Is this why Civilization does not Compress?
Part I — A Dull Month in the (Magic) Realm
At the Gathering I played a dull game of Magic Realm.
After my prior game (at HeavyCon) I wrote “What makes Magic Realm so Intriguing,” which apparently induced the universe to conspire to make my next game …. relatively boring.
Things happened (someone played the Witch King! Well!), but it was a month of frustration1. The map looked fine, but many of the treasure chits appeared in the Sphincter end of the Realm …. deep in caves with only one way in or out. Almost half the treasure tiles (and — therefore — Boss Monsters) on a single tile that cut your actions in half, and not even “right at the entrance.”
The Berserker died twice — once to bats and once to a “typical bad luck” goblin attack.2 So … things happened, but as a story it was unimpressive. (Later the Witch King absorbed a Dragon’s Essence which cleared out the bat problem and let the Berserker, Witch King and Wood’s Girl loot the single treasure in the deep woods, but … meh).
I was the Druid3 and staked most of my chances on finding the Pool. (Since I had picked “Control Octopus or Spider” as one of my spells). After discovering “The Sphincter” I ran to one of the two remaining tiles that could have been the Pool and for once got lucky … but the Pool was also deep underground. So … clearing out the octopus took a week or so instead of two days.
I found some treasure, and the month ended. The Berserker did finally stumble onto four decent battles (Trolls) instead of the unwinnable ones she’d encountered, so there was some redemption. The end.
Part II — Reflection
There were winners (the Witch King and Berserkers) and losers (the other five of us), but there weren’t any great stories. I mean, the prior game saw the wood girl lugging around a tremendous chest (treasure chest) and dropping dragons, the prior game started off with a massive bar fight and fireball-o-rama and this game was a thing that probably happened.
Thinking about winning and losing … it helps to change genres. If you win via Scholars Mate in Chess, that might be impressive to a novice, but it’s not going to get written up. The “great games” have drama and a back and forth. The 100 best chess games are mostly between grandmasters (probably super GMs) and have a flow. Winning on turn four? It’s a win, but whatever.
I was watching a video on the great space battles of TV and I agreed with their #1 choice (The Battle of New Caprica from Battlestar Galactica) but if you just watched the battle you’d go “Eh, it’s ok” or possibly just “I don’t get it.” That’s because you’ve missed the stakes. BSG is a notoriously dark show, with the main characters getting hammered repeatedly, so any victory would be stunning …. but the world had also set up expectations and precedents and when they were …. bent in a logical but improbable way, that was a “Wow!” moment.
In short, the build up matters. Streaming’s trend of “Drop a season at once and binge” is nice, but sometimes the dramatic cliffhanger and week (or months) pause really does add to the flavor.4
Part III — Synthesis
So — putting it all together — you need to a) set expectations and give people a framework that is both understandable but still leaves room for surprises, and b) build up to tension to make the release awesome.
And there’s no suspense if an explosion is guaranteed. Sometimes you just play the slow-boring- slugathon-grind it out joyless victory (or loss). For every chess game with a brilliancy, there are hundreds or thousands decided by blunders. If Magic Realm had the same ratio, it would be terrible, but it seems to still have many more “Wows” than “Mehs,” at least for me.
But I think there is something to the formula, and it captures a bit of why “Civilization does not compress” and why longer games often generate better narratives. It isn’t that the length is required for narratives, but that some narratives — like wine — require time to breath. Or it may be that the longer games provide more opportunities (or combinations) …. like strolling past a much larger collection of random wines you are more likely to discover something unexpected (as well as corked atrocities).
Something to consider.
Update — Eric Brosius wrote up a detailed description of this game in his GoF ’25 writeup.
- The mere fact that six players, including 3 with at most one prior game managed to play the full month in ~6 hours is testament to that. Our prior games often only got through two weeks with a longer playtime.
︎ - In order to die the second time, the Berserker had to a) fail a die roll (11/36), during a goblin day (1/6) and move after another specific character (1/2). ︎
- A tough character in a big game, because the main ability is to avoid summoning monsters from sound and warning chits, but that doesn’t matter if other people are summoning them because they are in the same hex. ︎
- I remember in college all the Sci-Fi geeks & writing majors spent hours and days arguing how they would resolve the Next Generation’s Best of Both Worlds Cliffhanger. ︎