The First Game of Manifold

In the early days, it was called Singularity.

The first game of Singularity was played on December 17, 2020, during the height of Covid, in a snowy little town in central Washington town called Leavenworth. I was there on vacation with my partner Eileen and two of our quarantine buddies, Brad and Danielle. Brad mentioned one afternoon that he had a card game that he’d been working on and I jumped at the chance of seeing what he had. I’d been on the development team of another card game before this one, and I was hungry to start another project. Brad brought out a notebook he had in his backpack, and we started producing some cards using notecards.

I noticed very quickly that there were a few aspects to the first draft of Singularity that have lasted all the way through modern day Manifold. Mainly, the idea of ‘cards roll dice, which get resolved for effects’ and the concept of characters which start in play which form your effective life total were incredibly interesting to me. See, I had never played Star Wars Destiny, and I later learned that these two aspects were central to that game. However, I was coming at it from the perspective of someone who had never played Destiny, which helped me think of the mechanics in a different light.

Another aspect of Singularity that I still love to this day is the idea that you can take your favorite character and customize them as part of the deckbuilding process. These original heroes had the same prestige system still in Manifold, but there were a lot more things like prestiges that can only go on specific named characters, ones that could only go on certain subtypes of characters, and a whole host of point values. I’m pretty confident that a more fleshed out hero customization element will grow over time in Manifold, even though Tyryn Sentinels had to be stripped down to the simplest elements.

This original prototype was similar enough to current-day Manifold that if you didn’t know either game, and probably squinted a little, you might think they’re the same game. In the two years of development that followed, however, every system was iterated on heavily, and a whole host of game design decisions were learned.

I plan on writing a series of blog posts detailing the development of Manifold, including stories of cards that used to exist, the concepts that were discarded along the way, and ideas that I desperately wish we can find space for in the future. I hope that this is interesting content for someone. Maybe that’s a player trying to understand how this game came to be, a game designer thinking about their own projects, or just someone bored and looking for something to read. Whoever you end up being, welcome to Manifold. This will (hopefully) be the start of a wild ride.