Richard Garfield

Early life and family

Garfield was born in Philadelphia, and spent his childhood in many locations throughout the world as a result of his father's work in architecture. His family eventually settled in Oregon when he was twelve. Garfield is the great-great-grandson of U.S. President James A. Garfield, and his great-uncle invented the paper clip. He is also the nephew of Fay Jones, who, already an established artist, illustrated one Magic card for him.

While always having an interest in puzzles and games, his passion for games began when he was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons.

Garfield designed his first game when he was 13.

Education and career

In 1985, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer mathematics. He joined Bell Laboratories, then decided to continue his education and attended the University of Pennsylvania, and studied combinatorial mathematics.

While searching for a publisher for RoboRally, which he designed in 1985, Wizards of the Coast began talking to Garfield through Mike Davis, but the game looked too expensive for a new company like Wizards to produce. Peter Adkison of Wizards of the Coast expressed interest in a fast-playing game with minimal equipment, something that would be popular at a game convention. Adkison asked Garfield to develop a game that was cheaper to produce than RoboRally, that might be more portable and even easy to carry around to conventions; Garfield did have an idea about combining baseball cards with a card game and began turning that rough idea into a complete game over the next week. Garfield built on older prototypes of games that dated back to at least 1982, when he had created a Cosmic Encounter-inspired card game called "Five Magics". Garfield thus combined ideas from two previous games to invent the first trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. At first, Garfield and Adkison called the game "Manaclash", and worked on the game during Palladium's lawsuit against Wizards, protecting the game's intellectual property under a shell company called Garfield Games. Garfield began designing Magic as a Penn graduate student. A group of playtesters, comprising mostly fellow Penn students, formed around the developing game.

Garfield studied under Herbert Wilf and earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics from Penn in 1993. His thesis was The distribution of the binomial coefficients modulo p. He became a professor of mathematics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Magic: The Gathering launched in 1993. Playtesters began independently developing expansion packs, which were then passed to Garfield to edit. Garfield left academia to join Wizards of the Coast as a full-time game designer in June 1994. Garfield managed the hit game wisely, balancing player experience with business needs and allowing other designers to contribute creatively to the game. With his direction, Wizards established a robust tournament system for Magic, something that was new to hobby gaming.

Wizards finally published Garfield's RoboRally in 1994. Wizards published Garfield's Vampire: The Masquerade-based CCF Jyhad in 1994, but changed the name to Vampire: The Eternal Struggle in 1995 to avoid offending Muslims. Netrunner (1996) was Garfield's CCG based on Cyberpunk 2020, where he included an element that made it an entirely asymmetrical game, with the two players having different cards, abilities, and goals. Wizards published the BattleTech Collectible Card Game (1996), based on Garfield's design. Peter Adkison was developing a Dungeons & Dragons MMORPG based on a design from Garfield and Skaff Elias, but left Wizards in December 2000 after Hasbro sold the D&D computer rights and cancelled the project.

In 1999, Garfield was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame, as was Magic. He was a primary play tester for the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition bookset, released by Wizards in 2000. He eventually left Wizards to become an independent game designer.

He still sporadically contributes to Magic: The Gathering. More recently, he has created the board games Pecking Order (2006) and Rocketville (2006). The latter was published by Avalon Hill, a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast. He has shifted more of his attention to video games, having worked on the design and development of Schizoid and Spectromancer as part of Three Donkeys LLC. He has been a game designer and consultant for companies including Electronic Arts and Microsoft.

Garfield teaches a class titled "The Characteristics of Games" at the University of Washington.

Games designed

A partial list of games designed by Garfield: