7 Political Multiplayer Formats for Magic: the Gathering – Part Two (Bang!, Throne, The Dark Melee & Octant)

Bang! Magic

Number of Players: 4-7 (More, with rules adjustments)
Prep Time: Quickish
Rules Baggage: Medium
Speed Compared to Cutthroat: Faster
Skill or Casual: More Skill
Political: Complicated

Take the political complications of Bang! and overlay it onto a game of Magic: the Gathering.  What’s that?  You never heard of Bang!?  Bang!’s got a pile of awards, including the Origin Awards 2003 winner for Best Traditional Card Game.  It’s funny how a card game can be so popular that it spawns six expansions, four unofficial expansions and a dice game, yet still not be recognizable to the public at large.  Do yourself a favor: If you never played Bang!, seek out a copy.  Here’s some reviews (Its also the first game I ever wrote a review for, though you’ll excuse me if I don’t link to it.  The other reviews are much better.)

The rules, in short, for a five player game of Bang! Magic:  Before the game begins, get a Plains, an Island, two Swamps and a Mountain.  Shuffle them together, and pass one out to each player, face down.  Players then look at their role card, and the player with the Plains reveals it.  That player is the Sheriff, who begins the game (often with more cards, and more life than the other players.  I suggest five life for each other player, and a card for every two other players.  Season to taste.)

The players with Swamps are Outlaws.  The Outlaws wins the game if the Sheriff is dead.  The person with the Island, however, is the Deputy.  Both the Sheriff and the Deputy win the game if all the Outlaws and Renegades are dead.  Who’s the Renegade?  The Renegade holds the Mountain.  He or she needs to kill everyone except the Sheriff, then kill the Sheriff in order to win.  It’s a tough job, but it’s a linchpin in how the game operates.  Whenever it looks like one side might be winning, the Renegade will switch sides and shut down the operation.

This would all go much easier for the Deputy if he could show his card to the Sheriff.  But, unless the Outlaws got a fast start, all the players will claim they’re the Deputy, bringing Outlaws and Renegades to justice.  The Sheriff should seek to keep all other players in a stranglehold.  After all, the Sheriff’s only got one friend at the table, and three enemies.  That said, a Sheriff who kills without provocation is a fool.  Not only is the Deputy the Sheriff’s only ally at the table, but the penalty for killing the Deputy is steep: Discard your hand.  Close calls might be worth the risk, however.  Any player who kills an Outlaw (even if its another Outlaw) draws three cards.

I can’t find any one writer on the internet who’s perfectly defined the rules for this format (though this forum post at mtgsalvation.com sums it up concisely, and this longer one picked up a lot more traction with responses.)  Part of the reason why establish writers shy away from Bang! Magic, I think, is because the people who are playing Bang! Magic are already familiar with the game of Bang!, and think you should just buy a copy of that game and adapt the rules.  I can also understand why major Magic websites would balk at recreating the rules of a published game.  If you’re curious, though, The rules for Bang! are free for anyone to read on the internet, and they include a few extra nuggets, like how to scale the game up to seven players.

I should also point out that Adam Styborski also… um… simplified and rewrote these rules to be more Magic generic (It’s the second format on the page I linked to, called Usurpers, below the rules for Assassins.)  Many readers pointed out to Adam that the rules he posted was a reinterpretation of one of the best selling traditional card games of all time.  Adam claimed ignorance.  In the original article, after all, he did say the rules were explained to him by a friend.  He just thought his friend made the rules up himself.  Whoops.

Throne Magic

Number of Players: 4+
Prep Time: Moderate to High
Rules Baggage: Heavy
Speed Compared to Cutthroat: Similar
Skill or Casual: Skill
Political: Devilish

Do you like secret roles?  I got your secret roles right here.  Throne Magic spins off Bang! and lightly touches Game of Thrones, adding further roles and multiple layers of complexity.  At the beginning of the game, Role Cards are randomly passed out, face down.  Then, the player with the King flips over his/her Role Card, claims the Throne (and, possibly, some Holdings) and begins the game.

What is the Throne, and what are these Holdings?  Here, let me show you the Throne of the Ancient King as an example:

Thrones and Holdings are beneficial cards that hang out in the command zone, but can be attacked as if they were a Planeswalker controlled by the Throne or Holding’s controller.  If a player successfully deals combat damage to a Holding, then they gain control of it.  If they deal combat damage to the Throne, though, no one controls it, and it moves to the center of the table.  On the King’s turn, he or she may attack the Throne to get it back.  No one can block for an uncontrolled Throne, but since the Throne triggers during the upkeep, in this scenario, the King effectively lost the Throne’s benefit for a turn.  If, however, the attacker is a Claimant (such as the Usurper, or the Ogre King), that player may reveal their Role Card when they deal combat damage to the Throne and gain control of it for themselves.

There’s more.  Much more, including rules for passing creatures back and forth, four Seasons which change between player turns, seventeen possible Roles, seven possible Thrones, nineteen Holdings, and rules for drafting which cards players will play with in any one particular game.  For some reason, Magiclampoon.com, the site where Throne Magic was originally hosted, is falling apart.  They haven’t posted a new article since February 2013, and that November most of the website went blank.  Thankfully, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine saved the rules to Throne Magic, and all nine articles which spawned that rules set.  In the comments section, when Throne Magic was first introduced, one reader made the disparaging comment that “Wizards will probably steal this.”  I sure hope they do.  Now that Throne Magic is no longer being developed by Magiclampoon, it would be great to see Wizards collaborate with the format’s creators and spread their ideas to a wider audience.

The Dark Melee

Number of Players: 3+ (Technically, 7 or more.  But no one’s looking.)
Prep Time: None
Rules Baggage: Mild
Speed Compared to Cutthroat: A little faster?
Skill or Casual: Both
Political: Shenanigans

Heretics, dark magics and evil curses.  Let’s return to 1994, a time when decadence ruled in Babylon 5, a show about… space diplomacy… which pierced the terrible veil of our televisions.  A time when the dark powers of the Acropolis featured the… magical sounds… of Yanni’s pan flute.  And where, exactly did Carmen Sandiego go?  Welcome to The Dark!

Oh forget it.  Let’s face it:  1994 wanted to be punk-goth, but it didn’t know how to do it.  Probably because, like The Dark, there wasn’t a real focus.  “We’re scary, because we say so” doesn’t work for youth culture, and it didn’t work for Magic, either.  Mostly, if you take away the occasionally creepy (occasionally goofy) artwork, you’re left with a pile of spells that forced you to lose life and sacrifice permanents.  And, since most people didn’t want to do that, most people didn’t play most cards from The Dark.  Good Magic design had a long way to go.

That said, one of the better things to pop out of The Dark may not have been a card, but a format.  Will Chase, in InQuest Magazine, took the concept of sacrifice and bargaining to the players.  In The Dark Melee, any player can call a bounty on another player’s head.  From that point on, if that cursed player died, the player who killed him would gain an amount of life equal to the bounty.  Foul magic, however, comes with a price.  The player who set the original bounty on a player’s head also loses half the amount claimed, rounded down.  If, when a player with a bounty died, and the original claimant’s life total was less than half the bounty… well, let’s just say that slaying one person in The Dark Melee could result in a cascade of finalized contracts.

There are other rules.  In theory, you’re supposed to play with seven or more people.  But really, that’s just an excuse to extend the original article into an explanation of how to play Grand Melee.  There’s no real reason for the rules of Grand Melee if you don’t want to use them.  I’m sure claiming bounties is more fun with more people at the table, but that doesn’t mean dark favors don’t listen to indicting whispers in a four player game.

The other rules snag is that players are supposed to play with cards from Revised and The Dark only.  Yeah.  While that sounds interesting, it’s impractical post-Millennium.   You can choose to ignore that rule, or, if you want something similar, enforce that players must build decks from Magic sets with a horror or decline theme to them.  By my count, that’s Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires, Ice Age, Apocalypse, Shadowmoor, Eventide, Innistrad and New Phyrexia, or any card that includes the word ‘Phyrexian’.  Feel free to be strict about the sets, but loose with the flavor, or be loose with the sets, but strict with the flavor.

The Angry Gamer from ‘I Remember Banding’ adds his own perspective on the format, and includes screen shots of InQuest magazine as well.  If your group allows it, feel free to be creative with the bounties, too.  “Anyone who kills this traitor can draw four cards!” makes a good bounty.  Make sure you have two cards to discard, though.  You don’t want to cross the collector.

Octant

Number of Players: 8
Prep Time: Quick (Though, wrapping everyone’s head around the concept takes time)
Rules Baggage: Heady
Speed Compared to Cutthroat: Slower
Skill or Casual: Skill
Political: Tricksy

In Octant, eight wizards sit on eight corners of a cube–bear with me now–striking along the cube’s seams.  Each Wizard only has access to the other three wizards they can ‘see’ along the edges of the cube.  Whenever a wizard defeats another, that wizard may choose to stay where they are, move to the defeated wizard’s corner, or straddle both corners, increasing their threat range.  From that point on, as long as a corner remains open, any wizard who can see that corner may move to it on their turn, or take up the space of both corners.  Play until only one wizard remains.

The geometry of the game is cool, but impractical.  I mean, you could program this as a computer game… and it would work, too, as long as the game designer made the menu system practical and responsive.  But the game isn’t practical in real life without anti-grav, or some sort of two-storied glass gameroom contraption.  That’s why we need to cheat to make the system work.  Let’s say that four players sat on top of a cube, and were arranged like this:

These four players can only ‘see’ along the cube’s seams.  So Player A could only attack and target Player B and Player D.  With me so far?  Good.  Now pretend the bottom of the cube is using the same four letters:

Once again, Player A can only attack Player B and Player D.  But they can attack one other player: the other Player A.  The same is true for the other players.  The top Player B can attack the bottom player B.  And so on.  Now that we’ve got this idea in your head, let’s separate the cube into two layers, and set the layers side by side, and push the two layers together.

The same targeting rules still apply.  Both Player As can target their table’s Player D and Player B, and the other table’s Player A.  If Player A kills the other Player A (for example), that player can stay in their seat, move to the other Player A’s table, or take up both spaces simultaneously.

Octant was first designed by Anthony Alongi, in an article where he picked up a dictionary and designed a bunch of Magic formats based on the words his finger happened to graze across.  Of the four formats he came up with, people really took to Octant.  So much so, that he wrote a follow up two weeks later, that includes an excellent map that you should take a look at before trying out the format.  A year and a half later, Alongi followed up with yet another article on Octant strategy.

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