Fantasy Flight Games steps into the ring with a new Star Wars themed trading card game to compete against Magic: The Gathering And Disney Lorcana. called Star Wars: Unlimited, it will launch in 2024 with a full set of over 200 cards and all-new art based on the original trilogy – alongside a slew of staged play events. Speaking to Polygon ahead of Tuesday’s reveal, co-designer Jim Cartwright readily acknowledged that he and his team would have an uphill battle to win the hearts of potential players, especially those burned by past experience with the Fantasy Flight card game franchises.
Fantasy Flight’s reputation as a card game publisher is a bit rocky after a series of high-profile cancellations, including Netrunner, Legend of the Five Rings, And Star Wars: Fate. The most recent failure, however, was the mysterious technical accident that went off the rails KeyForge, the popular procedurally generated card game launched in 2018. The initial interest was great, but due to an unknown problem, production stopped. The game is now owned and produced entirely by a different company.
Cartwright said Fantasy Flight is putting all the necessary resources in position to put its best foot forward this time around Star Wars: Unlimited.
“This is a game where we have committed more resources than any other game in FFG history,” said Cartwright. “In the past for these kinds of games […] we struggled to hit regulars like that [release] cadences. Anyone who has played such an FFG game knows that. [It’s] something we’ve struggled with, and we’re committed to getting this game out on time. It’s the way the industry works now. If you want to do a TCM, you have to be willing to get those dates.”
Cartwright describes Star Wars: Unlimited as a traditional TCG experience – a departure point for a company known for its Living card game lines and new experiences like the Star Wars: Fatewho used custom dice.
“We’re not trying to get into anything crazy or fancy,” Cartwright said. “We wanted to focus all of our design on how to make the best card game, specifically, and the focus on cards, and the focus on the interaction of those cards and the kind of unlimited possibilities that you get when you can play with all the Star Wars -toys. So it is a non-gimmick TCG.”
Cartwright described the game as fast-moving, with a lot of back and forth between players in any given round.
“It means you don’t wait for me to think about all the different things I have to do, play my entire turn, maybe ruin the experience for you in a short amount of time,” Cartwright said. “It’s really about this constant involvement of I do something, you do something, keep that[s] everyone at the same time focused on what is going on.”
In addition, and like Disney Lorcana, Star Wars: Unlimited was designed for multiplayer from the ground up. That means players can probably use the same decks they play competitively for more casual games.
“This was made as a sandbox style game,” said Cartwright. “We want you to play with your toys. That was actually a really big part of it [what] the original pitch was, and part of [the] reason why Unlimited works as perfect as a title. It’s the idea of unlimited possibilities that you can add to your Star Wars experience.”
Of course, the landscape for trading card games has changed dramatically in the three years since Cartwright’s team started working on it Star Wars: Unlimited. Even as the pandemic pushed secondary market TCG card prices through the stratosphere, Magic: The Gathering has quickly gone from one best-selling set to the next. While upstart Flesh & Blood keep on chugging along, Ravensburger’s Disney Lorcana looks set to suck all the oxygen out of the chamber when it launches in just a few months.
That sets the table nicely for a 2024 release Star Wars: Unlimited, but it also raises the stakes. To hear Cartwright tell it, the Fantasy Flight leadership goes all in.
“We have some of our most experienced deck designers working on this product,” said Cartwright. “Daniel Schaefer, who used to be in charge [A Game of Thrones: The Card Game] And KeyForge plow. We have Jeremy Zwirn of course Star Wars: Fate. We have Tyler Parrott, who was in charge [Legend of the Five Rings]. We brought some of our most experienced card game designers, and they’re the ones who put this together, [and] we made sure we would be ready to consistently hit the data we need by building the resources we needed to do it.
Expect to hear more about it Star Wars: Unlimited all during the busy summer tabletop gaming convention circuit, with more specific details later in the year ahead of its 2024 release.