EXCLUSIVE – We Interview Lorcana Designer Ryan Miller

Ryan Miller – Lorcana Designer Interview

Stephen del Prado: Ryan, thanks for talking to Player2! We’ve been loving Lorcana since it launched in Australia and it’s just really amazing to get to speak to someone who does have such a history in the medium.

Ryan Miller: Of course! Hey, that’s awesome.

SDP: Obviously, having work for Wizards of the Coast, I think your experience is definitely showing on Lorcana.

RM: Well, thank you. Thank you. I hope it is!

SDP: The first thing I wanted to ask is roughly how long was the development process on Lorcana before it came to market?

RM: The game design itself Steve Warner and I worked on for about six months. We started in 21… no, 2020 in November! Since that was during a specific global event that didn’t allow us to come together, we actually had to do it online from our houses. We started and Ravensburger were really cool. They were like, take the time you need. They didn’t say “You have six months”. They didn’t say “You have this amount of time”. They were just like, take the time you need. This is a foundational part of the experience, so let’s make sure we get something that we’re really proud of and excited for.

And so that was very cool. Steve and I just kind of kicked it off right away, by basically first trying to decide who we wanted this game to be for and we kind of came up with two big groups; one is trading card gamers and the other is Disney fans. You know, there’s certainly a decent overlap between those two groups, but we wanted a game that would kind of serve both the experienced trading card gamer as well as the person who’s perhaps never played a game like this before or has only dabbled in gaming and tabletop gaming. That sort of thing.

And so we wanted to see what we could do to kind of have both of those types of folks feel welcomed and excited to be here. Once we started doing that, we just really started kicking around like ideas for the experience itself. “What do we want?”
We’re like, “Well, we want to be able to have lots of characters on the table.”
OK. You know, if you wanna build your own deck and put your favourite characters in, you should be able to do that. And we started with just some wacky ideas, just some strange stuff!

I think one of the earliest designs was one of mine I was excited about, kind of like this engine builder card game where every turn you just have a row of your cards and every turn you resolve the abilities in your row and then you add or switch around or something like that. So it’s kind of a nifty engine building game.
And it was not fun at all. It was super procedural and it’s just the life of a game designer. You get an idea in your head and you’re excited about it. And sometimes you play it and you’re immediately like, “Oh dear Lord, why did I think that was ever gonna be fun?”

But I think that was an important part for us because what it really told us was, you know, we didn’t want to innovate through the game design of Lorcana because that innovation risks getting in the way of the theme and that’s why people are here. They want their favourite characters, favourite stories, they want just beautiful art and by doing something that’s kind of out there, like my engine builder idea, that’s kind of taking the focus away from what it really should be on.

We tried a bunch of different designs and once we got in that space of “OK, we know what we want to make; something that really gets out of the way”. It’s more about elevating the theme than it is about being its own kind of innovation or something like that. Once we got there, I think that was super helpful.

Then we started kind of putting together game mechanics that we liked, that we thought helped out with that. Usually of course you always start a game design like this with the resource system. You know when you kind of build up from there and that sort of thing and so about five months in, we really started crystallizing like what became Lorcana, I’d say by the six-month mark, we’re pretty pencils down.

SDP: That’s pretty amazing. That seems like a pretty rapid turn-around.

RM: I mean the game design itself, so you gotta keep in mind that’s just the game design. So when it comes to card design, that’s a whole other thing, and that takes much longer, right? Because you have to start that process by first exploring what cards can do in your game. You have to just explore all these different things that cards can do, and then we had decided to use this kind of Ink system of different colours. Again, not innovative, but supportive of what we wanted to do.

And so once you figure out what cards can do, then you start kind of portioning those abilities out into the different colours, that sort of thing, and really playing with that and making sure that your colour pie is really strong, then of course you gotta design the curve cost for your cards? There’s a lot more work that went into it, that six months was purely “This is the game designed, this is how Lorcana is played”, ready set draw, main phase, Inking cards, things like that. But after that is a whole other part of it, where you really have to find the edges of the design so that you know what kind of space you’re working in.

SDP: That universal resource mechanic of Ink, one of the things I’ve noticed that a lot of people who maybe haven’t played more recent TCG’s that use similar systems –  because I’ve mostly played Lorcana with some heavy MTG players – their perception is that it completely mitigates the Mana Screw problem. But I was wondering, did it then introduce any problems that you maybe hadn’t foreseen through that development process?

 RM: I don’t think so, mainly because Steve Warner and I have both worked on Duel Masters, which uses a similar system. And so we’re pretty intimately familiar with  the effects of it. One of the things we know about that type of system is it’s a very skill testing, if you choose it to be. So if you’re the type of player who really wants to get it, dig into the strategy and the skill, which card to Ink is actually very skill testing. If you’re not, if you just want to have fun, it’s actually not hard – you just kind of pick a high cost card, you drop it in your Ink and you’re good, right? And that’s totally fine. And we saw that with other games like Dual Masters as well.

So we’re pretty familiar with the effects of that, that skill testing moment can be intimidating for folks who are moving up into intermediate or advanced play.
But it’s definitely an important part of building your skill set when playing Lorcana.

I think the twist that we added to it was the fact that some cards are Inkable and some cards are not, and that was the part that we had the least experience with.
Cause I don’t know of a game, maybe there’s a game that does this?
I don’t know of a game that has that twist to this type of mechanic, and so it was unfamiliar territory to us. The thing we liked about it, and we still like about it, is it provides us with a really interesting balancing lever to put on the cards like you’ll notice – and you probably have already noticed – that a lot of the control cards don’t tend to have Ink on them. The cards that deal damage directly to characters, cards that make your opponent discard, the kind of quote, unquote “unfun cards” for lack of a better term, the ones that you know can be kind of rough to deal with, we can pull the Ink off of those and what that helps do is mitigate those kind of unfun interactions because we know that a lot of times you want to get your cards out and you want to play, But we also know that trading card games have to have that interactivity. Otherwise you feel like you’re playing solitaire against someone else, and that’s no fun either.

But with the Ink system, we can take the Ink off of a lot of cards that can lead to those really unfun or non-game gamestates and help balance an entire strategy. You still need those strategies. You need things like direct damage to characters and you need things like discard. Those are important to any trading card game to make sure you have this really healthy environment of lots of different decks that are viable in the tournament scene and that sort of thing. But when control becomes dominant and the main way to play can be very unfun,  we want to make sure that especially our new players can come in, even if maybe their first few games, they’re still learning the skills – not winning a ton of games, but at least they’re having fun.

They’re getting their characters out and things like that, so that part of the Ink system we really liked. There’s no hard and fast rules as to what gets Ink and what doesn’t get Ink. We definitely have our list of criteria that you know, hey, if the card has any of these and you want to give it Ink, then we have to have a discussion about it, right, it’s more like the Pirate code, it’s guidelines rather than rules (laughs).

SDP: On that, having played mostly with some experienced TCG players, one thing that they universally remark on is just how fast Lorcana plays out game to game. Obviously most head-to-head games are arguably a race game when you boil them down, it feels way less opaque in Lorcana. What was your main goal around making something so quick to play?  Is it just so that people can really get a handful of games out in a short amount of time?

        
RM: Well, I think our generally when you’re designing a trading card game, you want a game that averages 10 to 15 minutes. And I think the main thing is that’s a restriction placed on like tournament point, right? You wanna make sure you can get rounds done within an hour, and in fact, we went to – I’m sure you know this – but we went to a two-game round system for our challenges, partly because we didn’t like, you know… the thing about the game is, it’s fast for most people, but for certain matchups it can actually kind of drag on a bit for like control matchups and things like that. The two-game round was our way to mitigate that and also kind of help with the going first advantage right. That way both players always go 1st every round and then you play.

But generally, a fast game is kind of nice because even when you lose a fast game, it’s like, “OK, let’s pick up and play again,” right? It’s something that you don’t mind kind of going, “Hey, let’s play 3,4,5 games in a row”. You can iterate on your skills and that sort of thing. So ideally you get to a game state where you can have a decent number of your favourite characters out and have your deck start to do what you built it to do. Because it’s a really fun moment, right? When you build your deck to do a thing, it’s really fun to see it kind of start working in the way that you’re trying to build it to do. And so we don’t want games that, that, that end too quickly, right?
Because then those types of games don’t happen, but we also know that aggressive decks are another necessary thing that needs to be out in the field. So those can definitely make for faster games, especially on aggressive mirror matchups.

SPD: Yes, I’ve definitely had games where I felt rapidly outpaced. I do love the aspect of – you can sort of see it coming a round or two in advance, like “I can’t, I can’t make this happen no matter what I do”.

RM: (laughs) You could Draw something! you never know, but yeah, definitely. Those times can happen, sure.

SDP: Praying to the top decking gods, they can help me out. But again, with those experienced players, one thing I have seen online a little bit which I think is an unfair criticism, is that obviously Lorcana is getting compared to let’s say, for example, a game that’s been around 30 years, tends to be heavier and is now subsisting primarily on a fan made variant and IP tie ins, it doesn’t have the depth of competitive play. Do you think that those those statements are kind of missing the point of what Lorcana is and what it’s setting out to do and what would you hope that they would come to realize about the game?

RM: Well, first of all, I think it’s completely understandable that they would have these expectations. I mean, trading card gamers, there’s been a lot of great games come and go and there’s a lot of great, great games out right now and it’s a great time to be a trading card gamer. And so I don’t think it’s bad to have those expectations. I think it’s just something that we as a company have to try to meet and hopefully exceed when we can and we’re not always going to get there. I have a saying I always like to tell my teams and it’s that “We’re not here to be right. We’re here to get it right”, and that means that we’re here to try our best here. Get feedback, incorporate the feedback, try again, right?  And that’s how you get better and better and better.

We by no means came out of the gate perfectly. It was an amazing launch, but there was a lot of stuff that we could have done better and that we are doing better. I think that’s an important part of it. So I don’t begrudge the players at all for having expectations based on other games. I think that’s completely understandable.
I use it really for myself and our teams, it’s more like an inspiration for us.
We wanna make sure that we’re doing our best to fulfill and it works to meet those expectations. You know, it doesn’t bother me that that they have those feelings.
I think what we’ve put together in a short amount of time is… the teams effort is nothing short of heroic. It’s just amazing to me. I’ve been working in this industry for 25 years and I’ve never seen a company do what Ravensburger has done with it, with a new trading card game. We’re talking about a company that’s never done a trading card game before; they’re great at making games, so they have those institutional competencies, that sort of thing. But to do what they’ve done in the time they’ve done it, it’s just amazing.
And the product, the quality of the product, the quality art, everything is just outstanding, it’s really a testament to the hard working folks and it’s also a testament to a company that invested early in people, right. We hired a lot of folks.
We really put brought a lot of folks into the team that have experience in trading card games and can add, you know, their expertise to the efforts and we’re just getting started.

I think we’ve got a really bright future ahead and there always are going to be bumps, but our hope and our and our goal is that we don’t repeat old bumps. (Laughs) We’ll have bumps, but hopefully they’re new bumps, not like keep doing the same old thing and that’s our goal, is to get better and better so that we are delivering that really high-quality experience. I love when my players, I owe it to them to give them the best experience I could possibly give them with the time and resources I’m allotted, because they are the ones spending their time and their money on this product, right.

And so it’s really important to us to get that that experience and took always be honing and always thinking about how we can make the experience better, how we can do better. You know, it can be a little madding sometimes when it’s like we do this great thing and then we’re like, “Well, but could we do this better? Could we do that better?” But that’s an important part of the process, right? You gotta be open and honest about that.

SDP: And I guess that ties in to the idea that Lorcana isn’t a flash in the pan.
Obviously the game has legs, and as you’ve said, you’ve got time to keep getting things right. What’s your ideal long term plan for Lorcana? Where would you like to see the game go in the next 5 to 10 years?

RM: I mean, I obviously can’t go into specifics about what we’re gonna do in the next five years, but my hope, my real hope is that we really reach out, we feel like the gamer side of it, we’ve got a great stable of experienced TCG’ers that have really dug into the game and it’s so awesome to see that. I love it because I’m one of them. I’ve been playing TCG’s since 1994, right? I started with Unlimited when Magic came out and played through the 90s.
I played as many of those trading card games I could get my hands on and I’ve designed more than my fair share of published trading card games, so it’s something I’m just really passionate about, it’s a really fun way to play and I really love that we have that.

But my real hope is that we also get the Disney fan, the folks that are just – and I believe we are really starting to do this – the folks that have never played before or maybe looked at it or heard about other games, “That’s kind of neat, but I don’t know”. And now, because I think first of all, just collecting this game is a lot of fun.
And I think if folks just want to collect Lorcana, it’s a blast. There’s a lot of the art is, I mean… this is hands down, the most beautiful game I’ve ever worked on, and I could say that because I don’t do any of the art, so I’m not like tooting my own horn here, the art we do for this game is just phenomenal.

SDP: Absolutely.

RM: And I’m really proud of the team that puts that together. They do an amazing job and it just gets better every time I see new art for the next set or the next couple of sets, you know, sometimes we’ll get uncut sheets for future sets to do colour correction tests and stuff like that. And every time I’m just like, “Man, it just keeps getting better”.

So I think this game is really fun to collect and I think it’s great if that’s all they wanna do is collect Lorcana. My hope though is that a decent amount of them give the game itself a try, because I think there’s a lot of fun to be had there. Tabletop gaming is such a great way to sit down with your friends and family, make memories, and to make new friends. I mean, it’s just a great way to do that.

And so I hope that folks that collect or folks that are just getting into it really give the game a try and that we see this kind of big fan base of folks that are just they love Disney, they love Lorcana and this is something they do and we’re kind of already seeing that. One of my favourite things that we did not expect was the families – we knew at the beginning that we didn’t want to position Lorcana as a “kids” game and it’s not a kids game but it is definitely a family game, right? And we see this a lot now and it’s so wonderful to see like… one of the biggest compliments I ever got was when we launched at GenCon last year and this guy came up to me and he said “My two girls had been struggling with their reading and they decided on their own to get better at reading, so they could play Lorcana” with their Dad and their Mom. I was like, that is about as good as it gets right there.

I’ve got some friends here that I met through Lorcana at the local league and they’re this family like 3 boys, Mom, Dad, and they’ve started bringing other families that they know into Lorcana, now they have their own family League night with all these different families. (laughs) And so I love that! And then the other thing I love to see is when I see like couples like, I’ve got a lot of folks that say, “Oh, this is our couple, this is our date night game”.

A lot of fellas that I’ve met say, my wife or my girlfriend, she would never play Magic with me, but she’ll play Lorcana with me and that was a thing we bonded over and really love. And that’s what it’s about, bringing people together. I think games do that so well, tabletop is such a great way to bring people together. I think Lorcana especially because of the Disney characters and the intergenerational appeal, you know, you got the folks like me who remember way back in the day the older (Disney) stuff. And you got the newer stuff and it all comes together in one full game and something that people can really bond over. So it’s just delightful.

SDP: Absolutely. I think the theme does streamline that onboarding process so much like familiar characters, familiar settings. You get so much of that background details just from…this character, you get a vibe of what they’re going to do in the game, or whether it’s a villain or a hero sort of character. I mean, I’ve taught my 7 year old son to play it and

RM: That’s so cool!

SDP: As you said, it works with kids, but it’s not a kids game because I definitely did not destroy his Lore engine like I should have. And of course, I have a Disney wife, so I’m very close…

RM Ohh. Nice. That’s great!

SDP: I’m very close; she does not game at all, but you know it’s…I can feel there’s something, that I can make it happen soon.

RM: There’s this 8 year old girl in my locals who’s an absolute like, she just plays…
She is so good at Lorcana, and I remember when I first met her. Because one of my rules is I never throw game. I don’t care if you’re young or old. I don’t throw games. That way if you beat me, you can really say you beat me! Now I will put an asterisk on this and tell you that it’s not terribly hard to beat me like Steve Warner –
If you beat Steve Warner, that’s a true…like he is one of the best card players I know, but it’s a common misconception that a game designer is really good at his own game (laughs) but I just told her I said, “Hey, I just want, you know, I’m not gonna throw the game and she looks me right in the eye and she goes “Neither am I”.
It was outstanding!

SDP: Game recognizes game.

RM: Yeah, right! (laughs)

SDP: One thing that I think is absolutely amazing, and it’s probably not something Ravensburger really wants to hear, but I have to congratulate both you and Steve, on how well Lorcana works even with only Starter Decks. It’s so robust, it functions without needing a glut of booster packs. And yet, for myself, I am not a deck construction guy. Like it’s just… I’ve gone through so many games where I just wanna play and I’ve never got that joy out of building decks, but I think one of the ways that you’ve subverted that is it feels good to play with the Starter Decks, but then I think, “How could I make this better?” and that has actually enticed me into getting into that construction.        

RM: That’s completely, no, I love hearing that! We love hearing that!
I mean, that’s amazing. First of all, that’s a testament to Steve Warner and his team.
Cause now, since I moved to Brand Management, he runs now the whole game design team and one of their big jobs is designing those starter decks, making sure they’re fun to play against each other within the set. And it’s not easy. Especially with the kind of the restrictions you have, like the certain amount of rarities and that sort of thing.

And so that’s great to hear. I mean, to me, it’s such a fun way, especially if you’ve already played trading card games, it’s the best way I think, to get into the game because you just pick up the decks right off the shelf and you play.
I think for folks who have never played trading card games before, we have Gateway that’s coming out in North America and Europe like in a week. I don’t know – we have not announced the Australian launch for this – but what it is essentially is a two player, it just starts you off with two 30 card decks with just the basics. It’s like characters and like three actions per deck or something like that. And then there’s these special packs that you unlock as you play and whenever you unlock a pack, you add those cards to the decks and they fold in some new concepts. So like one pack might just teach you about Items, right? And another pack will kind of fold Songs in and so by the time you gotten through all four packs, you have a 60 card deck, you know all the concepts of the game and you’re ready to really play.

I think that’s a great way for folks who’ve never done a trading card game or someone who’s teaching some folks who have never done a trading card game.
And it’s a really good way to start off, but if you’re like yourself, you’ve played other trading card games, then the single player decks are the way to go for that. That’s a huge compliment because it’s not easy and I think that that your approach is completely understandable too, because building a deck is a big… it can be daunting, right? It’s like there’s so many choices, but I think your approach is really smart like “I’m gonna start with a Starter Deck and I’m start swapping cards in and just gonna start putting stuff in”. And I think that’s a fine way to go because you know, we’ve built them with that in mind, right? There’s clearly better cards you can start adding. For The First Chapter (Lorcana Wave One) there was the Mickey/Moana deck that has some brooms in it and has Mickey that likes brooms. But it doesn’t have a lot of brooms in it, right? And so clearly you wanna start adding, you’ll find some more magic brooms. Add those into the deck and that’s super fun, right?

We’re also working with some ways that you don’t have to build it, ways to play that you don’t have to build decks. We’ve got one that we’ve been kind of experimenting with called Pack Rush where basically you just take 2 (booster) packs, open them without looking at them, stuff them together. There’s a few more rules to it, but then you play a game and you only go to 15 Lore, not 20. And it’s super fun because there’s no deck building. It’s a great way if you’ve already got some packs and you’re gonna open them anyway, then this is like a really great way to even more fun. Because every time you draw a card, you have no idea what it’s going to be, right?
Is that going to be my enchanted? Is that going to be my legendary? You just don’t know and it’s super fun, right? It’s just really cool. So those kinds of ways, there’s just lots of ways to play the game. And I think that especially for folks like yourself that, you know, maybe deck building is just not your thing. That’s totally fine. There’s lots of fun ways to play.

SDP: No, but and I have to thank you because through Lorcana is becoming my thing, which is great.

RM: Nice. I love that! I love that.

SDP: What Wave has been your favourite to work on so far?

RM: So I left design right around set three design and so the first two sets – my answers are gonna be narrowed down. The first two sets with just Steve and I designing.  Now we have play testers, we have developers to actually develop the cards and help make them balanced and that sort of thing. But as far as just designing the cards with Steve and myself, we split; he took three colours, I took three colours and we designed the cards and came up with the first design file and we did that again for set two. Then I worked a little bit – because he and I designed the rules for Locations – so I worked a bit on set three, which added locations. But I have to say set two, because I got to do Amethyst, which is the colour of magic and sorcery. And my favourite movie of all the Disney movies is Sword in the Stone, which you might have noticed there’s, probably a disproportionate amount of Sword in the Stone cards in the in the game. And that’s completely because, yeah, it’s completely because I have abused my power.

SDP: I did notice a few.

RM: I love that movie so much. It’s a masterpiece. I highly recommend checking it out, it’s super fun. And there’s that iconic duel between Merlin and Madam Mim where they’re changing into different animals and are trying to outwit each other.
And that was super fun to work on because I wanted to see how close I could get to that happening in the game. And at first, my first thought was “Ohh I could build a Mim deck and you could build a Merlin deck” and well, that’s not great cause that relies on your opponent to kind of help you do this dream right.

And so that’s when I started toying with, well, because they’re summoning glimmers,  they’re both in your deck, how could they interact in a way that is kind of fun and it feels like they’re kind of trying to one up each other, that sort of thing, and that’s when I came up with, you know, the Madam Mim that had this Downside text, you have to return another character to your hand when you play her and then of course Merlin with his Upside text of, when I come into play or when I leave, do the same thing and and so that was just where that was born. It was super fun to work on and it’s really been neat to see people react and respond to it. That’s the deck I play when I go out and play. I have that deck all built up (laughs).

SDP: Inklands introduced moving damage and locations. Obviously, you can’t necessarily reveal anything specific, but can we expect new card types and other actions in the future?

RM: I mean, I think I can answer a more general question, which is, adding to the game, from set to set, I can’t tell you what we can expect in the future – I call those by the way, I call those Bruno questions like “We don’t talk about Bruno”, you know (laughs). But in a broad sense we have to look at this game, we’re planning this game so far ahead that we have to look at a strategic level like, OK, we’re adding things every set; at the very minimum every set’s gonna have new cards with new abilities on them and that sort of thing. And then we have kind of a level up from that which would be called Keyworded abilities. Like Resist is an ability that’s named specifically, adds to the list that are already out there, like Evasive and Ward and things like that. That’s kind of the next level up and those we don’t wanna do every set. And then of course above that is something like a new card type and those are very rare because basically the idea is we don’t want to add too much complexity every set because then the game very quickly becomes very heavy and can kind of buckle under its own weight. And then we have to take other measures to kind of help that, because we must never forget that every set is somebody’s first set.

Every single set is someone’s first set and we have to make sure that we are taking good care sof our new players because new players are absolutely the lifeblood of the game, right? Without them, we don’t have opponents to play. So we’re a lot of what we do is about acquiring new players, while of course trying to take as good care as we can of our existing players. So we’re always gonna make sure we’re doing it properly. In fact, the only reason we added Locations so early in the game was because we felt, from a thematic standpoint, that that card type would be a lot of fun in the game. It could allow us to portray a lot of very iconic things in Disney and we didn’t wanna wait too long before we did that and we thought, “OK, let’s try set three” because every time you add something like that it adds a layer of complexity.
It does add more design space, more things you can do, the things that cards can do, but it does add that complexity and that can be kind of a bummer for some people, especially just getting into the game, right?

So we’ve just got to do it very carefully. We definitely have a plan, Steve and I decided early on, we weren’t going to add brand new Keyword mechanics every set we weren’t going to add big mechanics every set because the game doesn’t need it and it doesn’t really want it. Because of that issue I told you about, buckling under it’s own weight and things like that.

SDP: No, it did feel like a good place to introduce him, cause as you said it does really help lean into that theme a little bit more.

RM: Yeah, and that’s what we were hoping. I think it did a good job and my only regret is that I still often can forget to gain my Lore at the start of a turn (laughs) when I have Locations out like “Agh!”. So let’s say, I wish we’d have figured out something a little better than that, but again, it’s not to be right, just to get it right.
So I think the Locations have done a good job though, they’ve found their ways into many types of different decks, even the competitive decks and that’s pretty cool that they managed to do that. So I think that we’ve tapped into something there.

SDP: I think we’re just about out of time, I just really have to thank you for spending some time with us today and obviously all of your hard work on the game.

RM: Oh, oh no, thanks for your time too!

SDP: It seems to be obviously building in popularity everywhere I look. I’ve got more people asking me about it and “What are you playing?”, “Ohh, this looks really cool!” and the Disney theme drawing them in. We’ve got Shimmering Skies coming up soon and I know we here at Player2 are excited to touch on that and obviously Gateway when it releases.

RM: That’s Awesome, thank you! That’s great. Outstanding. Thank you so much for your time and also thank you for what you do for the industry. I’m a big fan of journalists. I think it’s a big part of the community building aspect of gaming, so thank you for that!

Shimmering Skies launches for Disney Lorcana on. the 9th of August 2024. This interview opportunity was kindly provided by Disney AUNZ.