The history of key forge is a strange one. The trading card game came out in 2018 with a lot of fanfare (including from us) and features a procedural algorithm that alone can generate around 32 billion different decks of cards. The appeal was the surprise factor, as not even the game’s developers knew what was in each box. Publisher Fantasy Flight Games quickly gained a foothold in hobby shops and established a burgeoning organized gaming community; The game felt like it was poised to be the next big CCG. Then, in September 2021the publisher announced that it was no longer able to produce cards.
The message then was cryptic. Fantasy Flight simply said that the game’s sophisticated algorithm “Broken‘ and that it had to be rebuilt ‘from the ground up’. That may well be true. But there was a much bigger problem, Christian Petersen, the company’s co-founder, said in a recent interview with Polygon: All the software engineers who developed the algorithm in the first place were now working for another company.
Petersen founded Fantasy Flight in 1995. The Minnesota-based publisher made their name with Petersen’s own strategy game. Twilight Empire, widely regarded as one of the greatest and most complex board games of all time. From that single super popular game grew one of the leading tabletop publishers in the United States, responsible for key forge
In 2014, Asmodee, a large multinational company with dozens of popular board games under its umbrella, snapped up Fantasy Flight. Petersen left not long after to start a new company called Strange Stars. The engineers who could have helped rebuild key forge for Asmodee worked for him now. So he did what any good businessman would do: he made an offer to buy back the rights key forge.
“Asmodee got delayed again for another six months or so,” Petersen said. “Maybe they didn’t like the amount of money I was willing to pay. Eventually they came back and we made the deal this June.”
Now Petersen, who in recent years has developed software and manufacturing systems for the board game industry, among other things, is back in the publishing business. His first product is called KeyForge: Winds of Exchangeand at the time of publication, it has earned more than $1 million in crowdfunding on Gamefound.
Is that enough money to rebuild the algorithm and send the game back into the wild? Only Petersen knows for sure. In any case, he told Polygon he firmly believes in it key forge is still worth saving. So does the game’s new producer, Michael Hurley. Also a veteran of Fantasy Flight Games, he was among the leaders in the space, as co-creator Richard Garfield (Magic the Gathering) first provided a prototype with — what else? — a heavily modified Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
“There [were] a lot of macros in there,” Hurley said, drawing out the words to emphasize the size of the affected file. “It contained a list of all card names that [Garfield] designed for the game. […] When he wanted to create a deck, he just ran some scripts and it basically generated a list of the cards that were in the deck. [Then] He would draw the cards the spreadsheet told them and then put them together.
“He would just do that repeatedly until he did it […] a few dozen different prototype decks he made that way.”
But not all decks really worked very well in the original design.
“He originally wanted all decks to be like this Completely randomly,” Petersen said, “so you have no idea what you’re getting. But we said, ‘No, that’s not going to work because there’s so much variation in what you get that it’s going to be a problem for the players.'”
They ended up with a much more structured system – recipe is probably a better word – for deck building. That key forge Algorithms, new and old, both work the same way. You first draw 12 existing cards from each of the three houses, which are themed factions that add texture to the lore in the game. The deck is then given a name and a unique image on the back of each card, also generated by the same algorithm. But not every deck is created equal, and higher-performing decks are adjusted (much like a handicap score in golf) for competitive play.
But every once in a while, the algorithm does something unusual and creates an ultra-rare card called Maverick. This is a map that was originally intended to be part of one house but has been rearranged to be part of another. Mavericks even get their own icon printed on the rim to summon them. When present in a unique deck, misfits can become the core of powerful and unexpected strategies that are difficult for other decks to counter.
Sample cards from the proposed new edition of key forge decks.
Petersen says the algorithm rebuilding project is progressing well and should be ready in time for the next batch of procedurally generated maps, Mavericks and all KeyForge: Winds of Exchange in January 2023. Will it be soon enough to give the game a second chance at success? He remains hopeful but pragmatic.
“The big question is, is the audience still there?” said Petersen. “It is very difficult to resume an injured game. It is almost impossible. I’ve had many times in my career where we [have said], ‘This game was injured. It hobbles along. It’s mostly dead. And we love the game, we think it’s really great. But what can we do?’ In most situations, it’s just not worth it. […] Why try to revive it [when it] simply doesn’t make economic sense?”
That crowdfunding campaign ends on September 26th. However, expect pre-orders to open shortly after it ends and continue for many months until release.
