Behind a coat rack in what looks like a storage closet at the Wizards of the Coast headquarters in Renton, Washington, a hidden door swings open to reveal a private room where designers, friends, and guests sit down to play Magic: The Gathering. The building, tucked into the Pacific Northwest landscape that one staffer described as feeling already halfway like a fantasy world, is home to the company behind two of the most enduring games ever made. For millions of players worldwide, what happens inside this office is anything but ordinary.
A coat rack, a hidden door, and a game worth tens of thousands
The Renton headquarters reads like a normal office at first. Statues of magical creatures line the walls, but the real surprises are behind closed doors. The Magic Room, closed to the public, is where the game’s designers gather to test, play, and share the experience with family and guests. Athena Frolick, one of Magic’s executive producers, laid out the premise simply: players open packs, build decks from the cards they collect, and then battle opponents with the goal of reducing their life total to zero. The fantasy, she explained, is that you are a wizard casting spells from a living spellbook.
Magic: The Gathering is now played in more than 150 countries. Some individual cards have climbed into serious collector territory. A Black Lotus card on the table during a recent visit carried a value in the tens of thousands of dollars. But Frolick pointed to something beyond the market. ‘Magic is my life,’ she said, ‘and it’s something that brings me a lot of joy.’ The game’s current expansion, Universes Beyond, has pulled in players through crossover sets built around Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, and Marvel, and Frolick described the surge of new players that followed as one of her favorite things to witness.
Rolling dice in the room where D&D campaigns are born
Down the hall, another off-limits space serves as the dedicated Dungeons and Dragons room. Senior game designer Amanda Hammond ran a one-shot campaign there, acting as Dungeon Master while players took on characters from the classic 1980s D&D animated series. Hammond described D&D as ‘an interactive storytelling game in which the players are the heroes in a movie that the Dungeon Master is directing.’ The dice, she noted, determine how each moment of the adventure resolves, and they are not always cooperative. During one sequence, a roll of 14 was not enough to land a hit, and the reporter covering the session was dodged cleanly by the character he was targeting.
Dungeons and Dragons has been played by some 85 million people since its debut in 1974. Hammond was clear that no prior experience is required: anyone who finds the idea appealing can sit down and play. A campaign can run a couple of hours or stretch across years of weekly sessions.
The last card on the table
A Black Lotus, its edges worn smooth from handling, sits face-up on the felt surface of the Magic Room table.
Both games, stripped to their core, ask the same thing of the people who play them: show up, think hard, and share the experience with someone else. Brandon Burnstead, reporting from inside the Renton headquarters, found that most of the people who work at Wizards of the Coast are active players themselves, bound together by what one team member called ‘a great privilege and a great honor’ to carry these games forward for players who are not yet born.
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