Lorcana – The Actual Game

Ignoring everything else about Lorcana, there’s one critical question that needs to be asked. Is the game any good?

Yes. It’s a perfectly solid game.

Is it the most innovative thing in the world? Not particularly.

For anyone whose played a fair amount of TCG’s over the last 10 years, there’s nothing here that’s immediately shocking. Lorcana’s gameplay is a mash-up of a variety of different systems that most experienced players will have seen before.

Lorcana has players make a 60 card deck, with up to four copies of the same card. Deck construction is limited by the fact that decks can only contain cards from 2 of the game’s six colors.

The first small twist on the standard TCG is that instead of being a rush to bleed your opponent out, it’s a race to the top. There are no life points. Instead players are competing to be the first to collect 20 lore, in something more akin to KeyForge, than Magic or YuGiOh.

For the rest of this to make sense, we’re going to go over the general structure of the game. If you don’t care too much about that, you can skip ahead for our actual opinions on the gameplay.

Types of Cards, and General Structure

Lorcana currently has three types of cards. These are characters, actions, and items. Items and actions are somewhat self-explanatory, so we’ll cover them later.

Example Card: Gramma Tala

Characters are more complicated, and explaining them gives a good opportunity to go over the core of the game, so we’ll start with them. First, characters (and all other cards) have a cost. For Gramma Tala, this cost is two. But it’s not the only thing communicated by the top left corner. Gramma Tala also has swirly border around her cost.

This means she can be placed into your inkwell, Lorcana’s version of a mana/resource ramp system. Each turn, you can play one card facedown into your inkwell. Once in the inkwell, cards have no other types or information, can’t be looked at, and are just considered Ink for the rest of the game. Cards in the inkwell start facedown, and pointed up. To get resources, you rotate them 90 degrees, “exerting” them. (Yes, this is just tapping from Magic. But since they patented tapping, each time someone wants to make a new game, they have to invent a new word for it.)

There are three other numbers on Gramma Tala besides her cost. The first is the 1 in the spiky circle. This is Gramma Tala’s attack/power/what have you. It’s how much damage Gramma Tala does when attacked, or when she attacks. The second is the number in the shield. This is her health/toughness. Each time characters take damage, they receive damage counters.

Finally, there’s a small diamond shaped symbol under her health. This is Gramma Tala’s lore value. And it’s a great segue into the next part of this writeup: character actions.

Characters in Lorcana can be used to do three things. First, they can quest. Questing means turning a character sideways, and getting lore equal that character’s lore value. Collecting 20 lore is how you win the game.

Next, characters can challenge opposing exerted characters. Note the emphasis on exerted. If a character isn’t exerted (turned sideways), they’re safe from being attacked by the enemy. When characters challenge, the challenger is exerted down, and then both the challenging character, and the challenged character take damage equal to the other character’s power.

If either of them have more damage than they have health afterward, they’re put into the discard. Lorcana damage, like Hearthstone or Pokémon, doesn’t heal between turns.

Finally, characters can sing. Which brings us to our second card type: Actions!

Actions take the role of Hearthstones spells, or Magic: The Gatherings sorceries. They’re single use cards with a one-time effect. After paying the cost, the player performs the effect, and the card is discarded.

Some actions though, are songs. For songs, you can pay their cost with Ink, or by exerting (tapping) a character with a cost equal or greater then the cost of the song.

Finally, this brings up the last card type: Items.

Items, like all other card types, have a cost. Once put into play, they can be used immediately, unlike characters which have to wait a turn. They have a variety of effects, ranging from purely passive, to activated abilities that can be used on a player’s turn.

Back to Opinions

So, now we’ve at least covered the general structure of Lorcana, which means I can talk about how I feel about the game, and the cards in it.

The first thing that stood out to me after playing my first few games and looking through the card list is that Lorcana’s base set is incredibly restrained. There’s a very large amount of unexplored design space here.

I use the word restrained because “Basic” or “Simple” feels unfair. Lorcana only has 3 or 4 named mechanics, what other card game players might think of as keywords. But I don’t think it’s because Lorcana couldn’t have more. I suspect the designers made a deliberate choice to limit the number of mechanics and complexity present in the base set.

For example, while many Lorcana cards have tags for type, many of those types aren’t used by any cards. Only princesses, villains, and brooms have cards that interact with their type.

In addition, there are zero cards that care about other cards’ colors, or are multicolor. There aren’t any cards that allow you to recover cards from your Inkwell. There are very few pieces of hard removal, and they cost a large amount of ink, and there’s only one board wipe card.

All of which strikes me as a deliberate choice to prevent the game from becoming overcomplicated, or overwhelming. Because I suspect a large part of the game’s intended target audience are Disney fans who are first time TCG players.

So does that make it boring? No, but given that there are currently only 204 cards, the deckbuilding pool is very small. And even with small pool, the game feels pretty good!

So perhaps you’ve read all of this, and decided to buy in.

Well, it’s not gonna be that easy. Read on to find out why.

Welcome to Lorcana Week!

The last time I devoted an entire week to talking about a single game or series, it was Disgaea, in a blatant pandering attempt to get a review copy of their newest release.

This is not going to be one of those weeks. For starters, I don’t think Ravensburger has any more Lorcana to send out at this point. If anyone from Ravensburger reads my set of writeups, here are a list of items I think it’s more likely they would send me:

  1. A cease and desist letter.
  2. A box of spiders.
  3. A mailbomb.

A Brief History Lesson

For an omnipresent entertainment juggernaut, Disney has always kind of fallen flat on its face when it comes to making games. Pretty much every first party attempt they’ve made to create games has, while not failed, apparently never made enough money to justify its existence.

Propaganda Games, Avalanche Software, Wideload Games. Those are just a few names in the pile of corporate corpses the House of Mouse has produced.

As such, in 2016, they finally threw in the towel, and just licensed out their properties for other developers to make games with. And that’s how we get Lorcana.

Lorcana is a new TCG published by Ravensburger, by Steve Warner and Ryan Miller, and using licensed Disney IP. If you’re not familiar with TCG’s (trading card games), I suggest you take a minute to read our Guide to Card Game Terms.

This week we’ll be covering the game itself, the somewhat interesting launch it’s had so far, the game’s rarity system, and what the future could hold for Lorcana.

Is the game any good? Will it supplant the big 3 of TCG’s, or turn it into the big 4? How does Lorcana’s base set match up with other card games?

All these questions will be answered this week.

Schedule

Part 1. The Game Itself
Part 2. Lorcana’s Rough Launch
Part 3. Rarity, Distribution, and set Design (8/24 – Delayed While Math Occurs)
Part 4. Lorcana’s Future
Part 5. ???? (???)
Bonus Post 1. Enchanted Rarity Cards and Odds

Avant Carde

A few months ago I mentioned in my Granite Games Summit writeup that one of my favorite prototypes at the event was a deck builder with a working title of “Cubism.” I also noted that I didn’t really want to write about it while it was still in the prototype stage.

It’s been a while since then, but I’m happy to note that this week I can finally talk about that prototype. Mostly because it’s no longer a prototype, and it has a new final name: Avant Carde.

Avant Carde is a deck builder where players take on the role of collectors organizing shows of their artwork to score awards.

If you’ve played a traditional deck builder, you’re likely familiar with a lot of the base components of the genre. Players are given a (weak) starting deck that they make more powerful over time by using it to generate resources, and purchase additional cards to be added to the deck.

Where Avant Carde innovates, though, is in how it handles playing cards during a players turn, and also its scoring and buying system.

In something like Dominion or Clank, any card can be played in any order, though there might be advantages to doing things a certain way. Avant Carde is different.

Avant Carde has a something more akin to an Uno style chaining system. Once a player plays a card for their turn, the next card they play has to match the previous card in either color or number to continue the chain. At the end, they count up the number of cards in the chain, and any other abilities those cards might have, and that number is the amount of money they have to buy with.

This chain, for example, would generate 5 money for the player.

This leads to a really interesting balance where the more expensive and powerful cards can end up being a bit riskier to play if they aren’t in a color that you’re collecting.

Avant Card also has some interesting changes in how it handles the buying area. Unlike Ascension, where a limited pool of cards are available at any point in time, or Dominion, where everything is always available, Avant Carde splits the difference in a pretty fascinating way.

Another neat thing: The abilities in Avant Carde aren’t on the cards in your deck. Instead they’re on the cards you lay out above the buy row! This means you can change all of the cards’ abilities by just swapping out 6 cards.

You’re collecting cards numbered 2-7. Every number is always available, but the stack of cards for each number only ever has the top card flipped up and visible. And since the numbers come in different colors, even if you have the money to buy a high-cost card, it may not make sense to actually buy it if it’s completely off color, and would be hard to include in your future chain.

As tempting as that 5 might be, splashing into blue to play it could be difficult.

I’ve really enjoyed Avant Carde. It’s one of the few prototypes that I wanted to play every time I saw it over the last few months. I’m even more excited to see the final game. It’s a fascinating deck builder with some really neat mechanical innovations in the genre.

If any of this sounds cool, Resonym is currently running a Kickstarter for the game that you can check out.

Disclaimer: I am friends with the designers at Resonym, which is how I ended up playtesting it, but it’s honestly the best Resonym game I’ve played

Friend Vs Friends

I enjoy playing Friends Vs Friends. I don’t enjoy its progression structure for unlocks, and I will complain about that in a bit. One person I played with called it “Play-To-Win” which is very funny way of putting it, and also felt kind of accurate. But let’s start with the good stuff.

Genre1v1/2v2 FPS
Recommend? Y/NYes.
Price$10. Deluxe Ed $18. No IAP.
PlatformPC
Short VersionBest as a party game with friends. Progression systems are a bit annoying, but not a deal breaker.

Friends Vs Friends is a 1v1 and 2v2 first person shooter with a pleasant low-poly vibe. The goal is simple: kill the other player before they kill you to win a round. Win 3 rounds before they do to win the match.

So now it’s time for the twist.

Before a game, you build a deck of cards. Using a card can give you a weapon or other equipment, buff you, debuff an opponent, or other wild and weird things.

Perhaps most importantly for the purpose of strategy, unused cards carry over between rounds, and it’s possible to see which cards the opponent uses. So if they pop a powerful weapon, give me a big head, and slow on me on me at the start of the round, I might decide it’s not even worth committing resources to try to win that round. Instead I might pool up cards, then try to push through on a future one.

The end result is a really fun blend of moment to moment resource management, and FPS skill. Time to kill is fairly high overall, with most weapons requiring a large number of hits. This is important because it gives you the time you need to decide what cards to use.

The most fun I’ve had with Friends Vs Friends is playing it as a sort of party game with 3-4 friends who I talked into getting it. It’s relatively easy to set up a private game, invite folks, and then just jump into it. Running around, yelling at each other, trash talking, and calling every single round winning clutch is great.

But some parts are not as great. So let’s talk about them.

Progression and other complaints

Deckbuilding in Friends Vs Friends is reliant on collecting cards. You buy card packs with a in-game earned currency. There are two types of card packs: basic and rare. Rare packs cost twice as much as the basic ones, and it feels like you earn currency pretty slowly.

The frustrating thing about the cards is that they use what I’ve come to think of as the “Clash of Clans” model. That’s the one where duplicates don’t give you more copies of the card to work with, they just upgrade the existing card’s power level. Which is not very fun, because it means duplicates of a rare card (instead of feeling special and improving your deck a lot) just give you a like 3% boost.

But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is quests.

There are daily and weekly quests, because of course there are, and they give much larger amounts of EXP than just playing games. This would be fine, except for one thing.

You can’t complete these quests in games withfriends, or anything that isn’t random online matchmaking.

And the random online matchmaking, suffers from two really big issues. First of all, it’s very easy to just drop out of a match after a loss. So you can expect to see a lot of canceled rematches. This in turn means a fair amount of time spent waiting for the next match.

To be fair, I would also probably quit after losing a match to someone at progression level 100.

Secondly, it just isn’t quite as fun. The game is a lot more enjoyable with a group of friends shouting at each other over voice chat, and with the ability to make a fair set of 2v2’s by balancing teams.

But grinding online is the best way to unlock more cards and money to play with, and also the only way to unlock the in-game cosmetics.

So the weird end result is that the best way to play a game called Friends Vs Friends is, in fact, to not play it against your friends.

Overall

I like Friends Vs Friends. The gunplay is fun, and it feels fantastic as a group game. Unfortunately for my group of folks, it sort of got its lunch eaten by BattleBit in the FPS department. But we were having a good time with it before that.

It probably would have been better if the quests/progressions/unlocks didn’t work the way they did, or there was more capacity to really deckbuild. As it is, it’s fun, but the deckbuilding is never about building cool combos. Ultimately deckbuilding is just a “Stuff as much good stuff as you can” sort of vibe.

Overall thought, it’s good! I just wish there was a bit more to it, and some tweaks to a few systems because it could have been great.

Grotto Beasts

Grotto Beasts is an entertaining TCG with a really clever resource system that I haven’t seen used before. It’s good fun. But at the end of this writeup, I’m not going to recommend buying it. I absolutely recommend playing it! Just… not spending money on it. But we’ll get to that.

The most unique part of Grotto Beasts to me is the resource system. It’s very interesting and not particularly complex, but it is very different from anything I’ve seen in a TCG, so I want to go over it in detail first.

Grotto Beasts’ Resource System

Every card card in the game has a cost. To “play” a card, you have to pay its cost, which you do by placing cards facedown into a zone called the summoning pool. The summoning pool cannot be rearranged, and is not a discard pile/graveyard.

Here’s the neat part: whenever an opponent plays a card, you draw cards equal to the cost of that card from your summoning pool. If you didn’t have enough cards in your pool, you continue drawing from your deck..

In addition, except for the first card you play each turn, you cannot play cards if your opponent’s summoning pool is empty.

I found that in the games I played, this led to a bunch of really interesting decisions about what cards to use to pay various costs, and how to order them into the summoning pool. A heavy cost card might be useless now, but placing it at the very bottom makes it hard to get back. Likewise, it gives the game a sort of tempo pace. Dropping a high cost card into your opponent lets them draw a fair number of cards back, and can give them the answers they need to deal with it.

The Rest of the Systems

The rest of Grotto Beasts’ systems are functional and fun, if not as fascinating. Combat is similar to Magic, where all attackers attack at once. Unlike Magic, attack values are summed, and then defense values are summed. Each player chooses how to allocate damage across the enemy line. Cards only have one stat for combat, Power, so it’s fairly easy to keep track of what’s what.

Damage that isn’t blocked goes through, and when it does, the player who did the damage banishes cards off the top of their deck into a score pile, somewhat akin to Pokemon’s prize card system. These cards can’t be looked at, and the first player to get 10 prizes wins. There are also cards that can generate prizes with their effects.

The Good, the Bad, and the Jerma

The Good

For all intents and purposes, this card game was created as Twitch streamer merch. That said, the game itself is strong, generally fun to play, and has interesting and unique systems. I have no real complaints about the mechanical structure of the game, and it’s much better quality then what I would expect for a tie-in product. God we live in a weird world.

Ed Note: As far as I can tell based on the rulebooks, while a wide number of people contributed to this project, only one person is specifically credited with the game’s design: J. Evan Raitt.

One big thing that I really appreciate about the design is that outside of a single six sided die, it doesn’t require any external components or trackers for things like health, counters, or life. It also doesn’t have a complex zone setup system. I mention this mostly because it’s one of my pet peeves with Nostalgix.

The Bad

But while I don’t have complaints about the game’s design structure, I do have two incredibly large bones to pick with some of the specific designs. First, the starter decks. There are two starters decks, and they felt extremely unevenly matched.

One is called Super Luck, and it’s mechanically themed around coin flips and luck. It offers cards that increase the payoffs of winning coin flips, with some ability manipulate those flips. It has a consistent identity and strategy.

The other is called Lot O’ Grottos. It feels much weaker for a variety of reasons. First, the grottos themselves are primarily a defensive tool for the deck, and some provide search and discard pile recursing. But the deck’s stat lines on its creatures are incredibly low. One of the “tricks” the decks has is a 4 drop card that lets you sacrifice creatures at the start of a turn to get a card that costs one more. Except while the deck has two copies of a card that costs 6, it has no card that costs 5, and only two cards that cost 4. That means it’s a card that turns 1 drops into two drops, which aren’t much stronger.

In addition, the Super Luck deck gets a card named Festive Mimic. It’s a 3 cost, 2 power card that has an effect that triggers when it’s played. Its effect is “Roll a die, then draw that many cards.”

Grottos gets a card named Bobbin. It’s 3 cost, 2 power card, that has an effect that triggers when played. Its effect is “Draw a card.”

This isn’t the greatest sin I’ve ever seen committed. I’m more sympathetic to a card game that prints a version of Swords to Plowshares than I am to one that prints the Power Nine (Looking at you, MetaZoo)

However, these are problems with the design of specific cards, not the core mechanics. I haven’t written about this specifically here, but the initial sets of Magic were kind of janky, and the initial sets of the Pokémon TCG led to a dumpster fire meta. A set TCG with some bad initial set design does not make a bad game.

The Jerma

Indie card games are my kryptonite. I will play one demo game of something I’ve never heard of before, and that will be enough to sell me on it. Show me something even mildly exciting, and I will be forking over cash for a booster box.

So why don’t I recommend Grotto Beasts? Ultimately, pricing and production quality.

The cost of cardboard is too damn high.

Grotto Beasts’ boosters are $10 a pop, while the 2P starter set is $80. The starter set contains 2 decks, and 2 boosters, making each deck come out to $30 for 40 cards. For comparison, the Pokémon starter sets retail at aprox $15-20 a deck, with the higher end comp/premium products going for $30.

These prices are high, which is unfortunate and might be tolerable except for one final thing: production quality.

The physical cards are kind of crap. After just three games, the cards themselves were showing scratches and scuffs on the edges. In addition to this, one of the cards I opened in the boosters was straight up missing any sort of finish on the front of the card.

I spent part of this weekend running a pre-release for the new Pokémon set with the same friend I played Grotto Beasts with. And we both agreed that the print quality of Grotto Beasts is much lower quality than current Pokémon cards.

In Conclusion

I absolutely recommend playing Grotto Beasts if you get a chance. While the game has a few mechanical issues, they’re nothing worse than the very first set of any other TCG.

But the sky-high pricing and miserable production quality of the product means I just can’t recommend it, and I don’t plan on buying it, especially with the issue of the starter decks being incredibly unevenly matched.

If you love Jerma, and want to support the project, more out of the sort of tradeoff that we as humans make when we buy content creator merch, you can find the game here.

I, however, am NOT going to go to this website here with a list of all the Grotto Beasts cards and download the images. Then I am NOT going to put them into a big sheet, and I am NOT going to find a way to print them as make my own bootleg set of of the cards to play with.

I am absolutely NOT going to that. Because that would be wrong, and there are no situations where you should just steal a copy of something really expensive or out of print.