Disney Lorcana wants to expand the audience for trading card games in a big way

Since the first cards for Disney Lorcana were shared last September, Disney fans and hardcore gamers alike have only one question: what are the rules of the game and how do they differ from established franchises such as Magic: The Gathering And The Pokémon trading card game? Well, it turns out it’s hard to control this magical game, and those rules leaked a little early on Monday. But perhaps the most important part of those rules – their context and their intent – has been missing until now.

Earlier this month, Polygon sat down with Disney Lorcana co-designer Ryan Miller to learn all about the hottest new Disney collectible. What we found is a product designed with a surprisingly light touch. In fact, the rules fit pretty well on the front and back of a single sheet of paper. But don’t confuse brevity with simplicity.

“What we wanted was something that was accessible. And I like the term accessible, because it doesn’t mean easy,” Miller said. “It generally has concepts and things that are easy to learn for people who’ve never played these types of games before – and our early playtests showed that.”

Image: Ravensburger and Disney

Image: Ravensburger and Disney

In Disney Lorcana, players take on the role of Illumineers, powerful individuals who use a unique resource called ink to bring versions of classic Disney characters and items to life on the table. Each player comes to that table with a unique deck from their collection or a pre-made starter deck they bought in the shop. The goal is to collect ‘lore’, a kind of magical macguffin that represents life points or hit points in similar games. Lore is collected by sending characters on missions, and the first player to collect 20 Lore points wins the game.

To bring those classic Disney characters to life, you first need to generate a pool of ink – the main resource that Disney Lorcana used to enhance the action in the game. So, true to what Miller said, the process is approachable – generate ink to create characters, which you then send on missions to gather knowledge – but it’s not that simple. And getting the resource system just right, Miller said, was one of the hardest parts of design Disney Lorcana in the first place.

Ink

In the two most popular trading card games, Magic And pokemon, cards and their abilities cannot be played at will. They have costs that must first be paid in resources. Those resources are represented in both games by their own special cards: land cards, which generate mana Magicand energy cards, which become attached to beings in pokemon.

However, to bring land or energy into play, you must first draw those cards from your deck into your hand. In case of Magicyou may need several species resources — different types of land, each yielding different colors of mana — to play the different cards of your deck. That can make the first few opening rounds challenging, as players measure each other out and take the first few tentative steps to the table with only a few resources in play.

Miller and his co-designer Steve Warner spent six months trying to find another solution, and they finally came up with something unique.

Image: Ravensburger and Disney

Image: Ravensburger and Disney

At first pretty much every card in it Disney Lorcana can be used to generate the source ink, at a rate of one per turn. That solved the problem of not having enough resources in the early rounds quite easily. Then they started removing that inking ability from some of the more powerful cards, lowering their usefulness in one way and improving it in another. Today, many of the cards in the game cannot be turned into ink, but it’s up to the players to decide whether or not to include them in their bespoke decks.

“It allows for a really interesting balance adjustment that we can do,” Miller said, “because by taking the ink off a card and saying that this card doesn’t give you ink, it really changes your valuation when you review your deck. you’re building.. It really has to justify itself now because I can’t use it as ink. […] I think the experienced trading card players will find that very interesting.”

As written, Disney LorcanaThe inking system’s ink system moves resource generation from being the luck of the draw to making resource generation a choice – a choice based on experience and skill – that players can make themselves, both during the play as when building their custom decks. Adding to the complexity is that any cards converted to ink cannot be used for other functions later in the game. That makes melting down your more powerful cards to generate ink a really bad idea – unless it’s necessary to avoid being pushed into a corner.

“[I’ve] have to decide which of these cards is the least useful to me in this game,” Miller said, “and I’m going to decide that by going to the [other cards on the] table. That’s the best decision you can make, because I feel – as a player – that I’m using my skills right now. I can see from what they play, they do this strategy. […] So I’m going to go ahead and ink that [high-value card]. I feel good about that decision: I feel like I used my skills.

Another important advantage of the ink design that Miller enjoys is that it expands the variance. Giving each card in that 60-card deck multiple functions — used as ink, used to gather knowledge, or used for some other unique action — further increases the amount of variance in each deck. And it’s that variance that should make Disney Lorcana so much fun to play and collect – and experiment with, even if it means losing a hard-fought match.

“The reason I want to add variance is that variance gives hope,” Miller said. Without that extra variance, players who start losing the race to 20 Lore would have a higher chance of doing so Get on lose the race over time. Higher variance gives players more things to do, more cards to play in an effort to narrow that gap. It’s not a blue shell Mario Kart anyway, but it adds more drama to each game.

“Without variance,” Miller continued, “there can be no hope.”

songs

With the ink system in place, Miller said many of the other game design elements began to crystallize over repeated game testing. Among them were the three card types that will be available at launch: characters, items, and actions.

Characters called glimmers in the universe of Disney Lorcana, have come from the vault filled with Disney’s back catalog of classic animated films and been given unique, themed powers to play at the table. Items, such as Ariel’s dinglehopper van The little Mermaid, jumped from the margins of movie scripts to fill important roles such as healing other damaged characters. Meanwhile, iconic actions such as Maleficent breathing green fire while in dragon form are at the end of Sleeping Beautywere a natural next step in the evolution of the game.

Image: Ravensburger and Disney

Image: Ravensburger and Disney

But one sub-type of card, called a “song,” stands out. Songs come from Disney’s immense catalog of cultural touchstones that also happen to be powerful earworms. Each number can be played by any player, for their prize in ink. But songs can also be sung by individual characters played on the table, allowing players to use their ink for other tasks. Mechanically, they are yet another way to add variance Disney Lorcana.

As an example, Miller points to a card called One Jump Ahead, named after Disney’s song of the same name Aladdin. Players can pay two ink to play One Jump Ahead themselves, which allows them to pull a card from their hand and instantly turn it into ink, allowing them to move forward one jump, or one ink, as it were, the next round. Alternatively, players can have any character they control that is worth two inks or less sing that song, turning their action that round into an opportunity to essentially generate more ink for free. But that choice – exercising the character rather than using it to generate lore – is a trade-off that could have further ramifications later on.

Community

Ultimately, time will tell if players are as excited about these clever design choices as Ravensburger’s team. The rules themselves are purposefully skeletal, Miller said, and much of the game’s meat is made up of the hundreds of cards in the first of many sets — the vast majority of which have yet to be revealed.

But the real magic of Disney Lorcana can only happen if fans are ready to play it when the final game arrives in stores this summer. Miller is hopeful. The source of his optimism? It goes back to those earwigs.

“One of the things we’ve noticed,” Miller said, “is that you sing the song, at least the [first] line of it. So like ‘A leap ahead of the bread line!’ […] It’s almost like it’s a rule of the game because it happens so often that people sing the song as they play it.”

Miller, an army veteran with a beautiful baritone singing voice, said he especially enjoys singing “Let it go!” as he banishes his opponents’ glints with Elsa’s powerful song.

“Imagine a room full of people, and randomly you hear people singing snippets of Disney songs,” Miller continued, with a big grin on his face as he shuffled and bridged a stack of pre-production cards. “It’s just great!”

Disney Lorcana will be available for the first time at this year’s Gen Con, and soon after in hobby stores starting August 18 – followed by 12 weeks of organized community play. Fans can find it at major retailers starting September 1 ShopDisney.com.