Torre Belem is CC BY-SA 3.0 by Alvesgaspar, hosted by Wikimedia Commons

The Wizard’s Tower, that is. Wizard’s Tower is one of two new games which we are debuting at Metatopia this year. In Wizard’s Tower, you play the wizard’s somewhat lax house-sitters, frantically trying to fix the tower’s accumulated problems before the wizard comes home.

I don’t see a lot of chat about the failed games in conversations about game design. I’m talking about all the games that we try and that don’t make it into production, or even into playtest. In a sense, Wizard’s Tower exists because several other games don’t.

It began with a very wet Saturday when someone somewhere had issued a 24-hour game design challenge. We spent the day designing a storytelling game called Wild Magic. Wild Magic had a fairly clear game loop at the start, but its play relied heavily on the prompts and challenges. Prompts that were evocative and humorous kept our interest and made for good play, but writing them took time and revisions. Wild Magic went through six iterations, including my favorite twisted tribute to the Household Tales, before we stumbled on two branching games: Wizard’s Kitchen and Secret Ingredient, both card games. Those two games went through a couple of iterations each before Secret Ingredient morphed into Spell.

Spell is Key to the Kingdom meets Once Upon a Time with a wild magic table. It’s worth making, but other games were coming together faster, so they jumped the line. That’s how Dragon Hatch and Nebula were born. In the meantime, Wizard’s Kitchen felt too narrow. We needed to broaden its outlook. What trouble could our Players get into if they had access to more than just the kitchen? Wizard’s Tower was born.

Wizard’s Tower then went through several iterations before our core game loop hit our target for game length, speed of play, and thematic feel. The game conceit changed from characters who were building a Wizard’s Tower (without training or permits) to characters who were house-sitting. We tested the core loop with a few rooms and challenges until we groaned at the thought of another game. At that point, it was October 2023. It was time to decide which games to bring to Metatopia. We decided on Dragon Hatch and Nebula.

Wizard’s Tower took a back seat until September 2024. At that point, while we were still working on Dragon Hatch and Nebula, we had the time to brainstorm new games and take small steps on half-baked ones. We dusted the cobwebs off Wizard’s Tower and gave it a hard look. It was promising. We stepped into what is probably my favorite part of playtesting: for each mechanic, ask yourself, “Is it fun? Is it adding something important to the game?” If the answers to both are “No,” cut it. We cut Wizard’s Tower to the bone, and then played it. The core game loop involves facing bizarre, occult, and occasionally ridiculous challenges that are specific to each room. In this iteration, game play was too predictable, and worst of all, we didn’t have a solid losing condition.

Back to the drawing board! We were, of course, drawing inspiration from years of dungeon delves in a variety of role-playing systems. In those games, there’s one very obvious losing condition: the Dreaded TPK (total party kill). With a flick of our magic wands, we endowed our Characters with Health Points. They were mortal now. They could be killed.

Drunk with power, we took another look. The rooms themselves were feeling a little bland. So, I designed a series of eighteen room effects, one unique effect for each room. Some affect the storytelling, some affect the mechanics. Hopefully, all are fun to play. Certainly, all of them add to the flavor and difficulty of the individual rooms.

Finally, it was time to take on the final challenge: the Magical Mishaps deck. Magical Mishaps appear in the first iteration of Wizard’s Tower. They felt like the natural outcome of meddling with Things Wizards Were Not Meant to Know But Got Up to Anyway. Up to this point in the game design process, we didn’t have an actual Magical Mishaps deck, only an IOU. I was also feeling tense about the quality of the room challenges again—for like the fourteenth time, I admit it. I workshopped challenges for days at BigBadCon while firmly ignoring the entire Magical Mishaps issue.

That brings us to Tuesday. Yes, seriously, this Tuesday. We are totally committed to bringing Wizard’s Tower to Metatopia, and we absolutely needed a Magical Mishaps deck. Ack!

The great, the really great thing, about having games that you rejected, games that you put on the back burner, games that went part-way or nowhere or are just biding their time, is that nothing is ever wasted. Back what seems like a hundred years ago, I designed a Wild Magic deck for one of the iterations of Wizard’s Kitchen. While the deck focused on strange things to do with ingredient cards, the titles were solid inspiration for Magical Mishaps. As of this moment, we have 17 Mishaps and a quite realizable goal of generating 25 before Metatopia.

So, when you find us at Metatopia this year, you’ll find us with Dragon Hatch, Wizard’s Tower, and another game that I will talk about a bit later. You won’t find Wild Magic, or Secret Ingredient, or Spell, or Wizard’s Kitchen. But when you see Wizard’s Tower, remember: it was one of 5 games. It was just the one that made it this far.

Someday, I’ll pitch a panel on Failed Games to BigBadCon. I think all of us could use a reminder now and then that the games that get weeded out are the compost for the games that make it.