So there is a significant problem with making a pure Grand Melee formats in Mage Wars: movement and seating arrangements. If everyone is using one giant board, then there will be areas that a player can't reach with their arms, so is physically incapable of moving any of their cards to a zone that far away. Then you get the issue of people having to stand up and walk to where they want to move their cards. If anyone is taking simultaneous turns, this is going to cause a lot of problems with a large fraction of the participants getting up and moving to another seat, or having to stay standing when they get there because that seat is already occupied.
Ideally for a Grand Melee format we would have one giant game board and players could move their creatures and cast spells anywhere within legal range. This is what would make it a true free-for-all. With the limits of seating arrangements, each player can only play against up to 2 opponents at a time with square zones, and with cubic zones and a max of 4 height markers the reasonable limit increases to 3, where two of your opponents start 5 zones away from you and one of them starts 6 zones away from you.
To further complicate the Grand Melee conundrum, there is the issue of starting zones. If everyone starts on the outside, there will be less incentive to get to the middle of the board early on, since that makes players vulnerable from many different directions. But if anyone starts in the middle with no Arena walls to protect them, they'll also be at a big disadvantage.
It also might be important to note that a true, "pure" free for all might not be fair, since if one mage is being ganged up on by 5, and another one is being left completely alone, the mage that's fighting against five opponents is a lot more likely to lose. It's hardly an equal test of skill when you and your opponents aren't playing against the same number of people at a time. And while the psychological components can play a decent role in the number of opponents who you are facing at once, the starting positions will probably play quite a significant role in that too.
Even in Magic the Gathering Grand Melee format, there was a concept called Range of Influence, where you could only cast spells or attack enemy planeswalkers sitting directly to your left and right. Unfortunately, this is a poor mechanic to implement in Mage Wars Grand Melee. The reason of course is movement. If you try to implement a range of influence in Mage Wars, it causes both thematic and mechanical inconsistency. The question at the center of this part of the problem is this: Should Range of Influence be measured in seats or zones? If you measure it in seats, what does that mean on the game board? It would mean that you can only interact with spells and objects controlled by yourself or an opponent sitting next to you. So if you move a creature into the same zone as a creature controlled by an opponent sitting two seats away, those creatures would completely ignore each other.
However, if you measured range of influence by zones like say, not being able to move more than 5 zones away from your starting location, then a creature could theoretically move within range of an enemy object and not be able to interact with that object because of the Mage's range of influence. And if not, then if a mage summons a creature on the very edge of their range of influence, the creature's range of influence could be different from the mage's. And why would you not be able to move a creature into a zone to attack the creature there, but not be able to use a ranged attack either. All those invisible barriers that only apply to certain individual mages or creature they control is mechanically and thematically awkward, and it really just doesn't make sense. And if range of influence is measured with all creatures and not just mages, then we get the "out of your arm's reach" problem again.
Furthermore, you would have to make completely sure that everyone was using different card sleeves from everyone else so that no one gets confused about who controls what. The best way to solve this problem would be to require everyone to use card sleeves with their own unique avatar sticker on the front and back. You couldn't use your name because that would cover to much of the card in many cases, and mere initials aren't unique enough.
So, let's recap the obstacles to Mage Wars Grand Melee:
#1. Arm length and seating arrangements limit the movement of cards across the game board. And even if they didn't, scattering the cards you own across a giant board with thirty to a hundred people is going to make clean up after the game the most painstakingly long and difficult process imaginable.
#2. Those who start on walls have an advantage over those who start in the middle of the board, and the number of opponents each player faces at a time is likely to be unequal because of more than just psychological tactics. This could be solved by using the mechanic of height markers to make the arena 3x4x4 and keeping some of the walls between arena boards as starting corners for the mages but leaving some out so that there is a two-zone "gateway" on the border between every two boards. The walls make it less likely that you will engage much more than 3 opponents at a time, but players will still have the choice to move objects they control to other boards with a normal move action so they don't necessarily have to constantly face the same opponents until those opponents are eliminated. However, this requires that a solution to #1 above is found.
#3. Recognizing which cards are yours. A solution to this would be to have all players put an avatar sticker unique to them on both sides of all their cards sleeves.
Even with all this, #1 is the biggest problem. Arm length and seating arrangements limit the movement of cards across the game board. And even if they didn't, scattering the cards you own across a giant board with thirty to a hundred people is going to make clean up after the game the most painstakingly long and difficult process imaginable.
I have thought and thought about this, and I have arrived at the conclusion that being able to move a physical card anywhere you want to on a physical board that's longer than the length of your arm is impossible. However, the game doesn't necessarily have to be limited to only real space. I propose that to solve this issue, we take advantage of the benefits of virtual play. What I think would work best for this is some sort of a two-screen tablet. The top screen would be a map of the entire arena, and you could scroll in and out. The bottom screen would have four sections: Planned cards/spell-casting, objects in play, the discard pile and obliterate pile. Movement, range and zone position would all be done virtually using the map on the top screen, so you wouldn't have to worry about whether you could reach your cards and still move them across the board freely.
Furthermore, I think such a device would be very useful for easily setting up a plethora of formats that are difficult or time-consuming to set up or to clean up. If someone ever makes them, I think a cool name for these devices would be something like "Magic Mirrors", since they are windows through which you can view the whole arena and maneuver your objects and actions. Although it would probably be better to call them "Mages' Mirrors" so that it doesn't sound like they belong to Magic the Gathering.
What do you think?
