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.
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.