Designer Diary: Mistborn: The Deckbuilding Game

by John Clair

Callouts and Credits

I want to lead off with some callouts and credits.

As with nearly every creative endeavor, some more so than others, the creations of those who did similar things first were both informative and inspiring for the design of Mistborn: The Deckbuilding Game.

Any game with deck-building as its central premise owes a nod to the granddaddy of the genre, Donald X. Vaccarino's Dominion. Justin Gary evolved the deck-buiding genre with his game Ascension, adding in the variable card market, which in-turn showed up in many games that were informative in their own right, including Star Realms, Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game, and, most directly informative for Mistborn, Shards of Infinity.

A nod should also be sent in the direction of Richard Garfield, of course, for Magic: The Gathering as the ultimate grandpa of "rules on cards" games, but particularly in this case for King of Tokyo's elegant method of solving the "attack targeting" problem of multiplayer battle games.

Last but far from least, there is no Mistborn game without Brandon Sanderson's riveting, imaginative, and deservingly loved Mistborn book series.

As for credits, Mistborn would not be the game it is without the very talented work of the Brotherwise Games team, including but not limited to Hayden Dillard's diligent development work, Chris O'Neal's astute steering of the ship, and Johnny O'Neal's spot-on art direction of the many talented contributing artists. As ever, the many good folks who playtested Mistborn deserve noteworthy thanks. Their time, feedback, and patience through the good and bad versions along the way is an essential part of making good games.


Finding the "Added Value"

When I'm beginning work on a new game, I'm evaluating an idea based on its "added value" — does the idea justify its existence? In other words, in the scope of games that have already been published, what value does this idea add...or is it just noise?

This is a more specific question than "Are you doing something new?" or "Is your game fun?" New things are not always valuable, and valuable things are not always additive; a game may be good in its own right, but does not meaningfully differentiate its experience from other readily available games. This is, of course, subjective, but it is an important evaluation from both one's own perspective and a best-guess estimate at the likely general audience perspective.

Creating a game based on an existing, popular property, such as the Mistborn book series, has the same goal as any other game design: to create added value, to imbue the gameplay and product design with value for those who are most likely to play and/or own the game in a way that is not readily replaceable with existing games.

However, with a popular property, in many ways the property itself is contributing much of the "added" part of the equation, especially if it is the first or one of very few games for that property. (Mistborn: House War by the talented Kevin Wilson in 2017 was the first and only other current Mistborn board game.) This lifts some of the burden off the game systems to be a key source of new experience. For many fans of the books, merely playing amongst the characters, settings, and vocabulary of the Mistborn world would be a new and desirable experience, even if the functionality of the rules were entirely derivative.

That said, the stated goal from Dragonsteel (Brandon Sanderson's company) to Brotherwise to me was not merely to create a game for fans of the books, though that was an essential objective, but to create a game that would be an intriguing introduction to the Mistborn world for board gamers, some of whom would (likely) subsequently investigate the books. Therefore, in addition to my general disinclination to create an entirety derivative deck-builder, the goal itself was to be more creative than that. In a sense this article is a defense of the reasons why Mistborn is probably my most derivative game design to date — but it is also an opportunity to make the case that despite deriving much from its popular forebears in the well-established deck-building genre, the system still innovates in ways that I hope offer added value to players' gaming experience, while also expressing the theme of battling Mistborns in a way that current book fans will love and those yet to read the books will, hopefully, be inspired to do so.

I have typically had a "mechanisms-first" design approach. Inspiration often comes in the form of a component (see my prior writing on "kinetic design") or a game system that I perceive as new or narrowly-used and which has the potential to be a core element of a new value-additive game. "Mechanisms first" was true of my card-crafting games, of Space Base, Cubitos, Ready Set Bet, etc. but it is not universally the case, and more recently I've taken on several game designs based on intellectual properties, Mistborn being the second to be published, and these, definitionally, are theme-first designs. In these cases, the starting place is not to find a core system that is fresh or innovative in its own right, but one that illuminates the theme, making the theme indistinguishable from the central system and thereby making the theme itself, in a way, the thing that is innovative.


Brandon Sanderson is famous for his world building and his "hard magic systems", which are in many ways one-and-the-same. In Mistborn, certain people, called "Mistborns", are born with the ability to ingest and "burn" metal (in the "burning calories" sense) to activate magical powers. Different and very specific powers are granted based on the type of metal burned, e.g., steel, bronze, zinc, etc.

The first book in the series, which was a soft scope constraint for the base game, has eight known, useful, and common metal types and a ninth very rare and powerful one. Battles are contests of skill and cleverness in the use of these metals and the powers they grant; burn too much, and you run out of magic metal calories and can no longer use the powers of those metal types — but act too conservatively with your metal calories, and you may lose the fight and die. This was the essential experience and tension we wanted to bring to life in the game. Layered on that was the design-constraint of keeping the game accessible enough for a non-gaming crowd, i.e., book fans who are not board gamers...not yet at least. (Anyone can be, and most people should be board gamers imho.)

So that was a tricky puzzle: how to design an accessible deck-building game in which players manage nine different resource types, each with different combat and/or covert effects. One, perhaps obvious, solution was to abdicate the concept of the resources onto the theming; card names and pictures could suffice, and in-world terminology like "Steelpush" and "Ironpull" could thematically convey the metal variety, with the rules being unburdened by the need to differentiate steel, iron, zinc, copper, etc. This was an option, but not one I was compelled by. If there was going to be a method by which to make a value-additive gameplay experience deeply ingrained with the theme, from my perspective as a fan of the books, it should be in the metal management as a real and critical strategic factor.

For about two weeks after I attained the task of creating the game for Brotherwise, before thinking deeply on any other details about the game, I let this puzzle ruminate. I listened to the audiobooks. I imagined components for tracking these resources, like sliding tracks, cubes, tokens, or the cards themselves, but without the a-ha moment. I wouldn't dwell on ideas too long. Sometimes, creative solutions are best found by clearing the mind of clutter, keeping the question on the edge of thought, and letting it pop in and out of focus naturally without forcing yourself to dwell on it.

Often components are my source of inspiration, something I call "kinetic design": imagining the possible components and play-space; thinking not about which components are needed to fit the gameplay, but rather what gameplay possibilities emerge given certain components. Coins are a commonly referenced item in the books as the powers of iron and steel let Mistborns pull and push telekinetically on sources of metal, making coins a useful item and a dangerous weapon. Any half-decent Mistborn always has a pouch of coins ready for use...so at some point in my state of unforced rumination, coins presented the a-ha solution. Rather than resources in a traditional sense, with many tokens or sliding tracks to manage the nine different types, each player could get a set of coins, one for each metal type, with the idea of "resources" becoming abstracted to simply "have" or "don't have" by toggling which side of the coin is face up.


Front and back sides of all the final (top) and prototype (bottom) metal coin tokens
Inevitably, my instincts were to try to make a very non-derivative deck-builder. I rapidly went through several interesting iterations of a unique concept, resulting in a game core that I may return to at some point.


However, it had issues, and importantly I was failing to make it sufficiently accessible. I concluded that ironing out the issues of this gameplay system would likely be a longer endeavor than the timeline permitted. I reminded myself that the goal was never to create a groundbreaking card game. I was too preoccupied with the "added" half of the added-value equation and needed to step back and allow the theme to pull its weight in that regard without the "innovative gameplay" getting in its way. There was no need to reinvent the wheel in ways that the theme did not call for, so I set aside my designer ego and leaned on some of the tried-and-true deck-builder tropes when possible, while keeping at the center the thematic coin-costing mechanism and several other theme-specific aspects such as "missions".


Game Development

Originally, a coin being on the "have" side meant you could freely play any-and-all cards with that metal type for their basic ability. However, if you wanted to use a card's powerful ability, you would have to "flare" the metal, flipping the associated coin to the "don't have" side, meaning all cards of that metal type were useless until you could use a different effect to flip it back. ("Flare" is a term from the books meaning to "burn" the metal extra hard, rapidly depleting the magic calories but creating a bigger effect.)

Unfortunately, this resulted in too many unfun turns in which players would end up with dead cards in their hands or the feeling that they could never risk flaring. More flexibility was needed, and that's where the idea of dual-use cards arose, allowing players to use cards for metal instead of for their normal effects.

Along with this addition was a change to metal coins, which were still on/off togglers, but could each now be used to activate only a single card per turn. To play multiple cards of the same metal type in a single turn, additional cards, used as metals, would be required. This was the first version of the game I presented to the brothers of Brotherwise, and, while there were subsequent substantive changes, this version is greatly reflected in the final product.


I further developed the game for several months. Over that time, I joined the bothers on a trip to Salt Lake City to teach and playtest the game with Brandon Sanderson. As an experienced gamer himself, in particular a Magic: The Gathering fan, he had some pointed and actionable feedback. Happily though, he really liked the game and, as I recall, described it as a "home run" that succeeded in capturing the feeling of being a Mistborn, strategically burning metals, pursing missions, and battling other Mistborn.



Eventually, Chris and Hayden, the internal board game designers/developers at Brotherwise took the reins. Their big task was to identify, polish, and/or cut the elements that were keeping the game too complex. There were a number of minor rule changes like altering the way off-turn response effects work (i.e., "Cloud" and "Sense"), a lot of card balance adjustments, and one big change to the "how to win" rules. In my final hand-off version, completing your missions was the only way to win, while combat points were a way to counteract opponents' allies (which they still are) but also to slow down or trigger fail conditions on your opponent's missions, which would in turn boost your own mission progress.

I liked my system and felt it worked thematically, but Chris and Hayden found combat as an "anti-mission" currency to be too unintuitive for many playtesters; they preferred

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