Disney Lorcana (Ravensburger and Disney, 2023)
This post is a surrender.
This was supposed to be an in-depth review of Disney Lorcana, the new collectible card game from Disney and Ravensburger. I've spent the weekend rolling around a total of about two thousand words between four or so drafts of this review, every time ending up in the same rabbit holes, getting more and more agitated about definitions and boundaries.
Each of those drafts started with these words: "Lorcana is boring."
Later ones started with: "Lorcana is boring and irritating to me."
I'm not going to bore you with the definition of a dudebasher. I'm not going to go deep into game lineages. I promise that I will be brief on this one; I could wax poetic for a long, long time on any one of these points, but I promised myself to put this into the world, and here it is, as brief as I can be:
Lorcana is Boring And Full Of Baggage
Lorcana is boring. It's Magic: the Gathering, almost all the way, if unoriginal and uninspired in its cribbing. The differences are minimal and, in my opinion, do not change the experience significantly for the better.
Yup: not their "solution" to the eternal land problem; not their "reduced" competition, which is apt to provoke board stalls; not the removal of off-turn interaction, which means players have to spend decent percentages of game time waiting for their turn to arrive. With these changes and the low availability of synergies in The First Chapter, the only set currently out, the state of the game is such that it manages to be both slow and snowball-y at the same time.
And by building a game on the bones of Magic, it has inherited all the accessibility problems that that game possesses. Most of what's important to win a game of Lorcana is just not available for a new player to know. As in Magic, it lies in card assessment, in tempo, in the disproportionate value of a single card draw — all things that require additional learning that is not apparent from the board itself; nor hinted by game mechanics; nor touched in any of the Quick Start rulebooks or online instruction videos I've watched so far.
Far from me to weigh here on how desirable is to have an environment where these non-tangible, non-readable variables are important (I do not think it is, but there are definitely fuzzy design intent lines on what skills a game is trying to test) — but that we are in the year of our desolation 2023 still reproducing these accessibility issues, without much in the way of thought or change, really goes counter to the spirit of the messaging that Ravensburger and the designers keep giving in interviews and marketing: that this is a card game for newcomers, for people who haven't played a card game before, and that it needs to be welcoming, somehow.
I personally would not recommend this to a new player at all.
Violence: A Fig Leaf
One additional thing my drafts tried to touch on is the issue of in-game representations of violence. This is perhaps one of the most subjective areas of this review, but I believe it bears mentioning.
A point usually made against Magic's — and xCGs' — friendliness to a wide public is often the violence inherent in their themes. While none of the marketing or interviews I could find explicitly weigh in on this, Lorcana makes language choices to tone down or eliminate violent terminology in the game itself. A character doesn't take damage to toughness, but to willpower; it's banished, not destroyed; it's challenged, not attacked.
While superficially inoffensive, these changes are also disappointing.
That's because, while the words used to express the existence of violence in the game itself have been sanded down considerably, the design is still that of a dudebasher, and the core interaction mechanic is still through and through an attack to remove an opposing resource that's represented by a living creature, often a sapient person. There's no change in the metaphor, only couching in terms that are nonviolent.
So, in practice: the theming in the game itself is as anodyne and unaffecting as any Disney property, but the gap between the apparent intent in Lorcana, and its execution — behind what it believes is violence, enough to try and hide it, and what it believes is not violence, such that it is kept — is a signal, to me, of at best an uncaring incuriosity, and at worst the same kind of uncritical value-washing that is so apt at smuggling conservative politics into its source material.
A Conclusion
It's really hard to read this whole affair as anything other than an attempt to 'fix' an existing card game design by going down a list of preconceived notions and making the least exciting and least impactful changes to each of them. In fact, by doing so, it ensures the bones are solid: Lorcana is not a bad game for being, well, much less exciting Magic.
But: to say it is original is such a stretch it snaps down under the weight of any scrutiny. To say that it is welcoming to new players belies an absence of understanding of what makes a game accessible to nontraditional audiences.
The removal of the idea of violence is not helpful when the metaphor of performing violence persists; the game is not easier for having fewer mechanics when the basics of playing an effective game require the equivalent of reading 40-60% of Magic's Level One: The Full Course; not to mention the absence of effective organized play — how do you build community at local game stores, increasingly the one remaining place where these kinds of interests can flourish into camaraderie, when the product has been distributed so tightly and has enabled such speculation that prices now carry markups of 50-100%?
People taking Magic's bones and boiling them to make new soup was not new when Legend of the Five Rings and Magi-Nation were new games, and will not stop when the last Sorcery: Contested Realms card gets printed.
But, in 2023? Lorcana? This Lorcana?!?
Come on.
Here, Some Alternatives:
If you want a good experience that is definitely not Magic, Netrunner's move to a community-supported nonprofit with a good amount of queer people in it lets it both be a game that cannot be understood with the same tools as Magic is, and at the same time is free to tackle the ideas of representation and violence more thoughtfully. It is rare that theming in an extensible card game can get so close to representing real lived experiences and violence that's not just personal, but systemic.
If you're still looking for Games that are Not Magic but like your violence to be at most cartoonish, or still want the collectibility or resale angles, the Pokémon Trading Card Game has been there for decades now. And, if you're okay with the representation of personal violence, Flesh and Blood is such a fresh take on give-and-take brawling that perhaps it could be someone's cup of tea. Finally: Marvel Snap is mechanically so different it also bears mention here as a breath of fresh air.
Conversely, if you want a good experience that is like Magic but different, heck: there is no shortage of that on the market. If you want something fun, unpredictable and still somewhat interactive, Hearthstone is perhaps one of the best Magic simplifications around; likewise, Runeterra adds just a little more complexity and interactivity. If you want an experience that makes sense on tabletop, Keyforge and Alpha Clash have novel takes on the same problem areas that Lorcana is trying to work in that work better for their purposes. And, if you can stomach waifu art, Grand Archive is perhaps the newest complete package, with a more accessible distribution setup and much lower costs.