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Playing on Hard Mode
**August 19, 2024** - It was when playing squash that I truly began to appreciate the power of allowing my opponent to play on hard mode. I was clearly not as good as John, which was something I was comfortable with. I don't mind winning only 25% of my games. I was very much a fan of playing on hard mode in games versus other players — but I saw little appeal in making things easier for myself. After all, if I began with an edge, even if I won I hadn't REALLY won, right?
More about Richard Garfield Articles
Keep your Numbers Off of Me
**March 2, 2022** - Recently I started playing a digital game. There was a tournament announced for the top players. Although I wasn’t a top player – the game was new enough and there was enough luck in the play that I thought maybe I could qualify, and so I started paying attention to my ranking. Quickly I noticed that I was having less fun because I was no longer experimenting and trying new things – I was focusing on what I knew worked.
Richard Garfield Works His Magic
by Ryan Britt Oct. 11, 2024 Three decades later, can Garfield repeat this success? With Popularium, a new gaming studio founded by Garfield and three other industry veterans (Jon Bankard, Skaff Elias, and Arka Ray) he is about to find out as he launches the game *Chaos Agents*. Instead of being set in a fantasy world, this one exists in a space-opera-esque science fiction world, a kind of mish-mash of some of the more celestial Marvel comics but also at home with the texture of Larry Niven’s “Known Space” shared stories and novels.
Chaos Agents Commits to Being a “Forever Multiplayer Game” Through the Magic of Dedicated Servers
“You own a copy of the game to the extent that you used to own a disc that you could go and buy,” Ray says. “The goal from day one was to build Chaos Agents in a way where we could essentially promise our players that regardless of whether we are around, we are supporting the official servers or not, you will be able to play the game.”
Popularium launches alpha for Chaos Agents from Magic creator Richard Garfield
“We have been overwhelmed by the response to the Alpha announcement,” said Arka Ray, president and CTO at Popularium, in a statement. “The number of players who want to join the alpha and experience Richard’s vision has been over 20 times more than we anticipated.
Inside Chaos Agents, Popularium’s upcoming ‘auto-battler royale’
by Alexander Lee March 27, 2026 The post-alpha version of Chaos Agents showcased at GDC demonstrated the core philosophy behind the upcoming game — Garfield’s belief that optimized play patterns make for less-fun gameplay. The game is an “auto-battler royale” in which players control a single champion, or “agent,” giving them directions and leveling up their skills and abilities as they face off against other players’ agents in a virtual environment. To ensure a variety of play patterns, Chaos Agents features three vastly different win conditions and plenty of unexpected skill combinations to keep the metagame wide open.
The Coolest Games We Saw At GDC 2026
by Brian Shea on Mar 13, 2026 at 11:55 AM From Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield and the team at Popularium comes an autobattler-royale called Chaos Agents. The game arose from Garfield's desire to present an "unsolved metagame" to players. The team loved the accessibility of the autobattler genre, but wanted better multiplayer features that encouraged more engagement and prevented what felt like a long wait for an inevitable conclusion. The solution Popularium found was to inject that autobattler genre into the battle-royale space.