I bet they won’t bring the thief? The small deck stays small, and the game gets deeper without getting bigger.
Three Rooms, One Game
Playtesting also taught us that the rooms were never three separate games. The fusilier can fire into an unresolved room - across the table, into a fight that hasn’t happened yet. Placement can spread across one, two, or all three rooms. Characters can’t mix with monsters, but creatures can join either side, so every room’s composition is a statement about the other two.
The moment players started treating the whole table as one puzzle instead of three little ones, MMM changed. Battles stopped being math problems and started being commitments - I’m winning here because I’m losing there, and I need you to not notice which is which.
The Threat Is a Piece
And then there were the spells nobody cast.
The rules say spells may be kept in hand and used as needed - or not at all. In testing, “not at all” turned out to be doing enormous work. An unplayed Panic Attack makes every weak card your opponent commits feel exposed - the weakest foe doesn’t just lose the battle, it flees it, taking its Strength and its abilities with it. An unplayed Gold Loss poisons every room you’re winning: take the room, and the treasure might be cut in half anyway. Your opponent has to wonder, in all three rooms at once, which of the four spells you’re holding - and play around all of them.
Playtesting taught us that hidden information isn’t just about the rooms. It’s about hands. The card you never play can win the room you never fight for.
The Game the Players Found
Here’s the thing none of us expected: we kept bringing MMM to game night as the thing to play while waiting, and people kept… not waiting. They’d finish a game and immediately shuffle for another. The filler became the event.
Playtesting didn’t just fix Monsters, Magic & Mayhem. It told us what it was. We thought we were making something to fill ten minutes. The players showed us we’d made something worth choosing.
We stopped designing the game we imagined and started serving the game they were actually playing. That’s the whole job, really. Everything else is just cards.
Next from the Engine Room
A game also has to know when to stop. Next time: When Should a Game End?