New paper declares Magic: The Gathering the most complex game

A research paper published in May claims that Magic: The Gathering, a well-known tabletop trading card game, is the most complex game in the world, and possibly the most complex game that can exist.

Invented in 1993, Magic, which was originally designed by mathematician Richard Garfield, involves two players with decks of 60 cards assembled to their liking from a larger set.

The total number of cards available has reached incredible numbers in the two decades since the game’s creation, with over twenty thousand cards each bearing their own unique rules.

The paper co-authored by Alex Churchill, Stella Biderman, and Austin Herrick seeks to establish that the sheer number of overlapping and interacting rules has rendered Magic an unsolvable game.

Specifically, Churchill proposed that combinations of Magic cards could be used to assemble a universal Turing machine; this meaning that any Turing-complete system (such as programming languages like HTML) could be emulated entirely through the interactions of various Magic cards.

From the perspective of a player, this means that there exist scenarios within the Magic game where it is impossible to determine a winning strategy. In the worst case, finding the best move to make is an operation that simply cannot be computed.

Methods have already been devised to simulate the game UNO entirely within Magic: The Gathering, and Churchill is considering attempting a Magic-based emulation of chess next.