UW Bothell Center for Serious Play 

The Role & Implications of Gaming In Society

Brian Tinsman, Lead Game Designer at Zynga, speaks on game design at the first Futures of Unconventional Narrative (FUN) Conference at the Center for Serious Play at UW Bothell May 20, 2011.

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Featured Article, Magic: The Gathering Archive

Suppressing Fire: How We Designed Saviors With An Axe

I'm Brian Tinsman and I was the lead designer of Saviors of Kamigawa. Also on the design team were Devin Low, Brian Schneider, and Brandon Bozzi. Together we had a great experience building the final set of the Kamigawa block. But instead of writing about creating Saviors cards, I'm going to write about destroying them.

Lots of them.

Featured Article, Magic: The Gathering Archive

Designing Rise of the Eldrazi

Rise of the Eldrazi was the most exciting, most challenging, and highest quality game design work I've ever done. In fact, it challenged the talents of every member of the design team. It was just so different. When we started showing it around to the rest of the company the reactions ranged from "Holy cow!" to "Seriously? Seriously?" How did we end up with a set like this?

Featured Article, Magic: The Gathering Archive

The Creation of Scourge

I have a reputation in R&D for breaking rules. If there's a type of card we've never done before, a rule we've never messed with, or other virgin territory to be ruthlessly exploited, I'm immediately drawn to it. As we began the Scourge design, it occurred to me that we had never mucked around much with the mix of creature size on a broad scale. 

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Reddit AMA

War of the Fallen 

At Zynga I worked on multiple titles for iOS and Android. My team and I just launched War of the Fallen, Zynga's second card battle game, available from the App Store on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Industry Vlog

Rise of the El Drazi Video Interview

Trick interviews Brian Tinsman, Lead Developer of Rise of the Eldrazi at Pro Tour San Juan on Magic: The Gathering, his latest set, and how ge got started in Wizards R&D.