Mark Rosewater’s pet project Mood Swings is going live today! That’s right, the latest (and hopefully greatest) from the head designer of Magic: the Gathering is hitting the Secret Lair store later today.
Mood Swings, according to Mark, is his “love letter to trading card games”. Designed as a more accessible way of getting into the genre, the game comes in a single unique “deck”. The deck can be used as a shared resource for up to four players in a single game. A traditional two player game is quoted to take between 5 to 10 minutes, so there’s no need to clear an afternoon to get a single session in.
With the games close connection to Magic (including using art assets from MTG on the card art for this “prototype” version), you might be expecting a full suite of booster packs of various flavours, an overinflated singles market, and scalpers galore, but no! Whilst scalpers are probably still going to be a huge problem (thank you Secret Lair store), there’s no confusing range of products here. Your only option upon purchase will be a single 45 card deck. I mentioned earlier that each deck is unique, that’s because your 45 cards will be drawn from a pool of 133 total designs (48 commons, 40 uncommons, 30 rares, and 15 mythics). So if you buy a deck, and your friend buys a deck, the experience will be every so slightly different.
Whilst sharing Magic’s colour pie, rather than casting different flavours of spells as a planeswalker, each card represents an emotion, or mood. These moods have a value of a d6 in the top right for scoring, as well as effects on the text of the card itself. The aim of the game is to get the highest score by chaining these effects to raise your score as high as possible in each round, and then to win three rounds overall to win the game.
The social media push around the game is strong, with various influencers demoing the game and reporting. Overall, Mood Swings looks like the classic “easy to play, hard to master” style of game that tends to capture the hearts of gamers everywhere, but only time will tell how well the game sticks around (and how much it will be monetised in future).
Don’t forget, if you want to grab a copy, check out the Secret Lair store later today (usually these things drop around 5PM UK time).
