Why we started
Some of our friends have been playing Lorcana for a while now. We had seen it for sale in shops and online, and there were posts about it going round on social media. That piqued our curiosity and we thought why not.After a little bit of research on what is the best way to start, we bought the Gateway set, and it turned out to be the right call. It is designed as a learn to play box, and everything in it is built around getting two complete beginners to the point where they can play properly. The basics of the game are that you play your deck of cards to gain lore, and the first player to reach twenty lore is the winner.
Our Gateway box arrived and excitedly we opened it. Inside we found two starting decks of thirty cards, a game board, damage counters, character movers, a rulebook and a guidebook. There are also four additional sealed packs, numbered one to four, marked do not open yet. The reason being that you slowly work through a series of guided games, and at the end of each of the first four games you open the next pack, which adds more to your deck. Once all the packs are open you end up with two decks of sixty six cards, of which you only need sixty to play.
How long before it clicked
We were keen to get started so we opened the first packs, set the board up, and began to read the instructions. They sort of made some sense. We also found a QR code which you scan, and it took us to a tutorial video.
This is where things began to not make sense. We watched the video, stopping after each section and trying to mimic what was happening on screen, and I admit we found it very confusing, so we gave up on our first attempt.
So we did a search on YouTube and found a couple of channels that had videos of people playing the game and explaining it in more detail than the one from the QR code.
With our new found knowledge, we got the game back out, set everything up and started to play. The first couple of games were slow and a bit muddled, but by around game five or six we had mastered a few of the basics. Cards on the table, or in our case the floor with the cats trying to join in, ink in the inkwell, characters questing, lore going up. Enough to get through a game without stopping every thirty seconds.
Card abilities we found at first to be a bit confusing. The text on a Lorcana card is written in plain enough English, but knowing when an ability actually does its thing is another matter. Some fire the moment the card comes down, some only when the character quests, some only when it is challenged. We spent a fair few turns reading a card, looking at each other, and having a guess.
After a few games we did a bit more research, and having mastered the basics we found, whoops, we were making one big mistake while playing. Challenging. We were getting it muddled with questing, and it took us a while to work out where we were going wrong.
We have now been playing this for a while and are getting to grips with the game. So much so, we have also bought some extra Lorcana decks to play with.
Adding our own decks
Once we were comfortable with the Gateway decks, we wanted something of our own to play with.My choice was the Shimmering Skies Amethyst and Ruby deck. Jenny picked up the Reign of Jafar Ruby and Steel one. Each comes ready to play straight out of the box, along with damage counters, a paper playmat, a tracker token, a quick start rulebook and a booster pack from the same set. When looking at buying a new deck, pay attention to the ink colours. Every Lorcana deck is built around two of them, and each ink plays differently. Ruby is fast and forward, Steel is about strength and getting stuck in, and Amethyst leans on magic and card tricks. Two decks with different pairings want to be played in different ways, and you notice it the moment you sit down opposite one. Jenny's Ruby and Steel deck is the aggressive one. It wants to challenge, and one of the cards in it, Mulan, has to challenge every turn if she is able to. Mine is slower and tries to do a bit of everything. Playing those two against each other has taught us more about challenging than any amount of reading did. So far it is three games to two in our favour. Neither of us has worked out how to win properly yet, bit we are getting there
You do not need a hard game board to play, either. You can get fun Lorcana playmats with all sorts of characters on them. I am a huge Frozen lover so mine has Elsa on it, while Jenny's has Stitch, her favourite. The mats are made from a similar material to a mouse mat and roll up for storage. One thing I picked up from the videos I watched, and it has made a real difference, is putting coloured sleeves on our decks so we can tell them apart. The sleeves also protect the cards and stop them getting damaged or wet. With two decks on the go it helps us keep track of whose cards are whose, and it takes about one game to realise why that matters. To protect our decks we have also used our 3D printer to make some fun looking boxes, which means we can travel with them easily and not lose anything along the way.
Why we keep coming back to it
What has surprised us most is that no two games play the same way.
You shuffle, you draw seven cards, and what you get shapes everything that follows. A hand full of expensive characters and you spend the first few turns building ink and waiting. A cheap fast start and you are away, racking up lore before your opponent has anything on the table to stop you with. You cannot decide on a strategy before you sit down, because the cards decide a fair bit of it for you.
That is what makes it moreish. Every game throws up a different problem to solve, and you always finish thinking about the one turn you would take back.
It is also just fun, which sounds obvious for a card game but is not always true of them.
Who it is for
If you like Disney and you have never touched a trading card game, the Gateway is a good way in, as long as you go in knowing the tutorial video may not be enough on its own.
It works best with someone you will play regularly. You learn this one over weeks rather than in a single sitting, and having somebody to be baffled alongside you is half of it.
Happy playing.
