Discover the Best Strategies for Disney Lorcana Card Game Success

By: Ravensburger    Players: 2-6     Ages: 8+     Time: 30 + mins

Take on the role of an Illumineer and summon Glimmers; new and varied versions of Disney characters, items, and locations.

Use Glimmers to help with your quests and hinder your opponents as you race to locate scattered pieces of Lore across Lorcana.

With the option of using pre-made decks or constructing your own from the hundreds of cards available, Lorcana is a trading card game offering lots of variety and adventure, immersing players in the enchanting realm of Lorcana.

What Is Disney Lorcana Trading Card Game?

Lorcana is Ravensburger’s first trading card game, Disney Lorcana TCG, and was created in collaboration with The Walt Disney Company in August 2023. It features all kinds of characters, locations, and items from the Disney universe represented in both the base game and the half dozen expansions that have been released already since its release. The First Chapter, the premier set, was released in 2023. So vast and expansive is the game, that the CEO of Ravensburger himself has commented that Lorcana is “the largest investment that we have ever done into any type of project and initiative”. With a quote like that, you can’t help but have high hopes for the quality of gameplay and what’s yet to come!

Set in an alternate realm, Illumineers use magical ink to summon Glimmers, beings that resemble Disney characters. Players take on the role of Illumineers and summon Glimmers to retrieve ‘Lore’, fragments of a larger story, from all across the Inklands. The Great Illuminary, a central element in the game’s lore, tracks every story ever told and calls upon players to become Illumineers after the original Illumineers mysteriously disappear. Using decks of 60 cards, players produce Ink (the game’s resource) to summon characters, items, song lyrics, and more. The main goal of the game is to be the first player to accrue twenty Lore, or points, before the other players, by playing locations and using characters to embark on quests.

Game Set-Up

As with most Collectible or Trading Card Games, there isn’t much in the way of set-up. Any player taking part must have an appropriately constructed deck of sixty cards. This is shuffled at the start of each game and players draw a hand of seven cards. If the starting hand is not to their liking, players may return any number of cards they wish to the bottom of their deck, and draw that many cards from the top to bring their opening hand back up to seven. After setting the lore tracker to 0 and setting aside an adequate number of damage counters the game can begin.

How To Play

Each player’s turn is made up of two phases, each with several steps. The beginning phase involves a few simple actions: readying any exerted cards by turning them upright, checking for effects that happen at the start of the turn and following the instructions, and then drawing a card from the top of the deck. During each player’s first turn, these actions don’t happen but will after more or less every subsequent turn.

During the main phase, players can put one card facedown into their inkwell at any time. Cards that are placed in the inkwell are used to pay various costs, such as the cost to play a card from your hand, and the more cards in the inkwell the more a player can do each turn. Regardless of the text on the front of the card, once a card is placed face down in the inkwell it stays there for the rest of the game and represents one ink, so players should always choose wisely which cards they place there.

There are a whole host of other actions players can take during their main phase. They can perform any number of the following actions available any number of times they want:

• Play a card

• Use a character ability that doesn’t require them to exert

• Use an item ability

• Use a location ability

• Move a character to a location

• Use a character that’s already been in play to quest, challenge an opponent’s location or exerted character, or use an ability that requires a character to exert.

Forming a team of Disney characters during this phase is crucial for strategic gameplay, as players can collaborate with their assembled team to achieve objectives and enhance their gaming experience.

Each card has a cost associated with it and as long as a player has the same number of cards in their inkwell, they can exert them (some games call this ‘tapping’) by turning the cards needed 90 degrees and bringing the card from their hand into play.

When a character card is played they can’t do anything on their first turn as they have to wait for their ink to dry. After this, characters can exert themselves and go on a quest to generate Lore to go towards the player winning the game. At the start of the player’s next turn, they ‘ready’ exerted cards by turning it upright from its horizontal position. While exerted however, characters open themselves up to being challenged, and battling it out with another player’s character. If a challenge is thrown down, players look at the characters’ Strength and Willpower. If the Strength score exceeds an opponent’s Willpower, that character is banished and placed in the discard pile. If however, the Strength is less than the opponent’s Willpower, that character takes the equivalent amount of damage but stays in the game. Damage stays on that character until they are either banished or healed. Alongside all of this, character cards can have many different kinds of abilities to impact gameplay and help add to the strategy of the game.

Unlike characters, Item and Location cards’ abilities can activate immediately once played. Items stay in the game unless stated otherwise and can offer all kinds of special bonuses for the player, such as healing damage, buffing their stats, or making them harder to banish. Locations similarly offer buffs or bonuses to characters as long as they reside there. Moving a character requires an ink cost, but a location can have as many characters as a player wants there, and the characters can be ready or exerted when moving. Like characters though, locations can be challenged, and if they take enough damage they must be removed from the game. On the plus side, aside from offering powerful abilities, locations generate Lore each turn, so it’s worth putting a few in each deck you play with.

In a deck there are also Action cards: a ‘one and done’ card where you play it, follow what the card tells you, then discard it. There are also Song cards, which offer alternative ways to be played than simply exerting cards in the Inkwell. These offer various ways to impact the flow of gameplay, both to benefit the person playing them and hinder their opponents, but the best part is they are all named after songs from Disney films!

There are plenty of ways players can go about collecting the 20 Lore necessary for victory, and it comes down to how creative they can be when creating a deck made up of the many cards available. With well over 1000 cards already available and more coming, needless to say the possibilities are endless!

Summary

• Very quick set-up

• Straight forward rules

• Incredible artwork. 

• Good level of strategy

• Plenty of cards to use

Final Verdict

Lorcana is a fun take on the CCG/TCG series of games and it shows that the developers have thought the game out fully. For anyone familiar with games like this, it’ll take seconds to learn as it bares some resemblances to other more established card games, but anyone should still be able to learn how to play quite quickly. The most appealing aspect is the cards themselves. The game is full of memorable characters, places, and objects, all of which have been beautifully illustrated and are genuinely captivating. Lorcana is worth a try, both for veterans and novices of card games. 

Also Read: Best Disney Board Games: A Whole New World

Who Should Buy This Game?

We think you should buy this game if:

You like a good card game: Lorcana has been carefully crafted and if treated right, could rank up there with some of the best CCGs out there. 

You like good-looking games: One of Lorcana’s biggest selling points is it’s art. There are over a thousand cards available, all with beautiful, high quality artwork.

You like Disney: This is a true love letter to Disney fans, featuring many memorable characters (some of which with many different variation), places, items, songs, and everything inbetween.  

You enjoy strategy games: Although Lorcana is a Disney game, don’t let that fool you. There’s so many cards out there that there’s tons of different strategies to try out.  

You might not like this game if: 

You’re not a Disney fan: Firstly, how dare you! But most importantly, this is a purely Disney-centric game so you may want to look at other card games as options.

You don’t want to buy endless expansions:  Like similar games, Lorcana relies on players to put a lot of money towards building a significant collection of cards to get the most out of the game. Although there are starter sets with pre-made decks, these can obviously get stale and having a huge pool of cards to draw on is where the variety comes in. So does the tremendous cost however… 

Disney Lorcana FAQ