The quest to save KeyForge, the first procedurally generated collectible card game

polygon.com:

The story of KeyForgeis a strange one. The collectible card game arrived with much fanfare in 2018 (including from us), boasting a procedural algorithm capable of generating some 32 billion different decks of cards all on its own. The allure was its surprise factor, since not even the game’s developers knew what was inside each box. Publisher Fantasy Flight Games quickly got a foothold in hobby stores and established a nascent organized play circuit; the game felt like it was poised to become the next big CCG. Then, in September 2021, the publisher announced it was no longer able to produce any more cards.

The messaging at the time was cryptic. Fantasy Flight simply said that the game’s sophisticated algorithm was “broken” and that it needed to be rebuilt “from the ground up.” That may certainly be true. But there was a much bigger problem, said Christian Petersen, the company’s co-founder, in a recent interview with Polygon: All of the software engineers that helped make the algorithm in the first place now worked for a different company.

Petersen founded Fantasy Flight in 1995. The Minnesota-based publisher earned a name for itself with Petersen’s own strategy game, Twilight Imperium, widely considered to be one of the largest and most complex board games ever made. That single super-popular game gave rise to one of the premiere tabletop publishing houses in the United States, responsible for KeyForge of course, but also for other games that were based on franchises like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and many more modern classics devised by its own creative teams.

In 2014 Asmodee, a large multinational corporation with dozens of popular board games under its umbrella, snatched up Fantasy Flight. Petersen left not