Keyforge is the latest card game that looks like an endless money sink from Fantasy Flight, of Android:Netrunner fame. So probably best to get a few comparative notes out of the way first: 1) No, this is *nothing* like a living card game or collectable card game.
2) Yes, you can spend £stupid on Keyforge, but I don’t think you’ll want to. The big novel feature with Keyforge – opposed to pretty much anything else – is that every single deck is unique. And you can’t change it, or tell what you’re going to get before you open it.
In theory that means that any deck you get might be utter junk, but of the ten-or-so I’ve seen so far, all of them seem ok. All of them have the potential to explode into a spectacular chain of combos, drawing forth more “oohs” and “aahs” than your average bonfire night spectacular, but all of them have also fizzled like a disappointing roman candle stuck in your back garden in a persistent drizzle.
It’s a hugely swingy game, and honestly you have to be on-board with that. It’s all part of the fun. In any other game that involves you buying ever-increasing numbers of cards you’d play one game with a deck like these and then spend hours optimising some of the.
“interesting” choices out. Not in Keyforge: you’re stuck with what you have. And that’s wonderful. I love Netrunner – I really, really love Netrunner – but I don’t play it as often as I’d like to because I just don’t have the spare time to spend putting together a deck, and on top of that I’m really not that good at it.
So when I do, the quality is pretty hit-and-miss – and then I’m stuck with a potentially rubbish deck (which is all my fault). If it goes badly, I’m not likely to play again on the off-chance I just got unlucky, or played the game poorly – I’ve got to invest another chunk of time trying to fix the deck first.
I’m not saying this isn’t fun – it is! – but it’s not playing a game, and it’s an investment of time, and of money because you need the card pool to work with. I’m aware that Netrunner is now sadly out of print, and that’s a discussion for another day, but it’s just an example I use because I play it more than the likes of Mage Wars, MTG, Lord of the Rings LCG, Game of Thrones and the like.
The same applies to any card game where you have to customise a deck. They’re not just a game; they’re (to some extent) a lifestyle. It’s also terrible. Going back to Netrunner again, I recently played a game that was so tense I had to stop to dry my hands because I genuinely had sweaty palms.
Now, one of the problems with Keyforge is that the theme is paper thin, but I think this goes deeper: I’d invested time and effort into making this deck. It was on a knife edge between working and failing.
You can’t get the same tension without investing yourself in the game, and the pre-packaged popcorn of Keyforge doesn’t do that for you. And here’s where I think Keyforge really suffers: It also does almost nothing in therms of theme or gameplay to earn that sense of investment from you.
Looking at the theme, I can’t even see what Keyforge is aiming for. The cards look fine (though there’s some poor graphic design choices which makes a couple of the types of card difficult to distinguish) and yes, I can see that mechanically the flavour of the various houses marries up with the card abilities but it just feels like playing cards that do stuff in a game.
Which seems an odd statement, but think about it: Unless you’re playing a super abstract game, generally the playing pieces, the cards, the board, are stand-ins for something else. You’re not just playing a card, you’re summoning a wolf or carefully securing your server with countermeasures, or whatever.
I mean, yes, you’re playing a card but there’s more to it. It’s contributing to the story of the game. With Keyforge, I can honestly say that the flavour washes off at the lightest touch. It’s all mechanics.
There’s no story there, and no emotion. The mechanics do work though. The chains of cards you can put together are fun. It’s undeniably satisfying to throw a ludicrous combo down, wipe out the opposing forces, capture all their aember and end the turn sitting on a small mountain of the stuff as you invite your opponent to do something about it with a smug “check” – and it’s also strangely entertaining then being on the receiving end of a similar stream of nonsense as your mountain of aember gets levelled in the very next turn.
But mechanics are the word for it – although you do have a ton of meaningful choices to make each turn, starting with which house to play, as your turn begins you’ll have a bunch of cards that the game makes available to you.
You’re going to essentially pull a few levers and the clockwork of the game is then going to spin off and do a whole bunch of stuff and then you’re done. If you’re looking for any mind games, bluffing or the like.
look elsewhere. But. Sometimes you just want to open up a game, and play without high stakes, without preparation, and without stressing yourself out trying to tell bluff from double bluff. Sometimes you just want to throw cards down and laugh at the stupid overpowered nonsense that you’re each going to get to do and that – thanks to the wonders of having totally different decks – you couldn’t even see coming.
And under those circumstances, Keyforge definitely is worth taking a look at. I’ve played a lot over the past few weeks, purely because it’s very very easy to get to the table. I can play against my 11-year-old son and it’ll be just as much fun as playing against an adult and a lot of that is because it doesn’t rely on mind games, doesn’t rely on deckbuilding and most of all because, despite expectations, despite each card breaking the rules a different way, it’s really quite simple.
Now for a word of warning that has nothing to do with the game, but everything to do with the package you get when you buy it. Shamefully, Fantasy Flight have once again produced a starter set that is incomplete.
They’ve got form for this in the past – releasing starters where you need more than one to play without running out of components – but honestly, releasing a set without the rules in it? That’s absurd.
Yes, the rules are available online, but a physical rule book makes learning the game so much easier. It’s no fun to be mucking around on a tablet or phone trying to figure out rules, and it could have been solved so easily by just putting the rules in the starter set.
I can’t understand what they were thinking. You also get a bunch of tokens in the starter set, but again – these are incomplete. There aren’t, for example, armour tokens. Depending upon the decks you end up with, armour is going to be changing a lot, and having tokens to track it with is almost a necessity, but you’re going to have to dig out something for yourself to do it.
Given that you’re going to have to find the rules online, and given that you have to augment the bits of cardboard, you may as well just dispense with the starter set entirely. Pick up a couple of the archon decks, find a few tokens to use as power, armour and health counters and you’re away.
It’s a much cheaper way of trying the game out and if you like it you can make a much nicer set of tokens and keys than you’ll get in the starter set anyway. If you’re going down that route, here’s a tip for the chain counter.
In the starter set, you get a chain counter card (as you gain chains, your card draw is reduced so you need to keep track of this). I had thought these are the only items that aren’t easily replaced by coloured counters or the like.
But! Get a set of d6. Use them to track the number of chains you have (so, for example, if you have 8 chains, you’ll stick two d6 on your deck, one showing 6, one showing 2). The number of chains is the sum of the numbers on the dice, but the card draw reduction you suffer is the number of dice you have on your deck.
This has become super long, so I suppose a summary is in order: Keyforge is good. Not great, but good. It’s very lightweight compared to other games which expect you to keep buying cards, but with that comes accessibility and relatively low-effort rewards.
The lack of depth is an issue – probably not one that will stop you having fun, but it limits how deep it’s possible to dive into the game. It’s candyfloss compared to the rich Sunday dinner you might have been expecting.
Which is fine if you like candyfloss! But you probably won’t want to be eating lots of it in one sitting. And the starter set is almost insultingly poor – so pick up a couple of these Archon decks instead if you want to try it out.