I'd like to think that the LCG might be less personality-oriented and may be more province-oriented. Here's what my head's been percolating:

I'm imagining that "the feel of the game" will involve provinces of some sort like in the CCG, each with a flat strength rating. All cards are drawn from a single "Fate" deck. No gold costs are used; instead, the number of "[permanents]" to be played are equal to the number of provinces you have. Strongholds (which are now drawn from the Fate deck), make samurai units unique for that Clan; e.g., the addition of Shiro Matsu might allow for all the player's bushi units to have Conqueror or whatever. Same win/lose conditions as the old game, I suppose.

That sounds like a plan that would take all the downsides of the old province system, and magnify them a hundredfold by applying the same chokepoint effect to any card that stay in play, rather than just personalities and holdings.

In that version of the game, anyone who is at even a one province disadvantage is going to be massively disadvantaged in the game. The more so for each additional province they lose.

Can anyone share how many players this game will accommodate at once?

Have I missed any info on this, or is it simply not yet released?

I'm sincerely needing more than 2 to be interested.

Can anyone share how many players this game will accommodate at once?

Have I missed any info on this, or is it simply not yet released?

I'm sincerely needing more than 2 to be interested.

No information about the game has been provided since September 11, 2015. Literally all we know is that it's a Living Card Game and that it's coming out in 2017 at Gen Con.

Can anyone share how many players this game will accommodate at once?

Have I missed any info on this, or is it simply not yet released?

I'm sincerely needing more than 2 to be interested.

No information about the game has been provided since September 11, 2015. Literally all we know is that it's a Living Card Game and that it's coming out in 2017 at Gen Con.

Beat me to it

Here's hoping for at least 4-player multiplayer. They have to design for both duel and melee styles, but they've given themselves plenty of time to do it. I'd actually be surprised if it doesn't support more than two players in the core rules (not necessarily with just the core cards).

I would like to see province like they were in Legends of Burning Sands

In previous LCG Cores the game decks were below the "official" deck size.

So using enough neutral cards, it maybe possible to make two mini decks from one core. Maybe we will see also multi faction decks from the core box, just so that you can learn rules.

But the card count will not change to bigger. Too expensive core set. So I expect to see very limited card pool and not so many multiple cards in core set.

Summasummarum the official deck size can be 30 or 40, but core decks are much smaller. You need multiple cores to make two full size deck.

My two hopes for the core set are:

1. They don't cut any clans out.
2. They don't require more than 2 cores to have a complete playset of all core set cards.

It would be interesting for them to release two core sets, each containing 4 factions, with identical pools of neutral cards. All the clan cards in a single core would be complete playsets, while the neutral cards would be mostly 2x cards. This would still require players to purchase multiple cores (standard for all FFG LCGs), but would at least allow players to build more consistent decks based on a clans theme (not necessarily competitively, depending on the impact of neutral cards).

Yes, different cores aren't without precedence for FFG, although it would be new to LCGs. I wouldn't even mind FOUR different cores (basically duel starters) with full playsets of cards

/dream

I would be fairly happy with a Core very similar to the one for AGOT 2.0. Even if you have to buy 3 copies to get a playset 1) that's still cheaper than buying one single CCG display, and 2) you actually get a playset (unlike after buying 3+ CCG displays) and, furthermore.. 3) the single copy per card (except for neutrals) makes you feel that buying that third box is not a waste of money, while 4) still making one single Core an affordable buy for somebody who only wants to try the game, who can later on buy the second and the third. 5) Likewise, the competitive-player-on-a-budget has the option to buy his playset in three stages as he can afford and 6) it still fit 8 different factions from the very start!

still cheaper than buying one single CCG display, and 2) you actually get a playset (unlike after buying 3+ CCG displays)

Yeah, the best price I could get an MtG display for makes three of an LCG core (also at best price) 10% cheaper with 40% more cards, and they're all in the same numbers. I could open 36 boosters for 540 cards, and still not have more than a pair of everything. Which has happened to many.

(Somewhat compensated by a long string of mythic rares, of course!)

If they made each clan its own starter with a full playset so that people could choose from 8 starters initially, there would still be the problem of token distribution. You'd either have too few or too many if you included them with each such pack, and selling it separately isn't their thing. They want a core to have all the components to get started playing, hence the AGoT 2e model seems most appropriate, and it's likely there will be just as little waste for L5R (faction cards, neutrals you want more of anyway).

No matter how much they diverge from the mechanics of the original CCG I think it'll be closer to AGoT 2e in organisation. I doubt they'll remove the second deck, but it might mutate. Seems like such an important part of the game to make it stand out too, so we might be looking at 80-card (2x40) setups as the tournament-legal arrangement. I'm worried this'll make it the first LCG to require four cores for a full playset

I'm not sure this would require 4 core sets.

Let's say we have 40/40 decks and the rules stay more or less the same (and I think hte decks built from 1 core set could be 30/30), that would mean :

14-17 Holdings

1-2 Regions

2-5 events

16-23 personnalities

that would mean 6-7 in-faction personnalities. AGoT has 12 personnalities per faction, which is well enough to build a 40/40 deck. Should the game evolve into a one-deck, 60 cards game, that's still enough personnalities, considering there will surely be a few neutral (ronin and/or nonhuman) characters to fill a few holes in it.

What I like most about going from a CCG to a LCG, is the amount of coasters will go down significally.

You could keep the quantities of cards around the same as AGoT and have a good start for L5R, even if the LCG is 60 cards deck. I hope the L5R LCG will involve a kind of setup where you begin the game with ressources and/or characters in play in addition to your "Stronghold".

Yeah, hopefully it'll be a typical 2-3 core LCG. The way they've hyped it so far in advance you'd almost expect them to release the largest core so far

I hope for a setup phase too, where we get a set amount of resources to play for. FFG's games tend towards quick starts and avoiding resource starvation - no "manascrew" you didn't cause yourself