Keyforge card game has been bought by an ex-Fantasy Flight CEO

Keyforge, the card game designed by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, has been bought by Ghost Galaxy.

Announced via a blog on the official Keyforge website, the intellectual property and publishing rights for the unique deck game first launched in 2018 has been acquired by Ghost Galaxy – a company founded by an ex-CEO for Fantasy Flight Games, the studio that originally released Keyforge.

Christian T Petersen was an original founder of Fantasy Flight Games and has since launched his own company, Ghost Galaxy. Petersen made the deal with Garfield to release Keyforge when he was still at Fantasy Flight and has now regained the rights the publish the unique deck game with Ghost Galaxy.

According to another blog on the official Keyforge website, Asmodee – the parent company of Fantasy Flight – approached Ghost Galaxy with an offer to sell the IP and publishing rights to the studio. As Ghost Galaxy had been already developing software to support the creation of procedurally generated card games, the company decided to accept Asmodee’s offer and acquire Keyforge.

Last year, it was reported that the software algorithm Fantasy Flight had been using to procedurally generate decks for Keyforge had broken, forcing the game to into hiatus until the software could be fixed. According to Ghost Galaxy this incident, alongside the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on tournament play, caused enough issues for Asmodee to make its offer to Ghost Galaxy.

Under the helm of Ghost Galaxy, Keyforge decks will apparently begin being released once again. Software engineers at Ghost Galaxy are currently working on finishing the software for procedurally generating decks, with the studio predicting that it will “take a number of months,” for development to be completed. In the meantime, the company will be making decisions around the release schedule for Keyforge, including the previously announced Winds of Exchange – which was initially meant to be published by Fantasy Flight.

Other plans that Ghost Galaxy have for Keyforge include attempting to “streamline and condense competitive Keyforge play,” moving deck registration and player account software over to a Ghost Galaxy service and reducing the number of localised language versions of Keyforge due to the “small team,” at Ghost Galaxy – focusing purely on English-language releases for the time being.

Keyforge is a two-player game that has competitors using their respective decks in order to forge the three keys they need to win. Each deck in Keyforge has been procedurally generated, meaning that players do not need to craft their own decks and every deck is entirely unique. Decks in Keyforge are made up of three ‘houses’, with each one being based around its own gameplay mechanics and playstyle. On their turn, a player can select one of the houses included in their deck and can only play or use cards that are part of that house. Players can forge keys by collecting Æmber through the cards they play and use.

There is no set release date for Winds of Exchange, with new expansions for Keyforge yet to be announced.