Ghost Galaxy has taken over Keyforge from Asmodee which puts the crazy fuckn firesale that we just saw from them into context.
Read about it here. It’s still Richard Garfield and Christian Petersen and some of the original game developers. I’m curious to see what happens next. We haven’t played in awhile but one of our game club members at work donated a bunch of decks to the game library, so I will likely be teaching the game soon.
We really had fun with this game casually. I thought the tournament thing at Gencon the first Summer was bullshit as it wasn’t a tournament, it was just a table with players that wanted to play with the most apathetic hosts ever–though they did have the awesome vending machine with decks.
Hence this is good news, but then I came upon this what in the flying fuck:
“Second was the excruciating loss in ’21 of the software engine that made it impossible for FFG/Asmodee to render new KeyForge decks.”
How in the shit does this happen? I’ve been in software development for almost my entire career and I’ve never seen or heard of a software engine being “lost.” I dug into it more and here is what is conjectured to have happened. Apparently a disgruntled employee burned the software that made the decks when fired. It’s quite difficult to do this when there is normal server redundancy and back ups, but a determined person with the correct access levels could pull off deletion of all backups, source code, etc. Why would anyone do this? Is this really what happened? Who knows. What matters is that the game will continue under new ownership and I’ve said this on BGG and other places:
If they build a game like this with algorithm-built randomized decks for multiplayer: it will be the best CCG ever.
Let’s see what Garfield and Petersen do with this now. Even now it’s looking more promising than any new version of Shadowfist.
I just happened to play at lunch at work today and am reminded, this is a SOLID game.
