I am sure that most of you have never heard of The Mat Game, unless you happen to be one of my friends in disguise or you used to play cards down at Cosmic Comics in Omaha, NE. The Mat Game is a variant of Magic that was developed by my friends and me when we were looking for an alternative to the current formats. The Mat Game was developed around 1995 and was completely different from all other formats.

We took the mat from the old BattleMasters game (done by Milton Bradley in association with Games Workshop). The mat was probably about 5 ft. x 4 ft. and was seperated into hexagonal spaces. You can see a real bad picture of the mat here http://www.dragonoftheblackpool.com/hero/battle.htm.

Our idea was to make a game that would follow with the storylines from the three M:TG books: Whispering Woods, Shattered Chains, Final Sacrifice. In those books, wizards wandered around in caravans and dueled each other for supremecy.

For our game, your main deck was your caravan. You would choose a space on the mat and place your main deck there (placing the caravan on a water space was illegal). You would then proceed by drawing your seven cards.

You would play lands off of the mat and you could still only play one land each turn. If you were to play a creature, you would have to play the creature on one of the spaces adjacent to your caravan (main deck). You could only have one creature in each space.

Each creature could only move one space along the board per round (a round is defined as the begining of your turn to the begining of your next turn). However, creatures with flying could move differently. We designated two different forms of flying. If a creature was merely 'hovering' then they could only move one space per round, however if they were 'flying' (which was denoted by placing a blue token on the creature) then they could move across two spaces per round. It required one movement space to bring a 'hovering' creature to a 'flying' state, but a 'flying' creature could move to a 'hovering' state and move one more space.

The way damage was dealt was quite different from the way that you are all used to. First off, you could not die from not being able to draw a card. If you ran out of cards, you would place a marker on the spot where your caravan (main deck) was and you could then move that marker as if it was your caravan. To be killed, 20 points of damage had to be dealt to your caravan.

Rather than being able to block with any creature on the board, creatures would have to intercept each other (move onto the same space) to attack or block. Effects such as first strike were of course legal, but I think we had banned "flanking" and "shadow" when we redid the rules. If a creature was dealt damage, that damage remained on them for the round. They would regenerate their lost health next round. Enchantments all had to be placed on the board, and to be killed, 15 damage had to be dealt to them or a disenchant had to be cast on them.

For a spell to be cast at a target, the target had to be 3 spaces away from the caravan. There was one other way that you could cast a spell at a target. You could pay the casting cost for a spell and place the spell upside down on a creature (that was within 3 of the caravan) with any X cost being marked by a dice (one change is that i would have all converted costs being marked by dice). Spells such as Wrath of God and Armageddon could be played on the board and could do their effects to all players because they were more of "area-effect" spells.

Another interesting effect was that walls actually served a purpose! A wall could be played on any spot adjacent to your caravan and would then branch out two spaces on either side of the original spot (make sure to bring 4 extra cards of that wall so you can place them on the board). If the board ended at one of those points (or there was a water space and your wall didn't fly) the wall would not only extend up to that point, and the extra space could not be played elsewhere. Walls that had flying covered both the 'flying' and normal spaces at the same time.

This format made for an exciting version of Magic and led to some really long and grueling matches. I am sure that I didn't cover all of the rules and some of my rulings may not be correct (I will have to check with my friends on them.) If you want to hear more about this format or want to offer any suggestions about it, please leave a message and I will get back to you. Have fun and try The Mat Game, its really really fun!

- Matt

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I remember way back when I was about 8 my mom bought me Battle Masters.. I still have a couple figs laying around, but most are in the trash

I remember playing something like this, but we placed our own terrain...