KeyForge, the procedurally generated CCG, has a new publisher

key forgethe trading card game designed by Magic the Gathering Creator Richard Garfield, changing hands. Fantasy Flight Games has sold the property to Ghost Galaxy, a new company founded by Christian T. Peterson, the founder of FFG. Ghost Galaxy announced the announcement in a blog post from June 22nd which became public on Tuesday.

first release 2018, Keyforge: Call of the Archons caused quite a stir when it was unveiled at Gen Con in Indianapolis. As the world’s first unique deck game, every single deck is completely different – right down to the graphics and stats on each of its cards. The secret sauce is a powerful computer algorithm

created by a team at FFG capable of producing 32 billion different decks. However, this algorithm broke down sometime in 2021. His failure, never fully explained, started the game indefinite pause from Sept.

“We just don’t have the ability to make new decks right now,” FFG wrote at the time. “The deck building algorithm for key forge is broken and needs to be rebuilt from scratch. This is not an easy or quick process, so the game will pause for a while. […] We continue to ask for your patience while we work to rebuild the unique deck engine in preparation for the game’s relaunch.”

When asked to comment, Ghost told Galaxy Polygon that its approach to procedural deck generation will be as robust as the original implementation.

“Ghost Galaxy is creating its own suite of software that will be able to generate new ones key forge decks. Our team of software engineers is already working on this project, but we expect it will take a few more months to complete,” Ghost Galaxy’s Michael Hurley said in an email. “Our new software will be able to do everything that FFG’s software can. The possible number of unique decks in key forge depends entirely on the size of the card pool within a given set. As we plan to continue creating new cards, the theoretical maximum number of unique decks will always increase.”

Ghost Galaxy is part of a small cadre of organizations funded in part by Strange Starsa venture capital firm with investments in virtual reality, manufacturing and software.