The KeyForge card game became an instant success upon its release in 2018. Designed by the acclaimed Richard Garfield, KeyForge is not only a fantastic game but also brought a flood of innovation that the tabletop game industry had never seen before.

KeyForge was the world’s first Unique Deck Game, meaning every KeyForge deck sold was 100% unique. It also featured many other fun innovative elements.

All this was made possible by the power of procedural generation and digital print production.

KeyForge remains a highly successful game today, and is 100% developed inside Forgefire.

Every KeyForge deck is a unique combination of cards. In other words… there are no two decks alike in the world!

Publisher Ghost Galaxy makes each KeyForge release possible by first creating their desired pool of cards inside Forgefire, after which they invoke a Blueprint connected to an elaborate series of Forgefire scripts.

These scripts define the card selections used for generating card sequences (i.e. decks) that fall within Ghosts Galaxy desired parameters.

One of the defining features of KeyForge are its wonderful and fun deck names. Like KeyForge decks, the name of each deck is unique.

Name assignment is made possible by using Forgefire’s advanced custom data options: Ghost Galaxy created a number of custom data lists, each containing names, name fragments, adjectives, nouns, etc. When a decks is generated, random selections from these lists populate one of several name sequences (resulting in names such as “Ambrosia, Hammer of Cauldrons”).

In addition to a unique custom name, every KeyForge deck receives a unique avatar illustration.

Once more, Ghost Galaxy takes advantage of custom data to populate Forgefire with a large selection of image fragments for the different graphical regions of the avatar. When the deck is generated, scripts pull the components together to Ghost Galaxy’s specifications. This creates a personalized unique expression of every deck.

The KeyForge game has a number of “keywords” which imply important game effects to players. As there are many keywords in the game, some players may need to be reminded of the effect.

Fortunately, with procedural generation, Forgefire can detect which keywords are used in any given deck, and provides a helpful Quick Reference card of the deck’s keyword effects.

This is made possible by the logic scripting that may be applied to decks in Forgefire.

Perhaps the feature of KeyForge which best showcases the power of procedural generation and digital printing, is the “Card Enhancement” abilities in KeyForge.

Some KeyForge cards “enhance” the deck in which it has been included, by adding game abilities to other cards in the same deck. In this way, the inclusion of a card may affect the deck as a whole in novel and inspiring ways.

This is made possible by Forgefire’s logic scripting, which allow for the attributes of a deck to be changed after the selection of the cards it contains.

Every KeyForge deck comes with a “list card” detailing the unique contents of the deck: listing each card of the deck and providing the deck’s unique ID and QR code.

Ghost Galaxy creates this list card procedurally as the final step in the KeyForge deck generation process, by compiling the deck’s data woth scripts, and by using Forgefire native ability to generate UUID’s and QR codes.