Keyforge Announcements and More of This Week's News for Nerds

Welcome to this week’s PUNCHLIST, where we round up the biggest news in nerd culture. We highlight the tastiest morsel in some detail and then close you out with a link round-up.

Fantasy Flight Announces Keyforge Adventures Multiplayer Experiences

Richard Garfield’s Keyforge burst onto the scene in 2018 with the Call of the Archons set; capitalizing on Magic: The Gathering-styled play but streamlining the deck-building approach through procedural generation. You buy a sealed deck, and it is then what it will always be; no adding or subtracting from its deck list. This made entry into the game super easy ($10 and you’ve got all you need to play right away), and the hobby exploded – selling over 1 million decks in less than a year’s time.

Since Call of the Archons, three more sets have debuted (Age of Ascension, Worlds Collide, and Mass Mutation) and its fifth is on the way (Dark Tidings, though it is experiencing delays) and over 2.2 million decks have been registered in the Master Vault.

Keyforge has been exclusively a 1v1 format since its debut, although fans and players have pitched workable multiplayer PvP (player versus player) variants (Earth Nerd Adkins favors this one). But this week, Fantasy Flight announced two PvE (player versus enemy) multiplayer experiences due out this spring: Rise of the Keyraken and The Abyssal Conspiracy.

Both adventures will be free downloads under the new Keyforge Adventures banner. Rise of the Keyraken is slated for late April, and The Abyssal Conspiracy in May. The former looks to be a straight up brawl against a gigantic creature that threatens to rise from the depths, while the latter is staged more like an adventure with players scouting locations on a grid to uncover a conspiracy onboard their ship and prevent further disaster.

Any deck from any of the seasons or sets are viable for play in the Keyforge Adventures, and each boasts multiple difficulty levels for replayability. They can also be tackled solo. All of that combines for a lot of ways to play!