Keyforge is Richard Garfield's Mad Science Experiment
Today, I'd like to talk about Keyforge, a physical card game.
What? You appear to be under the impression that this newsletter is only about digital games, and therefore it woudn't do to talk about physical games! You are mistaken, however. Can you point to a single place where I suggest that I'll only talk about digital games? Ah, OK, you're point to the banner directly above this paragraph, the one that says "The Last Videogame Blog", which is the name of this newsletter, and which uses the world 'videogame', which is exclusively used to talk about digital games. Fair enough! However, remember the golden rule: if a card's text contradicts the rules, the card's text takes precedence. Phew! Let's talk about cards!
This is not a review of Keyforge, because I haven't actually played it. I bought a few decks (for some reason, decks from the game's second expansion, Age of Ascension, were being sold for a pittance, almost a 90% discount from their recommended price) after seeing the game favourably reviewed on Shut Up & Sit Down, and while finding another human being to play continues to be the step in games-playing I struggle the most with, the game's very structure still blows my mind.
Not in a good way, though. But not in a bad way, either. In a 'I need to write a newsletter about it because maybe someone, somewhere, will read it and absorb this thoughts' kind of way.
But before we get to Keyforge, let's go on a quick history lesson on card games.
I'm not going to talk at lenght about poker and tarocco and what have you: let's skip to the games a big nerd thinks of when they hear 'card game'. And the first game of this kind is, of course, Magic: The Gathering. Invented in 1993, it brought a dazzling innovation to the card game genre: deckbuilding. If you're playing canastra or something, all players have a shared deck, and the rules of the game tell you how that deck is set up. On Magic, from the first expansion, you had a pool of hundreds of cards to choose from, and you had to build a deck of just a few cards amongst them.
Magic: The Gathering is a bad game. It is bad because your resource allocation is random. You get resources by creating mana, which is done through certain cards in your deck, usually lands. If you do not draw enough lands to play your cards, you get stuck. If you only draw lands and not the cards to play them with, you also get stuck. Thirty years of intensive design experimentation have managed to polish this design to a shiny turd, but there's still a chance that when you sit down to play a game of Magic, you'll simply not be able to play it, and this is baked into the design deeply enough that it can't be solved without turning Magic into a different game.
I know Magic was the first game of this kind to be invented. But I can respect the invention of the assembly line and not want to drive a Model T.
This has nothing to do with what I'm talking about in this newsletter, but I think it's important to let people know Magic is a bad game, lest they end up trying to play it. Anyway.
Magic: The Gathering is the prime example of a Trading Card Game, the kind of card game most people who don't think of go fish think of when they think of a card game. Yu-Gi-Oh is also a trading card game; the Pokémon TCG is, well, that's what TCG stands for. On a trading card game, you don't usually buy a deck (although you sometimes can, often starter decks designed for newbies). Instead, you buy a pack of random cards, and build a deck out of them. If your friend happens to open a card that's good for your deck, you'll have to trade them for it. Maybe you have something good for their deck, as well? Hence, the 'trading' part of Trading Card Game.
At least, that's what the game's creator, Richard Garfield, has gone on record saying he expected. What actually happens if you want to play the game competitively is that you trade a card you need for you deck for a surprisingly large amount of money to a sweaty nerd. Even playing with your friends, which approaches the vision Garfield had for the game, is tainted by this. All you need is one friend in the group who's willing to buy cards outside the group, and everyone needs to do that as well. Anyone who plays the game semi-seriosly will repeat to you this mantra: don't buy packs, buy singles. That is, do not buy the official product that's sold by the company, buy product that's already been opened and is sold by a third party.
Isn't this super weird? Imagine if you wanted to read, I dunno, the Game of Thrones book series, but the only way the publishers sold them was as a pack containing five random books that they publish. And the best way to buy this book was to buy it from someone who had opened the packs and got them. Except they charge ten times as much as a pack's price, so maybe it's better to buy packs after all? Surely if you buy like five packs you'll open one of them? Oh, wait - the GoT books are all rares, and are printed at a lower rate than the other books, so you have a lower chance of getting them!
This is an asinine way to interact with, well, anything, and it's a shame that it's been normalized enough that it's considered the standard. But our buddy Richard Garfield had more tricks up his sleeve. Later on, he'd go on to create NetRunner: a Living Card Game.
NetRunner has some marked improvements over Magic. For starters, you can now get resources to play your cards every turn (at a cost, but you're not at the mercy of whatever cards you draw). This sci-fi game is about a hacker trying to get the best out of a powerful corporation, and this means there are two different kinds of play. One player plays as the corporation being targeted: it has a lot of resources, and it can hide them by playing them face down, but it is completely reactive, unable to affect their opponent until they make a mistake. The other player, the runner, must make 'runs' to aquire the corporation's assets. The runner has a lot of avenues of attack, being able to steal cards from the corporation's players hand, deck and discard pile, as well as cards they've played, but all their cards are played face up, they must choose when and where to attack, and the corporation's conterattacks are brutal, with a risk of reducing their hand size and shrinking their options.
On top of that, it's a Living Card Game. This means you buy an entire set at a time. This set has three copies of every card that has come out for that expansion. Since decks can only have three copies of a card at most, you can build any deck from an expansion with a single purchase. This is not a flat improvement over the TCG model - for starters, a Living Card Game has a much more expensive barrier to entry. You can't buy a cheap booster - although that's an illusory comparison, because you can't play a game with a booster anyway, and buying enough boosters to have anything approaching a playable deck is a crapshot. You can't play a begginner's deck either, which is a more painful loss - but a beginner that buys such a deck for a TCG will either be locked at that level of play or be forced to enter the booster/singles game to improve it anyway. The Living Card Game may not be outright better, but it certainly is more fair. It's difficult to argue that it's a worse idea from anything other than personal bias.
NetRunner has gone bankrupt twice.
Two companies have tried to publish it; two have lost the licence. Presently, the game is being published as System Gateway, a fan-made retroclone that's compatible with the official game but has its own card pool. I haven't seen their cards; I must, again, send you to charming British lads.
So, at this point, Richard Garfield has invented two different card game genres: a bad one that's wildly succesful, and a good one that's failed constantly. What's left for him? Well, he could try to invent a good system that's also succesful, but I doubt that will happen as long as Magic: The Gathering exists and is sucking all the air out of the room. Which is why I think his latest invention is more of an experiment than an actual attempt at creating a better game.
So let's talk about Keyforge. It's also a modern card game, in which each player shows to a game with their own deck, but it's not a deckbuilder. Put a pin on that, I'll get back to it. Keyforge has some rules to make it very different from Magic, and even from other games in the TCG sphere. Your goal is not to remove life points from your opponents, but rather to forge keys, which requires a resource named æmber. (Yeah, I know.) Your creatures can be used to gather æmber or to attack your opponent's creatures, which stops them from gathering æmber. You need to forge three keys, and you can only forge one key per turn, so even if you run into a combo that lets you create massive amounts of æmber, if you haven't forged any keys your opponent has two turns to respond. Infinite combos are also banned - the rules explicitly says that looping effects don't trigger more than six times per turn.
So... I'm not one to try to divine the author's intentions from the author's work, and I don't know how much of that design comes from Garfield himself and how much comes from his employers, but it seems a very definitive attempt to distance this game from Magic. There are lots of ways to win the game on the spot with Magic; it's not difficult to find examples of two cards that, played together, win the game outright and immediately if the opponent can't find a way to disrupt them. And this is without other types of decks that mean to deal massive damage in one turn, attack with a massive creature out of nowhere, remove the player's deck from the game, or even trigger a win condition they bring themselves. Keyforge limits these interactions as much as it can; it's literally impossible to win the game in less than three turns, no matter how explosive your opening hand is.
But the wildest thing about the game is... well, I could put TCG's like Magic and LCG's like NetRunner in the same category of 'deckbuilding' games, but I can't slot Keyforge in that same category, even though each player also brings their own deck to the game. In Keyforge, every deck comes out ready-made. I'm not talking about stuff like starter decks: an algorithm creates a deck, and when you buy a box that deck must be played as it is. Each deck is named after an Archon - a kind of being that exists in the lore of the game, whose name and appearance are also randomized - and each card has the archon's name and image on its back, instead of a generic image for the game. You literally cannot mix two different decks. You cannot find combos outside of what your deck already has. You only play with what you got.
This feels to me like the ultimate way for Garfield to try to find the feeling he was looking for when he created Magic, over three decades ago. If players won't interact with his game as fun pieces instead of investiment opportunities, he will force them to. And yet... how many brand new design ideas come from this concept! One of the suggestions for a tournament setting the manual gives is one in which you bring a deck for your opponents to play. This is a brilliant approach that no other card game could do, since with complete freedom you can always just create an unplayable deck. With Keyforge, there are decks that are good and decks that are bad, but there are no decks that are unbeatable and no decks that are unplayable.
This approach, however, comes with a few bizarre choices to me. A game like this feels like something you could walk into a game store, buy two decks, and challenge anyone who knows the game. So it's puzzling to me that you can't. The game requires a handful of tokens - you need the keys, damage doesn't wear off so you need tokens to track those as well, units can be 'stunned' and that needs to be marked, and of course you need to count your amber as well - and for all the game innovates, it's bizarre that no onte thought these tihings would be a detriment to a sit-down-and-play enviroment. But it certainly feeds my theory about it being an experiment...
Is the game any good? I don't know. Like NetRunner, it nearly went bankrupt recently - although that may have been due to COVID woes, which were apparently combined with an issue in the algorithm that stopped them from printing new decks - and they're now back with a new publisher. But as a dude who's bad at videogames and who's better at thinking about stuff, this is all it needs to be. A new way to look at a genre many people may argue has peaked with its first entry. This kind of design that asks 'what if we did everything differently from what we've done in the past' does not come often in modern society. Let us cherish it.
July's Links of the Month
'No Man's Sky' Players Are Reinventing Money
I spend a lot of time on this newsletter talking about how asinine NFTs are, so I think that when a positive use for them is found, it should be highlighted. Turns out it was just a matter of making it impossible to link it to real money.
A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia
This one is wild. A series of apparently well-written, well-researched articles on Chinese Wikipedia turned out to have been created from whole cloth by a Chinese housewife out of her frustration with her inability to read the sources she seeked, difficult to find sources, and loads of misplaced imagination. Wikipedians are treating it like a sophisticated attack, but I think there's a sort of beauty to it.
Mildly-mannered reporter Clark Kent walking into a phone booth and coming out as powerful demigod Superman is an image marked into our culture, but how often did it actually happen? To answer this question, we need some sort of super-nerd willing to account for every time this actually happens in every one of the many media the caped crusader has dipped his indestructible toes in. In a surprising recounting by the "Superman Homepage" ("online since 1994!", and it shows), the answe to how often it happens is "barely ever."
In this month's video, a cyborg and an alien go on a joyride.
