Between the final of Arcanethe new one Team Fight Tactics set, and a new one League of Legends season starting soon, it’s been a big few months for the world of Runeterra. And it’s getting bigger. Riot announced this on Thursday Competition jumps into the real world once again, this time with a physical card game set in Runeterra, currently codenamed Project K.
While Riot’s announcement video goes into some of the game’s details, Polygon got the chance to preview Project K ahead of the announcement and speak with game director Dave Gaskin about how the game came together, the process of changing Competition in a card game, and when players can actually play Project K.
As the video explains, the game is playable in the traditional 1v1 TCG format, but the team is even more excited about the fact that players will be able to play the game in groups of up to four for free, or even better, in teams of two. The game features a recognizable TCG mana system, granting players two Runes per turn, with each unit and spell costing a certain number of Runes to put into play.
Project K only started life last year, making it a relatively quick turnaround by the studio’s standards as one of Riot’s many R&D department projects. After the idea of a physical League of Legends trading card game emerged, Gaskin says he and his team developed the core game engine just a few months later. From there, Gaskin says he began staffing the Project K team from Riot’s large pool of TCG enthusiasts. Gaskin particularly mentioned the excitement he faced in both Riot’s Los Angeles and Shanghai offices.
“When we started looking for playtesters both in Shanghai and here, the first thing was internal,” Gaskin said. “So I offered Riot to host some learn-play sessions, thinking: Oh, 20, 25 people will play it. Instead, 150 to 200 people said, ‘We want to learn,’ which is crazy.”
As for the development process itself, it all happened quite quickly, but still required some iteration. An early example of this is the game’s 2v2 setup, which Gaskin credits with the team wanting to emulate some of the game’s team-based, fun multiplayer. Competition. The larger player base also naturally lends itself to larger gatherings and more real-life social experiences, which Gaskin said was another key goal for the team, as Riot currently has no plans to create a digital version of Project K .
“I think if you want to know if something is fun, doing it in a social setting is a good way to find out if people like it or if it just gets in the way of a good time with their friends. Gaskin said. “When we started testing 1v1, we were like: Oh, this misses some of the magic of multiplayer. And not long after we thought: Hey, let’s try 2v2. And that’s when we thought: Oh, okay, this is actually really nice. This is the way we want to play.”
However, once they decided to have teams, another problem arose: in other TCGs for example Magic: the meetingEach player has health and can be eliminated, but in a team game one or two players can easily remain on the sidelines for much of the game. To solve that problem, the team opted for Project K’s Battlefields points system, instead of a player health system. According to Gaskin, this also had the added benefit of making the game feel a little more immersive League of Legendsat.
“One of the things we really cared about when you were playing against the champions of the MOBA or TFT is that it plays out the same way as what you expect in any other context,” Gaskin said. “So when you send three champions into a battlefield, it feels a bit like laning or jungle. I think there’s a lot of room for us to explore there, especially 2v2. We talked about them being like duos and, Oh, which two great ones do I want to put together?”
While Gaskin is particularly fond of the game’s 2v2 setup, it’s still fully playable in more traditional 1v1s as well. That’s how I experienced the game with Gaskin in my short preview. Our game lasted about 20 minutes, which Gaskin said was pretty typical for a 1v1, but it still felt like it had several stages that should be familiar to most TCG fans. I played a traditional ramp deck that was around Competition champion Volibear, and spent the early game defending as best I could while setting up more powerful combinations of spells and strong cards to play in the late game. Each deck in the game must be built around a specific champion, but Gaskin explained that the team’s goal was to make each champion card feel thematically consistent with the champion, without feeling limited by the MOBA gameplay experience. version of the game. Competition.
For example, Gaskin gave the example of champion-themed decks like Darius and Viktor, both of which focus on building armies to defeat their opponents. This doesn’t exactly apply to their abilities League of Legendsbut it is thematically consistent with their in-game characters. Meanwhile, one of my Volibear cards had a more direct link to his abilities, giving him a shield that makes it harder to cast opponents’ spells against him, such as his E ability in Competition.
As someone with moderate TCM experience, Project K felt fairly easy to pick up. As Gaskin put it: if Pokemon And Marvel Snap are on the simpler side of TCGs, and Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic being on the other side, the team’s goal for Project K was to fall somewhere in the middle. That felt right to me: the mana system is easy to understand and dynamic in the late game, without distracting from your more interesting cards, while the champion cards each have intuitive and easy-to-understand effects that opened up a lot of options. for synergy between them. Of course, it’s difficult to get much more than a brief impression after just one game, and it’s both easy and exciting to imagine how adding two more players might complicate the game, based on what I’ve played.
Project K will release in China in early 2025, but when exactly players in North America will be able to get their hands on it is a much more complicated question – especially since Riot hasn’t yet found the right publishing partner.
“What we’re looking for is a partner that cares as much as we do about providing players with a great gaming experience in the places they play, which for a physical card game like this is usually the hobby stores where people play the game,” Gaskin explained. “So for (Riot) there are certain capabilities that we don’t have in terms of printing, distribution, sales and organized events. (…) So we have to look for a partner who cares as much about this as we do, who is willing to invest the time and energy in it.”
While Gaskin couldn’t provide a definitive timetable for when exactly the game would come to the United States, he did make it clear that the goal is to release the game as close to the Chinese release as possible. But like most of Riot’s projects, he says it’s all about doing it right, even if that means it takes a little longer. For now, Project K will be playable for visitors to Riot’s Team Fight Tactics invitational tournament in Macau later this month, and Gaskin hopes the team will have more news to share with players soon.