Magic Beasts demo at game night

By Justin Tiemeyer
Contributing Writer

10/22/2024

Attendees of Lowell Community Game Night, at Lowell United Methodist Church on Friday, October 4, 2024, were met with a pleasant surprise as developers from Magic Beasts Game Design arrived at 7 pm to demo two of their games; one a fast-paced two-player game of penguin vs. penguin snowball warfare called Arctic Armies, and the other, a space hex strategy game called Beyond the Event Horizon. John Yonkers is one of the seven creators behind Magic Beasts. “Your objective is fight,” John said.

Rookies Sportscards Plus owner, Jack Reedy, met the developers behind Magic Beasts at GrandCon Gaming Convention from August 30 through September 1, 2024, at DeVos Place where both companies had booths. Reedy is one of the organizers (alongside minister Brad Brillhart) behind the monthly Lowell Community Game Night event, so he invited Magic Beasts to the October gathering.

Magic Beasts Game Design’s tag line reads “Board Games With Teeth,” and that is not merely a reflection of the wild animal theme in their logo. The founders of Magic Beasts, A.J. Holwerda, Garrett Yonkers, and Seth Barber, are factory workers who have been playing board games together for years, and “with teeth” describes their play style perfectly. Though they are the best of friends, their parents would often find them yelling at each other over a game. Their goal in creating games is to foster camaraderie through competition. “A lot of this was an excuse to hang out with our buddies and make cool stuff,” Garrett said.

Events like Lowell Community Game Night are the bread and butter of Magic Beasts Game Design. In terms of marketing, hustling and putting your game in front of as many live audiences as possible is one of the only viable options outside of the “just have your dad give you $50,000 so you can run a bunch of ads” strategy.

In terms of judging whether a game works, based on the body language of its players, Garrett believes events like these are priceless. If people lean back, start looking around the room, or start looking at their phone, it is clear that the game is not working for them, or at least that it needs to be tweaked to work better. If they lean in, start yelling over dice rolls, and talk strategy, that is how you can tell a game is a success.

Driving around West Michigan playing games, especially with the abundance of game shops and events in the area, may seem like a dream to some, but for Garrett, it is bittersweet, because the creative mind behind so many of Magic Beasts’ games, A.J. Holwerda, passed away in 2022, and he never had the opportunity to see his games meet the wider audience that the developers were working fervently on building at the time of his death.

Garrett describes Holwerda as “truly brilliant”. Holwerda came from a military family, and many of his cousins and uncles went to West Point, where they mastered the art of military strategy, but when they played strategy board games together, it was clear that Holwerda was thinking several steps beyond them. “He’d wipe the floor with them,” Garrett said.

“Several steps ahead” is a good way to describe Holwerda. With any given game, he could look at the rules, process all of the ways to win, and decide whether or not a game was “solved”, and Holwerda would not waste his time with a solved game. By solved, he meant that there were only a certain amount of ways to win, and one of them clearly worked the best, so it would not actually be a challenge to win. Holwerda preferred easy to learn, difficult to master games, where ruleset complexity is eschewed for the sake of multiple simple dimensions of play. Beyond the Event Horizon, one of the two games demoed at the Lowell Community Game Night is a great example of this idea.

Three attendees sat down with John to play Beyond the Event Horizon that evening, and the most complex, or rather difficult, part of the game was setting up its many tiles and pieces. Most of the rules were easy to pick up right away, and one of the players seemed to get the whole thing immediately. The first dimension was space warfare between three different types of ships, the second capturing planets and acquiring additional resources, and the third involved customizing ships to have different abilities. The rules for each of the dimensions of the game were simple, but the decision tree branched out as far as the eye could see. “I can get the rules of this,” Garret said. “It’s the choice overload that’s hurting my brain.”

On first blush, small box strategy game Arctic Armies is a simple, silly game for kids only, but it started out as a Civil War game, taking advantage of complex tactics, like laying down between rifle rounds to reduce the odds of getting hit by enemy fire. It runs as easily as Candy Land, despite offering a wider variety of decisions, and it is a welcome alternative to playing the former day-after-day without end. Magic Beasts Games arrived to Game Night at 7 pm, the same time as pizza, but a seven-year-old and an eight-year-old sat with Garrett, learning how to play Arctic Armies and, moreover, picking this brand new game over the allure of pizza and pop.

Picking up a copy of Arctic Armies is as simple as placing an order at magicbeastsgamedesign.com or attending an in-person event advertised on the Magic Beasts Game Design Facebook page. A link to the Facebook page is available through the Magic Beasts Game Design website, as well. Beyond the Event Horizon is currently in fulfillment stage following its successful Kickstarter in April of 2024, but you can preorder it on the same website.