“There were some versions where you collected victory points to win,” he recalled, “and some versions where you wiped out your opponents.” Garfield never considered Five Magics publishable and, because of constant tinkering, he never played it the same way twice.
The colors shifted around, but, eventually, red aggression came from mountains, black ambition from swamps, blue rumination from islands, white orderliness from plains, and green growth from forests. He granted elemental characteristics to five distinct colors of energy that arose, as in many other fantasy games of the period, from different geographies. Garfield himself made a game called Five Magics. Titan had players commanding an army of mythological creatures like centaurs and griffons to attack the other players’ titans. Wiz-War had wizards hurling fireballs at each other in a maze. The ideas that bubbled up in the following decade flowed in a similar direction.
manuals all went out to make their own games. Like the misfit musicians who bought the Velvet Underground’s first album, the young kids of the seventies who pored over the first set of D. “The game was very hard to learn from the rules, which is something it shares with Magic, I guess, but its brilliance shone through.”
The books themselves “were dreadfully written,” he said. “It puts players in the position of game designers,” Garfield told me. Players would collectively tell a story about their characters wielding enchanted swords or picking locks, with dice rolls deciding many of the consequences. manuals finally arrived, he was astonished to discover that you could keep playing the game indefinitely.
“You could move around the map and go into different rooms and then there would be monsters in these rooms.” You could also “win” in Garfield’s version. “It was more like a Clue board,” he recalled. A lack of language had never stopped him before he made something up.
Back in the United States, around the age of thirteen, he began to hear about a game called Dungeons & Dragons-he was told that it had pit traps and orcs and treasure-but his local game store didn’t have the rulebooks yet, and none of his classmates knew how to play. Garfield didn’t speak Bengali or Nepali, so, to make friends, he would unpack a deck of cards or spill out a bag of marbles. Before his family settled in Oregon, in the mid-seventies, he spent many of his early years in Bangladesh and Nepal, places where his father worked as an architect. In his youth, Richard Garfield, the mathematician who created Magic: The Gathering, liked to play and invent games.