Board Game Design Day: KeyForge: Creating the World's First Unique Deck Game

[Music] welcome to GDC everybody today we're gonna talk about my project key Forge on board game designed a key forage creating the world's first unique deck game I'm Brad Andrews and let's get to it so first of all Who am I well as I just told you I'm Brad Andrews I'm a card game developer for Fantasy Flight Games I've been working there for about eight years now and during my time there I've worked on a lot of different projects so let's quickly talk about a few of them first game I worked on was Warhammer invasion one of our lcg's then another LCG kala Cthulhu Warhammer 40,000 conquest was the next game I designed working with Eric lang then Legend the Five Rings the card game with Nate French and Eric Dolman and last but not least I guess this game key Forge call of the archons with Richard

Garfield but for today's presentation we're in talked about a couple different things first of all what the heck is key Forge then I'll talk about some of the challenges we faced on making such a weird different game and we'll get exactly why this game is so weird in a minute then we'll talk about what's next for key Forge what's coming up in the future and where are we taking this concept and then hopefully at the end we'll have some time for questions so what is key Forge oki forges as you saw from the talks title the world's first unique deck game it's designed by legendary game designer Richard Garfield of Magic the Gathering netrunner and recently artifact fame it's it's very different than a traditional TCG in in the following ways so you know two decks have the exact same composition each and every deck has a unique name each and every deck has a unique card back and decks are not customizable these set it

apart and make it a really weird thing but how exactly do we want to make a game like this we started key Forge with a really dis philosophy and I think it's it's best put in a quote by Richard Garfield that we had in the wool book I've always been attached a good procedurally generated content game worlds generate in this way really feel as though they belong to me the player I am often discovering them as I play the designer didn't even know they existed often games with such content are extremely managed experiences everyone goes through the same storylines and can experience the same gameplay by making the same decisions everything they experience feels plans the contrast feels to me like the difference between exploring the jungle and walking in an amusement park now what he meant by this is when you go to an amusement park when you go to Disney World you know where all the rides are you get a map right at the beginning you know where to get on

the roller coaster where to do the tilt the world or to get your cotton candy and where to go to the bathroom and you know the kind of fun that you're going to have on all those things you know how you like roller coasters you know how you like the tilt-a-whirl but you walk through the jungle you go on a safari you're going down a trail and you're not quite sure what you're gonna see you're not sure what you're gonna experience but you know it's gonna be uniquely yours you could walk down that same trail a thousand times and each and every time you would see different things you would have a different experience Richard really wanted to take that concept and capture it in a game one where no matter what happened you weren't going to run into the same decks week after week you weren't going to have the same matchups week after week you weren't kind of know what you were going to run into every week and so that's where his impetus for key forage came from so what makes key for Janique each and every deck is an Archon now our Archon is our player insert it's the way

you interact with the game world and it's representative of your deck that character is made of a combination between a unique card back and a unique name now again each and every one of these completely distinct throughout the entire world now each deck is made out of 37 cards 12 of those cards are from three different houses the games actions and the last is an Archon card representing your character and on the back of it showing the decklist all the cards that are in your deck and their rarities now that deck consists of action cards artifacts creatures and upgrades just to show you guys but the kinds of variety we have in there now p4 just played very differently than many other TCG's oftentimes those games devolve into a attempt to beat the other player in the face if you will whereas key forage is you're trying to beat your

opponent to the punch it's a race to the finish and players will do that by collecting a resource or a victory point called amber now players will collect amber throughout the game by doing various things this includes using their creatures playing cards and a whole host of other ways but as players collect amber if they start their turn with six of them they will spend them and for Jackie the first player to Forge three keys wins the game however there's a there's a unique twist to key fork and that is that it doesn't have a resource like many other games that have them mana or credits or any sort of a point you spend to play cards and key forage you're instead going to choose one active house each turn and I told you earlier that each deck consists of twelve cards of three different houses which means that you're roughly activating one third of your deck every

turn when you have a house as your active house you're gonna be able to play cards at that house use cards and play and discard cards so you need to really be careful how you're managing both the cards that are in your hand and in play so you can have the maximum amount effect on the game space now let's talk a little bit about the flavor of the crucial rule like some key for it so key for takes place on a world called the crucible it's an artificial planet in the center of the universe and it's made by some mysterious beings that people don't really know that much about on they're called the architects at least that's what everyone calls them and the only native inhabitants of the crucible are the archons they show up mysteriously and do various deeds across the land and earn their names that way the other native thing to the crucible is amber as we've previously talked about it grows pretty much everywhere and is a psycho reactive

substance meaning that it responds to the hopes dreams and thoughts of the people that hold it or try to use it and of course the crucible being an artificial planet it is made of the pieces of hundreds of thousands of different worlds from across the universe now that means when you take a piece of the world put it on the crucible means that all the wildlife all the people all the different things come with it merging together and bringing countless alien cultures together now those cultures work together to try and survive such a weird and strange world and let's talk a little bit about those cultures first of which is the broaden art which are our Viking techno barbarians they're full of Giants and goblins and they believe that the strongest are the most right and the most correct and so that's how they live their society now mechanically that means they focus on fighting they love getting in a good

scrap and they have the powerful creatures that mean they need to back it up they also have lots of abilities to deal direct damage you know just to play in a card and dealing three damage to something the Dees are bizarre demons and imps that live below the surface of the crucible and they are entirely incapable of emotion themselves so they need to steal the emotions of others by capturing in an ammeter now their mechanics focus on board control and manipulation pairing effects making them kind of our catch-all control faction the logos my personal favorite are the mad scientists of the crucible they tinker and experiment constantly and have kind of forgotten what their previous bodies look like as they've modified themselves with cybernetics they're very much science for the sake of science asking can they rather than should they

mechanically they focus on hand management drawing cards putting cards aside for later discarding cards in their hand to improve their draw and cross faction play letting them continue to manage that hand and the board state they also have more artifacts than any other faction which makes sense for all the gizmos and gadgets they're always creating next a little closer to home is Mars which literally classic sci-fi Martians they live in a two-tiered society with the taller Martians being in control of the shorter ones and I don't know where that idea came from but they're very very xenophobic they don't at least the the taller ones are and they don't get along as well with everyone else on the crucible now this is reflected in their mechanics and that they're very self synergistic they work very well with themselves but not with other factions they also have powerful

abduction effects causing your opponent to capture their own amber so when you destroy their creatures you get it instead in addition to that they have key defense effects increasing the cost of your opponent's keys so they have to gather more and more amber in order to be able to beat you the sanctum a religious order of knights and spirits they live on floating cities throughout the crucible and try and maintain law and order the best they can and they're on a quest for enlightenment trying to figure out exactly why they're here on the crucible and gain transcendence from it mechanically they're very defence focused they have more armor in their faction than any other and armor allows them to shrug off damage they also to benefit that have a lot of healing so if you do manage to damage them they have the capability to heal that right up they'll also prevent their opponent from

being able to forge keys by taking their Amberleigh and holding on to it for a bit the shadows is a sneaky society of Thieves full of Dark Elves and they love love amassing treasure they can't get enough of it and more just the physical act of taking it and hoarding it rather than exactly what that treasure is so after coming to the crucible they fell in love with Amber now mechanically it makes sense they have amber control they are the best faction it's stealing amber from their opponent which is an extremely effective way of gaining it yourself and also hard to hit they have a lot of the key word illusive which means that your opponent will have to spend two creatures for every one they attack and they get some pinging damage for Harry in their opponent and doing a point of damage here and there and softening them up for some of their smaller creatures to finish off last but not least it's the

untamed they represent the flora and fauna of the crucible the beasts fairies and witches that live in the wilds either by choice or because they've been shunned by their communities and using the effects of amber they have mutated themselves often into bigger stranger and more powerful forms mechanically untamed is the best house at gaining amber just pure amber game and that coupled with their ability to instant key buy outside of that first step of a turn makes them a formidable force they also can get their cards back from the discard pile more frequently than any other so what challenges did we face during the development of this game so I'm going to talk to you about three different categories of challenges today the first of which being mechanical next we'll talk about the testing we did and then we'll talk about the user experience how we made this game work with such a strange and different concept

so mechanical what types of challenges did we face we had to figure out how we were gonna make decks that were entirely unique how we were gonna ensure that those decks were entirely unique how we were gonna figure out how each of these decks was going to be named and how we were gonna have a heck we were gonna possibly make card backs unique for every single deck out there so how does a document mean we have the almighty algorithm to thank for that the algorithm is a collection of tons of different rules regulations and restrictions that cause a deck to both be in the form that we desire when the deck when we hit the button to make a deck the first thing the algorithm does is collect all those rules gets them together some of these are as simple as like there's 37 cards in the deck and one Archon card there's three houses

those sort of things basic stuff all the way up to very very various interesting stuff I wish I could tell you more about but the next step is it's gonna choose houses for that tank and we this is important because those houses are going to dictate all the other choices that the algorithm is making when it's building a deck then it's going to start to generate some cards and it goes one faction at a time filling in the deck list with all of the different cards that can possibly be in it now when it's doing that each time it's generating a card it's making an era T calculation when it's rolling that card individually then it's looking if there's any variants of that card now this would be example that some cards and key Forge have more than one version of that card master of one two and three is a perfect example it's a card that all of the

numerical values on the card change for each different version and you never know which one you're gonna get now there's also some companion cards a card that always comes with a different card and if you look under the logos the center section there you can see that there is a time-traveller and help from future self there now those cards always come together you never see them separate and they have a strong synergy with one another and interact well now brace yourselves we got a math alert so if you have a weak Constitution I'd recommend leaving the room now we're going to talk about ensuring uniqueness now to do this we're first going to talk about the maximum number of decks there is 369 non fixed cards in key Forge and 36 card per deck which means we can take 369 to the 36th power which gives us 259 novemb ignant

alien decks now big number but most of these decks ignore our rules they're just an abstract possibility we have cards that are divided by house we have cards that are different rarities and we have a ton of other rules that dictate exactly what cards can possibly go into a deck now if we take all of those into consideration we get a much much more reasonable 104 octillion decks which is still enough for each person on the planet to have billions and billions of decks unique to them but how do we how do we how do we solve this we actually have a really interesting mathematical problem called the birthday problem and that states that if you get a group of people together such as we are here today that the possibility that they have a shared birthday between two of the people in a particular group is dictated by this equation now at 23

people in a room there's a 50% probability that two people have the same birthday and at 70 people there's a 99.9% probability so I think we probably have two people that have the same birthday in the room today now weíll analyze this for key forge where D is the number of possible decks and n is the number of decks we generate we can get a table that looks something like this so you can on the left is the number of decks we generate and in the center is the expected number of duplicate decks so you can see that it takes us making fifteen trillion decks before we can even expect to see one duplicate and I can tell you we haven't made that many but just in case we also do a uniqueness check that checks a code against every other deck that's been generated just to ensure that no two

decks have the same composition so there you go now in terms of making card backs we use a multi-part construction consisting of seven different pieces now first is the body the head the left and right arm the background the symbol in the center of the card and the color now these are all randomly generated because well there's there's no other way to to do this part of the card but it's very interesting because the only way we can make this game is through digital printing traditional printing methods for a card game or even a board game don't apply here because typically board games use a process called black plate replacement they print they're cyan magenta and yellow layers first and then they leave the black layer separate so that they can print in multiple different languages and they don't have to pay for more plates that way now we

have to use digital printing because key Forge well we're only printed in one of each deck we're not trying to print a ton of the same deck so that's the only way we could go additionally we do a uniqueness check for card backs by giving each and every piece of a card back a unique part of a code when you line those codes all up we can quickly check those numbers against one another and tell if we've used the same card back before now another unique thing we have to do is figure out how decks get names to do that we have built a series of blueprints that look sort of like this and by sort I mean exactly like this that generates all of those different names that you might have seen now those blueprints are filled out by word lists and we have 18 different ones I'd tell you exactly what they were but that I'd

be telling too much but those word lists are pulled in to fill in those blueprints based on the different qualities of the cards in the deck whether it's a card that's more aggressive deals damage prevents your opponent from forging keys all of those factor in to the eventual name of that Archon they qualify that deck for those different word lists and once the deck has gone through and checks for all the word list it qualifies for it then all the word lists get the blueprints get filled out and you can see we get stuff like enforcer Wizzle repo face the man who notably yearns for height it's not me and the king that surrounds porridge and again we take these and we do a uniqueness check to make sure we're not repeating ourselves and that each and every name is unique to the person that opens it now so that gets past some of our mechanical hiccups we had to figure

out solve but how did we test this game I'm going to talk about a little bit about our methodology and some of the questions we wanted to answer from our testing so in terms of methodology we used an advanced specialized technique we played it a lot we used over 40 different groups which is much more than typical for key Forge and we had over two years of testing both internally externally and through our beta tests this was intense period and we used a lot of different internal techniques to answer some of the most compelling questions to us about what makes key Forge tick those focused on player skill versus deck strength which is more influential to the excess so success of a player and to do that we broke it down into three different tasks the first two I'm going to tell you about right now and we'll get to the third in the third section

of the talk now how influential is that composition task one we created 60 different decks and divided those 60 decks into ten groups of six then we split those groups among our testing groups doing this four times for our 40 different groups now group a marksman group one would receive decks from set a and B two from B and C and so on and so forth this ensured that each deck existed in two different environments and we could see how its success in those different environments would vary and this would give us an idea of how important that composition was regardless of who was playing that deck now when we did this we had some really encouraging meta implications we had some decks that would dominate in both different groups they were in sums that would only dominate in one and some that

would dominate neither and to us that felt like man there's a lot of possibilities for key forage and your local meta is going to be so interesting and when you go to a different tournament that can be completely different that further is the idea of discovery that we wanted to bring forth for the players and it's always been at our core of what makes key forage so fun and interesting is there's always something to discover now task 2 we wanted to figure out how important is player skill so we had players take some of their favorite decks from the first part of testing and play a series of 20 matches with them now after 10 matches the players would switch decks that way we could see whether it was the player skill or the deck strength that was really the culprit behind the success and we often found that higher skilled

players would in fact win more games in total regardless of what deck they were using this is very encouraging because it meant that a player could in fact be more skilled at key forage than another which with a deck with a game such variety was really an important thing for us to find out now last but not least let's talk about the user experience how do you engage a player base with a game that's so bizarre and different how do you make them feel like this is something they can rely on and invest in we focused on ease of entry effects ability flexibility and product and making sure that players had tons of resources to aid their engagement involvement in key forge so first of all ease of entry started from day one in design we wanted to create a low barrier of entry just in how the game was put together we did this by creating a

streamlined series of decision points now this means that each turn you're selecting an active house this unclutter is a turn it makes it much more easy to process and go through because you're making your hardest decision right at the beginning after you've made that hard decision you're just left with a series of smaller lighter decisions of what order are you going to do things in this alleviates a lot of analysis paralysis that players face because once they've made that hard decision they just can go to the races we also used a lot of warm language on cards making it really easy to read and understand what effects did this is important because players can often feel intimidated when they pick up a card and they have no idea how it functions so that was something we made sure to focus on very early we also wanted to have simple card effects be it common now common cards are the most frequently pulled into decks and so by having more

simple effects they're ones that were easy to grok understand and play with we made sure that they kept the complexity of the game lower in fact the main philosophy behind rarity and key Forge is focused not on power level like in many other games but on how complex the card is how involve the card is for a player to use and how much game knowledge is were acquired that way as a player buys and continues their key forage career they can learn those complexities a small bit at a time each time they play a game and encounter a new rare then they'll learn something more about the game we often have players even now discovering new rares that they've never seen before which again it's another point of discovery and and fun for a player we also wanted to have ease of entry in product design we focused on a low cost for Dex early early on in the process we

decide determine we wanted Dex to be 995 so that anyone could come in pick up a deck of key forage and just start playing now also coupled with in only needing a single purchase to play key forage sure you can buy our starter set but any player is just as well-equipped by going to their store and picking up a single arc on deck and I've often heard players say something like hey I'll get your first key forage just implying that they'll walk into the store and both buy arc on Dex and sit down and play a new game having again that moment of discovery of this new deck we also included QuickStart rules both online and in the starter set that allow the player to get going in 10 to 15 minutes that way there's no there's no fumbling through a rulebook for an hour or two you can get going and start playing key forage as soon as possible this flexibility and product is also reflected in our enormous pile of

formats of which I'll share just a few with you guys today formats meaning how a player plays the game and what structure is a tournament set up in so sealed meaning that you show up to your game store you buy a single arc on deck you open it up and then you play a tournament with it this fosters so many different interesting discovery moments as you're learning how your deck plays along with everyone else that's learning how their deck plays our con format is our bringing your best deck and play a tournament with it format it's our most bread and butter vanilla format which more TCG players will be at ease with and will be able to understand adaptive is one of our more interesting formats in which players will bring their bring their decks they'll play a game with them and then they'll switch decks with their opponent playing a second game then if each player has won

one game at that point players will then bid chains for the deck that won both games we'll get to what chains are in a minute excuse me we also have survival format in which players will bring multiple decks and each time they lose with one of those decks that deck is out of the tournament the last player with decks left wins then reversal in which players bring a deck they feel like they can beat they know how to beat and at the beginning of each tournament round they'll switch decks with their opponent who has also brought a deck they feel like they can beat and you'll play against the same deck every single round of the tournament instead of playing and play with a new deck every round which has been a really fun and exciting format that has added a lot of value to decks that players may not feel like are up to par with some of their other decks meaning that more of your purchases are in fact valuable so I mentioned I talked

about chains and task 3 earlier and here they are chains are a handicapping mechanic we've added two key Forge and it's really important because it allows players to even the odds no matter what decks that you open you can always use chains to bring those decks into parity with one another so even if you only want to go out and buy two decks and play with a friend you'll be able to play those two decks no matter how good they are chains are a mechanic that restrict the number of cards you're allowed to draw at the end of your turn slowing down decks that earn more of them and giving decks that don't have chains a better chance against them there's also powerful cards in the game that cause a player to gain chains meaning that if you you push too hard you may be causing yourself you have the game because of it additionally our

weekly tournament type is called a chain bound tournament this lets us use chains to help regulate a local meta game every week that a player comes in place depending on how successful they are during that week their chains are added to their deck which will then be there in subsequent weeks of the tournament so as the week's go on the meta at the local level will be changed by this players that will rank up their decks in chains will then have to either continue playing with a handicap deck or switch to a different deck meaning that every week you come to play at Key Forge is a different different story giving you another moment of discovery we also wanted to give tons of different player resources and these all focused on our master vault app and website now master all app and website provides a reference hub for players a place to go and find all things key Forge there we track the

decks how many chains they have and the number of wins and losses they've had in tournament play it also shows off a mechanic we call the power level of the deck now this ensures that decks that are doing well are increasing in power levels and each different type of tournament or experience we have for players has a power level regulation in which you can't play decks above a certain power level in that that means for example we just had a vault tour this last weekend it's our premium play experience each deck that won that vault tour is now power level 8 meaning that those decks can't compete at those weekly chain bound tournaments anymore because those decks have proven exactly how powerful they are and we can let the chain bound tournaments that those decks would normally participate in evolve and change the master vault website also allows players to find stores with key forage events I'm also happy to say that that number of decks registered you see

dough in the corner past seventy seven hundred thousand just a couple days ago but what's next for key forge and that is our first set new set called age of Ascension just announced about a month ago now age of Ascension is going to add 204 new cards to the key forge environment but it's also going to bring along one hundred and sixty-six cards from the first set call it the archons now this is really intriguing and interesting because most other TCG's wouldn't be able to do something like this because players already have those cards they wouldn't want more of them but in key forge those 166 cards are given new life a new experience because there are alongside two hundred or four completely new cards the value of those one hundred and sixty-six cards changes inherently based on the other cards that are in your deck so you'll see powerful favorites but they're going to be in a completely new context allowing you to discover them

all over again additionally we also have a legacy card mechanic now legacy cards are rare cards that are from previous sets and they're pulled into the current set again only very rarely this means that every single card that is in call of the archons can be found in an age of Ascension deck and when a player finds one of those legacy cards it acts as another cool moment of discovery something new something different something they weren't expecting and so whenever you open a key for deck you never know what you're gonna get we've also introduced a bunch of new mechanics that you can check out the Fantasy Flight Games website to see what we've been premiering so far should release in the second quarter of this year and we're incredibly excited but that's it for me today we have time for some questions now there is a microphone stand right in the center of the room so

if you have any questions you'd like to ask please line up there and we'll get to it oh and please say your name and where you're from thank you very much hello my name is J I'm Southern California hey Jed I call you quick so yeah sure there was a meme not too long ago involving quick so the card mhm and someone's saying they wanted a person just like quick so and then underneath was like I am that person yeah did that actually happen no no no so they just made that meme for four good times based on the art i premiere dit earlier in one of my first slides but after you've been at Fantasy Flight Games for five years you get to put your face into a game and it just so happened that my five year lined up right when we were

starting development with Anki Forge so I'm the card quick so the adventurer in quotes thank you very much No thank you very much in the UK having developed a game like conquest in a very large predefined world and creating a game like key Forge in your own what do you find more enjoyable they're both special in their own way working on conquest was a big like lifelong dream for me I had been a really big names workshop fan for a long time and so getting into like really immerse myself in that world and and work with them was a really interesting experience but definitely one that was tailored in a way they definitely had things about their IP they wanted to make sure came forth regardless of any personal predilection notes I had but he

Forge allows you know me and my team to really do what we'd like and build a world that were happy with and it's been a ton of fun comparability I guess I prefer working on key Forge making my own stuff and making making the jokes I want to make to be honest too is very freeing experience and building something for yourself is also a real treat I hope at that answer is right thank you I'm from Richmond Virginia I have two questions oh oh so the first question is the beginning of your talk was really exciting because I did not know a lot about the world building until those few slides and I was I was actually thinking back to the cards and there's not a lot of world like there's not a lot of like flavor text in it so was that like a very deliberate decision from your team

because you you you you are focusing on uniqueness so that's the first question and then the second question is how do you balance the the legacy cards because it's pretty elegant how you have sort of the more powerful decks come to retirement by themselves so is there like a really strict time frame for the legacy cards I do you watch the made it in real time or is it just a replay testing mm-hmm okay so first question was the of the flavor yes a lot of flavor on the cards I learned everything it was too so we we use flavor very deliberately in key Forge we wanted to make sure that one we kept the the lightness and the approachability of the universe so where we could inject humor was often a time where we decided that we wanted flavor text to be here there's a couple of different bits of world-building here and there Oh mm bagel this morning but we also

wanted to make sure the cards felt clean and approachable so we made sure to leave some cards just very open and and I get readable so that when you're picking up a deck for the first time fanning out your cards you don't feel intimidated second question in terms of legacy cards we did a lot of testing both with decks from the first set and X from the second set ensuring that both would be good in the same environment and so that helped with a lot of our legacy testing to make sure that we weren't bringing anything forward that we read we also made sure to pair most cards that we saw like and ensure that there wasn't anything going to be ridiculously broken just in terms of looking at the pool all together yeah yes yeah I was I was thinking more like maybe like five years down the line how many legacy cards would play survive but yeah and we'll figure that out as we

go I think you know that's one of the things about key Forge is it is a big experiment it's very different it's very strange and so we're figuring out a lot of stuff as we go as well hi my name is miles I'm from here in San Francisco I'm interested in the digital printing aspect of the games for us firstly from a production standpoint how you're able to keep the cost down to $10 a deck when obviously digital printing is a lot more expensive than messes like you know mass production printing and then secondly as a designer you know is fantasy flight looking at other games using this sort of thing because obviously it opens up a world of possibilities so in terms of digital printing we did a lot of investing investigating into exactly how we were gonna make this deck and game and so that was one thing we spent a lot of time on especially the production department we but we finally found a digital printer in Germany

Ryan buy this mad German scientist essentially trying to pioneer exactly how we were gonna put these decks together and he got this insanely interesting assembly line which I wish I could talk more about figured out and has tons of different uniqueness checks all the way through and essentially each and every deck is assigned a code at the beginning and that code is rechecked every single step of the process I can't go to too much into it just because again that's that's part of our trade secret but that's that much I can tell in term what was your second question again just whether Fantasy Flight is interested in Wow yes yes yes sorry short-term memory and one up definitely we're very interested in the space it creates and you know as the talk is it's the world's first unique deck building game I would imagine we'd want to explore the space in the future especially since we

put all the groundwork in but I can't say anything about any future plans at the moment okay thank you hi I'm Quinn from Atherton California just south of here and my question is so the kind of the selling point of this is jac uniqueness but I suspect that a lot of players will at some point kind of want to maybe start designing their own decks putting them together like a traditional card game and it seems like that's something that wouldn't is not that hard to support given you know people could take cards from various decks and sleeve them but the concern with that is that maybe that might undermine your business model a little bit with people wanting to you know have to buy several decks to kind of find one they like and I'm wondering how if that sort of start started to happen or a community started to grow up around that how you would support that or not support that and what you're thinking on that is my take on players building their own decks is that we've given them the tools and if

that really is something they want to do then I'd say go for it if you if they want to create the rules for it and they want to do that that's that's that's that that's their own thing I feel like the way we present key Forge is the most exciting and compelling way that the game can be played and I would encourage players to do that but far be it from me to tell players exactly how to play their games in terms of official support again we believe that the the format that key Ford is in is the strongest format and that is the one we're determined to support but again who knows everything is possible Thanks I suspect that it would be because you didn't really test for that that the constructed format would be kind of degenerate which is probably why it wouldn't likely there's a lot of back-end rules that players can't see that regulate how decks are put together and whatnot and obviously players could make their own deck building

restrictions or changes but it's not something we're in in pursuing ourselves but again if the player community wants to go for it go for it all right thank you hi my name is Lionel I'm from New York City I wanted to know I have a couple questions actually but the first of all I wanted to know what what are your thoughts on procedurally generating the cards themselves during development and what it looks like for the future for that as far as procedural generation of actual cards it's it's definitely something that's been really intriguing and we talked a lot of a lot during the development of the game and it's something Richards definitely interested in pursuing but the exact implementation of it is pretty difficult and not something we've figured out yet but it is something we're definitely looking at and hopefully we'll see what happens in the future I wish I could say more but how did you handle the perhaps disparity

between a player's play style and the play style of their deck mm-hmm definitely great question so a player's play style versus the play style of the deck and yeah it can be really really intriguing how you can pick up a deck and it plays either exactly like you'd want it to or completely differently you I find that the best combinations are when you can find a deck that fits your own play style but one of the things we wanted to make sure through development is that there were tons of different play styles available through those randomize processes and I think we've achieved that there's lots of different types of decks out there lots of decks doing well tournaments even even decks that go counter to what the meta says is best for example with the vault tours that just happened this weekend shadows has been very much thought of as the best house but the deck that one in Seattle didn't have had shadows in it at all and so players are scratching their heads

and trying to figure out that aspect of the game and so yes you can find decks that aren't going to be exactly your play style but I think your most effective continuing to look for one that is thank you you're welcome hey Brad hey handsome hey how's it going Brad this is Jonathan we used to work together it's true but so my question is actually about the design of the starter sets in the original call of the archons for the new player experience you included two non-randomized decks that were designed to be that were intended to be teaching decks I understand that in the newest set that is no longer the case that it is just two completely unique decks is that true that's true yeah so what motivated kind of that decision to change the format of those starter decks and include like more tokens instead of those two kind of theoretically generic teaching decks yes so as John put in the first set we included in the course at

two non-randomized decks the only two round randomized decks which aren't legal in tournament play that have our hand picked and hand designed to be easier for players to to use in play with this includes additional reminder text on the cards to explain mechanics and these are designed to be played along with the QuickStart now our feeling for the game was always that very much like many other TCG's players would not be typically learning through the rulebook they'd use it as more of a reference which is why we again have a rule book and a QuickStart the rulebook has all of our FAQ all of our clarifications there so when the game was first coming out players were going to need that to get a base install of players that knew how to play the game then moving forward our biggest portion of players were not going to be wanting those starter decks they already knew how to play they were looking for those new cards and those new experiences so

we focused on more tokens and more things that a player that's already invested in key forage would be interested in and could use to teach new players so that that became our motivation additionally in the future by not setting a trend of doing those starter decks we free ourselves up for different exciting things to be in those starter sets giving us more just wiggle room with our budgets hi my name's Thomas I'm from Cincinnati a question on your testing methodology so I have a deck that's the library access draw your deck for three keys in one turn and our store opened a double horseman deck where those sort of combinations specifically built during your testing phase and how do you feel about them right now are they just an acceptable consequence of the variability of what decks can be and

with the specifically draw your deck loop type of decks is that informing any future design on trying to limit that or lean into that design space you know it's a really interesting intriguing part of design space you know we never even talked about the double horseman decks when we were working in the game and so it was kind of a pleasant surprise and you know I printed one out and tested it and it was fun and and powerful but definitely not the most powerful deck I had experienced I also happen to open up one of the library access combo decks on our stream a while back and you know I lost that game and it was really cool to me to have this combo deck be present in the environment because combo decks are always something I used to play when I used to play a lot of TCG's that was that was a fun archetype however we wanted to make sure that that archetype didn't dominate and has weaknesses and that's the key

combo decks are good for an environment only win there's counter play when there's counter play that exists then those combo decks don't run rampant there aren't the the be-all end-all and again our results from this weekend's fall tour is very promising that those combo decks didn't do that well they did okay they were fun I saw one that went for and - I believe in eindhoven but they weren't they weren't they weren't bringing home the bacon every time because the consistency is is important and those combos can be slow they can be raced out and so that that's I think an important part and so I'm interested in having experiences indexed like that that feel like they have that kind of synergy yes I'm interested but ones that make other decks obsolete know that I think that is not something we're interested in and as we continue designing and developing they gain

something we want to keep a close eye on thank you hi I'm I'm Hans from Stockholm Sweden I want to ask a couple of questions about the the algorithm there I realized it's the sort of secret secret sauce to everything but I'm sure we all want to go home and can I try to make our own right how complex is that how many weird little rules are there in there so the algorithm is is a little bit of two stage there is a long series of rules that dictate the exact deck construction and then there is a longer list of rules that apply to individual cards and so we have kind of a two-stage process there in that a deck is generated and then it's checked against those individual card rules and if it violates those it's kicked out so in terms of how complicated and pretty complicated it's

it's definitely a sight to behold and so when I when I start to dive into that algorithm when I start to work on a new deck or a new set because we make sure to look at that every time we make a new set and sometimes we'll need to add a new rule to even on that the base list of rules we have had to add rules to be like okay I made this rule to accommodate this single card but it's important that it functions exactly this way so man I wish I could answer more about how complicated is seven said uncomplicated with right and just a quick photo like if you find a combo or a mechanic they're super overpowered do you balance that only through frequency in the algorithm we can we can tackle it in many different ways if we find it in playtesting we can always alter the card and change it algorithm wise yeah if we need to we can we can dictate okay only one of this card can be in a deck and it would be a

combo if there was ever to and from that we can you know mitigate that type of thing so we can take a ton of different strategies that are our novel to a game like key Forge that you couldn't normally take you can't or would be intrusive to take because in a TCG a lot of players will just like when you're like okay you can only run one of this card but if there's never more than one of that card anyways then players will perceive it very differently and as as a good friend once told me perception is often reality alright thank you love the game thank you very much I come from a technical background actually I'm a game developer who specialized and appreciate procedural gaming and I was wondering because you talked about the gazillion decks you can produce with the algorithm what were the challenges to actually start making the first rules I mean we

all have that white paper or sin syndrome why we want to try something but what was your first step on that and how did you actually manage to go through it so some of the earliest steps we we took was determining how many houses we wanted in the game and then how many houses we wanted in a deck and I don't remember the exact combination a long discussion with Richard about this at one point but with seven houses and three in each I'm trying to member the probability that when you sit down to play with someone that you're sharing one house is I think in like 60 to 70 percent range and because of that it means that you'll have this very interesting overlap between those houses and how they interact with one another if you have say shadows overlapping you'll have this really interest game where you guys are stealing amber back and forth trying to figure out who can come out on top and forge those keys and those different overlaps will create

really compelling experiences and so that's some of the earliest stuff we knew about when Richard originally brought the game to us you know it had seven houses and three houses of each and even the idea of having 36 cards 12 of each would give you know enough variety that you'd see and there'd be enough just base material filling out that deck that you'd get that variety that you wanted so a lot of it was from a mathematical like what makes sense to create good experiences and that's where we kind of you know put our first marks on that white page if you will and just to finish up thank you for bringing back later into the vision of the five ring it's a game I really like then you should an awesome game thank you very much hi I'm Kara I'm from Nashville Tennessee I've got kind of general questions about just the card development process the pipeline of that so to speak from just

the general idea of how what is the cycle for the development of a single card as well as in the development cycle have been a set is it when you guys are doing testing are you testing individual cards that you're introducing with a new type of mechanic or are is it that you create the set as a whole and then do another round of testing to see how the set actually functions together so with key Forge it's very much a design the whole set in design the whole environment because unlike most other TCG is key fors about in crafting in those environments it's about crafting each house in a set to feel the way we want it to and then generating a ton of decks to make sure that that house is consistently feeling that way so when we've created you know call of the archons logos play as a particular way but ascention logos might have a different take on it it might play a different way and might have a twist on what you even come to know and love and so crafting that environment

first for this game is integral in terms of individual testing we do do some of that especially with the amount of rares that we have because as many players have noticed there are more rares than any other type of card which is bizarre and different for a game anyways but we often will ask players to take decks that we've generated and play some games and then swap out some of the rares in their deck with some of the other rares in that house to try and give additional testing to those cards one because of their complexity level and two I mean just because they're cool fine all right thank you so much thank you hey I'm Daniel from New York this isn't so much as a question is just for everybody in the audience who maybe hasn't played it before I'm a volunteer at the shut up and sit down game lounge and we have key forage over there and volunteers would love to play it with you so just for everybody in the

audience thank you very much we have time for I think one more question which is good because it looks like there's one more person in line yeah I'm also Daniel but from San Francisco how did you guys handles prize support for the tournaments and stuff it's most card games would give like foils and alternate art cards but it seems like it would be difficult for a game like this yeah so let me let me pop back a couple slides to our master vault app and website because you can take your decks the two own and register them on the master vault app to your personal profile and that for every deck that you register you're going to get our digital currency called an amber shard now when you're participating in a tournament you're going to get additional amber shards for each round that you play and win it now our amber shards can be spent at our prize walls at all of our vaults were events to get various things like

hoodies pins play mats all sorts of different key forged merchandise there's even a the top level is a customized key for a gaming table that players can purchase if they have enough amber shards so that is how we distribute prizes for key forage is a prize wall that you can go to and enjoy it encourages players to come to our vault tours and you know have a good time and pick up some great prizes it also means that a player that's at their store every week playing games can be just as rewarded as a player that goes out and can win any tournament okay thank you thank you guys all very very much for having me today it's been a pleasure enjoy the rest of your GDC