Fantasy Flight Games to Purchase Legend of the Five Rings

• Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) debuted in 1995, just two years after Magic: The Gathering created the collectible card game money-sucking tornado from thin air, and unlike nearly every other CCG that debuted at that time, L5R has continued to see new releases from its publisher, Alderac Entertainment Group, to the present day.

After two decades, though, that time is coming to an end as Fantasy Flight Games has announced plans to acquire L5R from AEG, with the game being transformed into a Living Card Game that maintains the same setting as the original L5R — "as well as its pervasive themes of honor, nobility, magic, intrigue, duty, and warfare", according to FFG — but with the new Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game featuring significant changes in the game mechanisms and being incompatible with the earlier game. FFG plans to debut Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game at Gen Con 2017. (First title on BGG's Gen Con 2017 Preview!)

As for why AEG might sell off a game line that's been part of the company for twenty of its 22 years, AEG's Todd Rowland writes that it's primarily because the publisher is no longer "The L5R Company" that it once was:

Quote:

As a company, AEG has been changing. Anyone who's followed us at all, been to GenCon [sic], Essen, BGGCon [sic], etc can see this. We've become a card and board game company. Our hottest lines (Smash Up, Love Letter, Doomtown: Reloaded, Trains, etc.) are all basically board or card games. It's a different business than a heavy collectible tournament game like L5R.

It was an organic change in the company as I've commented in a few places. We found ourselves having big success in board games at the same time we were really coming to love making them. This doesn't at all mean our love for L5R diminished. FFG has a very strong business in LCGs, and that new format for L5R, along with FFGs existing structure for it, will mean great things for the IP in the long run.

On the L5R website, AEG notes that tournament events such as the Fall Kotei Season and the European Championships will go ahead as planned. The final set for the L5R CCG, Evil Portents, is due out in Oct./Nov. 2015, and since players and retailers might have little incentive to purchase something for a product line that's being abandoned, AEG notes the following: "[W]e're going to be making Evil Portents available to retailers and players through a pretty remarkable deal – essentially, we'll be virtually giving it away for free. Details of this will be forthcoming shortly."

Given that FFG has had continued success with The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, the subject matter of which was part of another CCG that debuted in 1995 (Middle-earth Collectible Card Game) that was released as a Living Card Game, perhaps it's time to update an inscription from the text that inspired that work:

One card format to rule them all, One card format to find them,
One card format to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them...