7 thoughts on Keyforge

I bought KeyForge decks for several friends this Christmas, and played a couple games yesterday. If you like TCGs, I recommend spending $20 to buy two decks and trying it with a friend! Here are my other thoughts.

*** 1 ***

Let's just call it Keyforge, not KeyForge. Internal caps just... feel like they're going to make something feel dated later, and they're annoying to type :) Relatedly, "Æmber"? Really?? I need to be able to type and pronounce this word. I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "amber", because "I gain 3 amber" sounds a lot better than "I gain 3 ember".

*** 2 ***

Components needed to play: I just bought individual decks instead of the starter box set. This is a great feeling -- none of us have a big bulky box lying around, we each just have our decks! I can bring a deck to someone's house trivially, just in case someone wants to play! I was a little worried about not having the tokens in the box set, but found that during play, we used the following:

• 3 or 4 yellow dice to track Aember (usually you just need 1 per player)
• 2 purple dice to track Keys forged  (1 per player)
• A handful of blue dice to track damage on creatures
• A handful of other markers or dice to track stun on creatures and other misc effects

So, basically, I'd show up to the first few games with a medium-sized collection of dice and markers, and see what you use.

*** 3 ***

To me, Keyforge doesn't feel very similar to Magic, Hearthstone, and other Magic-like games -- it feels about as far from them in game-space as something like the Pokemon TCG (which I also recommend trying out if you like TCGs). In order, the things that I'm guessing make it feel not necessarily better or worse, but definitely different:

• No mana system: instead, you choose a House (think color) to play, then play / activate / discard as many cards from that House as you'd like. If you're sitting with a hand of cards and thinking "I have 3 mana this turn, next turn I'll have 4, what can I afford to play and what will I be playing later?", it's going to feel pretty similar to Magic / Hearthstone / etc. Removing mana changes the feeling of decisions (e.g. I'm not thinking about how to use mana efficiently), means that decks don't need to be composed with mana curves in mind, means that "must keep this card in my hand for later" is much less common, that you can often play many cards per turn, etc.
• Not "reduce opponent's health to 0": at first, I thought "collect Aember to win" would be really different. Then, I noticed that it's structurally similar: imagine that each Aember is 1 damage, and each Key is one "shield"; now you're doing 6 damage to break a shield, and have to break 3 shields to win. Not so different, right? However, collecting Aember still feels different to me. I think this is because a creature's combat power doesn't determine its Aember-gathering rate, because Keys are meaningful chunks that allow Aember gain / loss / stealing to be more dynamic while still ratcheting the game forward, and (most subtly) because the cards treat Aember more as a resource than as a damage-substitute.
• Not "draw a card each turn": instead, you draw back up to 6. I think this gives a very different game feel, and keeps card advantage from being a major consideration.

I really appreciate that Keyforge feels very un-Magic; I'm frankly kind of bored of games that feel like Magic, and am very happy to see more of the space of card games explored. (Another plug for Pokemon TCG if you enjoy thinking about game design -- I played it just because a friend liked it, and was like "holy wow, there are a ton of cool ideas here, why is this space so unexplored?!")

*** 4 ***

It feels like I'll play a lot more of unique-deck games (UDGs) than I historically have TCGs. The basic proposition is: "Pay $10. Now you have a deck that's all your own, it's at least playable and probably competitive with all your friends' decks, and you can play a game in ~20 minutes." In Magic or Pokemon, I personally have problems (emphasis on "personally", because obviously all of these things that I don't enjoy are super-fun to a huge group of people, and Magic / Pokemon are objectively great games):

• Constructed: "Buy a bunch of cards (for significantly more than $10) and build a deck. It's probably going to take a lot of time to figure out how to do this; in theory that's fun, but in reality, you don't enjoy it that much, and you're not great at buying cards or building decks. If you want your deck to be unique, expect to take a lot more time and some additional money. Now play against your friends, and hope that they built decks with similar philosophies, otherwise one of your decks is probably going to be much better than the other. If you want a new deck, it's at least $20 + time, worry, and effort. End up with a collection that makes you feel vaguely guilty for not using it."
• Limited: "Draft with friends. This takes all day, and you'll never play with the decks again. Also, you're not good at drafting; consider getting good at that, but realize that you don't actually care to get good enough to have a great time. Leave the cards with your friend, because they might actually use them."

(In reality, I've ended up playing mostly Wizard's Tower because that's the best version of Magic for me.)

Looking at these problems, maybe you can see why my main way of engaging with Magic is to read about it online and talk to friends about it; when I actually play Magic, the experience typically falls short of what I was hoping for. I'm hoping that UDGs like Keyforge will be more playable for me. 

(I would buy decks of a Pokemon UDG in a heartbeat -- I think it'd be an incredible improvement over the TCG on a ton of dimensions, and much better for young kids!)

*** 5 ***

On the other hand, I'm guessing that I won't spend nearly as much time reading, listening to podcasts, watching videos, etc. about Keyforge compared to Magic. Magic's deck-building core generates an incredible market of ideas; the difficulties that makes me dislike playing constructed Magic are food for the distributed Magic Brain that I love to watch and talk to!

*** 6 ***

I really enjoyed Richard Garfield's explanation of what he's hoping Keyforge will be. It's in the instruction manual, but I thought I'd include it at the end of this post. Perversely, it seems like Garfield kind of intends Keyforge to not have a Collective Brain on the level of Magic -- if there's no secondary market for cards, maybe it'll preserve a world where I don't see cards until they're played against me? I'm excited that Keyforge might be a purposefully obfuscated game; it can't be spoiler-proof, but it can remove the incentive for reading spoilers. (I'm personally not planning to go read spoilers of all the cards, and regret seeing some cards online.)

*** 7 ***

I'm hoping that homebrew formats take off, and it seems like there's a lot of potential for this -- e.g., take a pool of decks, mix them together, draft or construct decks, then sleeve up and fight. Each card's back identifies the deck that it's part of, so putting your decks together should be reasonably easy; the "default state" of a collection is a functional collection of standard decks, instead of a big mess of cards that could be made into decks or draft packs with a bunch of effort.

***

Conclusion: Keyforge is exciting! Maybe it'll be a fad like Pokemon Go, and maybe it'll have more lasting power. In any case, I'd recommend making the minimal investment to try it out.

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The Origin of KeyForge
Richard Garfield, April 2018

In the early days of trading card games, they were played in many ways – and some of my favorite ways disappeared over time. Among those were sealed deck and league play. Both were awkward to manage because cards had a tendency to get lost in one’s collection. Also, players could only play with trusted friends because it was easy to cheat by improving one’s deck surreptitiously.

I have often wondered if I could get back some of that really exciting play, which was characterized by tools that weren’t universal. Each player had treasures no other player had, but also had less powerful cards that needed to be used in clever ways to get the most value. One’s sealed or league deck was never ideal – but it was unique, and there was a great deal of skill in getting the most out of it.

While I enjoy constructing or drafting decks, I am often longing to play cards that are not powerful enough to compete within these formats. When playing with sealed or limited decks, these cards often become viable, since you can’t just replace them with top tier cards. I find special pleasure in winning a game using cards that many people ignored or overlooked. I have always been attached to good procedurally generated content. Game worlds generated in this way really feel as if they belong to me, the player – I am discovering them as I play; the designer didn’t even know they existed. Often games without such content are extremely managed experiences; everyone goes through the same story lines and can experience the same gameplay by making the same decisions. Everything they experience feels planned. The contrast feels to me like the difference between exploring a jungle and walking in an amusement park. When trading card games first came out the feeling was like exploring a jungle – and as the cards became more like commodities, it became more and more like an amusement park.

In the amusement park there are experts telling you how to play the game, the safest strategies, what net decks to use. In the jungle you have the tools you have. There is every chance that you are going to be the best in the world at playing your decks – you can’t just look up what the synergies are or the weaknesses; you will only find out by playing.

Welcome to the jungle!