I Invented Planechase First August 10, 2009
Posted by James in : all, planechase , trackback
We finally got the rules for playing Planechase, a new way to play Magic a little bit like Chaos Magic. You roll dice to try to activate a special card (Enchant World) and only one special card can be activated at a time. This is exactly what Nightmare Magic was, a game I invented about 10 years ago.
There were a few differences:
- Nightmare Magic uses “Nightmare” cards instead of “Plane” cards. (My design was inspired by Knightmare Chess.)
- You activate Nightmare cards at the beginning of your turn and it didn’t cost mana to activate them.
- You couldn’t attempt to activate Nightmare cards over and over.
- Nightmare cards only had one ability rather than two.
See the complete list of rules for Nightmare Magic and cards here.
I featured Nightmare Magic on a Geocities website in 2003, and it is still there. I think it was also featured on dragon-warrior.com for a while.
Comments»
This is what I said when they made the announcement. The official rules just confirm it.
Public domain theft no Jutsu!
Believe it!
Right, I probably should have said something about the possibility earlier.
Isn’t it planechase? Also, I assume if you design enough magic stuff, something they come up with will inevitably be similar to something you come up with.
[…] Planechase is the new informal way to play Magic. You get a free Plane card in play. It is supposed to be a location that the players are at, and it functions as an enchant wold. Players can roll dice to try to change the plane or get the triggered ability of the plane. It is a lot like Nightmare Magic, a way to play Magic I invented some time ago. […]
I think the earliest example of Planechase was in a 1999 issue of Inquest Gamer. In it you used a map and each bordered area (territory) of the map affected the game somehow. Players (preferably 3-5) would play a game of chaos magic with these new rules and whoever won gained control of that territory and chose the next (bordering) territory to fight on. The winner was whoever was the first to have three bordering terrains. If the territory was already controlled by a player, that player would start the game with 40 life.
It’s easy to make at home. Just get a piece of posterboard and draw a map with 12-20 territories. Get some 3×5 note cards and write different effects to the game on each one. (My favorite involves revealing the top card of your library during your upkeep and being forced to play it at 0 cost). Choose a territory to start at random and randomly reveal a 3×5 note card. That card is assigned to the territory and is how all future games in that territory is played. Use tokens of some kind, such as different coins or miniatures (way cool if everybody has theme decks) to show who controls that territory. First to control 3 bordering territories wins.