How to play Commander with 32 people: farewell party makes an imposing table

If you thought your own kitchen-table Commander games were a bit crazy, this might just prove you wrong: the craziest Commander game of all time. Over the weekend, according to Reddit user u/FellowGreendalien, there was a 32-player, 5-hour Commander game at their local store.

The tale was shared on Magic: The Gathering's official subReddit very mysteriously at first, with just a brief description of the experience: "Quite a ride...". It was described as a "Commander Battle Royal", and the post quickly gathered the attention of the curious folks who wondered just how the hell do you even play a 32-player Commander game.

Thankfully, another player who was at the game shared the whole story on another post, alongside pictures of the event itself. The idea was to celebrate a friend's going away party, who was moving to California. According to the story, they were a very for-fun player, so they wanted to go the extra mile and try to get as many people possible in the Commander game.

The poster for the party had a very simple message, "BIG DUMB POD AT 7!", and, boy, did people show up.

As the message goes, as soon as they were able to determine they had a precise number 32 of players, they decided to do what they planned before and play it by ear, which basically resulted in some very interesting rules being created on the spot.

For starters, you might even say this wasn't a true 32-player Commander game, because players should only account for players directly at their right and left. The "Sphere of Influence", as they called it, meant you'd basically only pay attention to your immediate surrounding players.

The other really important rule was that they assigned everyone a number, which would correspond to their seat and their order to play. If you were assigned seat 1, you played first, and so on and so forth. They assigned players numbers from 1-4 in 8 different tables, so this meant 8 people had their turn at the same time, four times.

According to the story, "If you hit a "Win the game" situation, you remove your immediate left and right and nothing else.". This would result in the room condensing each time someone was eliminated, and that kept the game going for exactly 5 hours.

Additional details included planes being added, and changed periodically:

"Planes would change in between positions 4 and 1. Untap, upkeep, draw, roll planar die every turn. Chaos meant chaos, nothing else mattered. Everyone got one turn in each plane."

The actual game went on from around 8 P.M. to midnight.

What do you think? Time to break the record?

You can check out the whole account below: