As a huge fan of just about any game that involves friends gathering around a table to play together, I have seen many become popular for a year or two, then fade into the background as the larger legacy titles continue to dominate. And when I asked other tabletop gamers around me what they thought of Disney’s Lorcana when it first released three years ago, the response was almost unanimously “we’ll see.”
Today, most of those same people don’t just own Lorcana decks; they regularly play at the local game shop. I’d seen firsthand how Lorcana had won over gamers and the many ways it’s clearly growing, but a chat with co-creator Ryan Miller really helped me see why this game is so popular and what the next couple of years will look like.
Ravensburger’s booth at most game conventions is pretty big, but this year’s D23 was something unique. The size of the booth had grown significantly from its presence at Disney’s convention two years ago, including a massive space to play alongside a retail space and a small section for an in-person treasure hunt called a Collector Quest, where you find four cards inside of booster packs and trade them in for a rarer card with a foiled background.
That last part was so popular it took over six large nearby tables as people searched booster packs for the cards they needed, everyone helping one another reach their respective goals. There was an entire 120-plus-person Lorcana tournament in the middle of this convention, complete with cameras and color commentary. It was easily one of the biggest booths on the show floor that wasn’t entirely dedicated to shopping, and was constantly buzzing with activity.
Lorcana appeals to more than the Disney-obsessed, but that’s clearly a huge part of the base. Folks who have never played another trading card game before own multiple decks to challenge others, while others are here purely for the artwork and its place in their collections. It’s a wide array of customers to appeal to, and according to Ryan Miller, the key to keeping everyone as happy as possible is to avoid being overly reactive. “You can’t be too reactive. Partly because we’re a physical product. It’s impossible to be too reactive. Where we can be more reactive is in how we talk with our audience and how we listen to them, and then […] the play programs and things like that that are a bit more agile. ”
Miller adds that customers’ feedback is key, “There’s a lot of folks that are easier to hear just because of the spaces that we’re familiar with, but we’ve got to make sure we’re always listening to as many folks as possible.”
Experience also plays a huge part. Miller himself is a 25-plus-year industry veteran, with time at Wizards of the Coast (Magic: The Gathering) among many others, and it’s clear expertise matters to this team. I watched a single Ravensburger employee play Pack Rush and two other Lorcana games against players simultaneously, ensuring each person not only had fun and felt supported but also learned ways to improve their gameplay. The knowledge of the cards and the lore and the upcoming releases came from everyone at this booth, because they all had a part to play in helping any kind of player to approach the booth.
Russell HollyHaving the support of a company as large as Disney certainly doesn’t hurt. After a test run on Disney Cruise Lines last year, Lorcana will be included in every ship starting in 2027. But according to Miller, the goal of Disney property activations like cruise ships or the Collector Quest event at last year’s Festival of the Arts isn’t to turn most people into hard-core Lorcana players.
“I usually start by saying, ‘You’re not going to learn the game tonight.’ Some number of these people find out about Lorcana, they’re trading with others at the event, but then they go, ‘What’s this game about? This seems interesting,” Miller says. “Then next thing you know, they’re watching the videos, or they’re going and learning from a friend or something like that, and they’re playing.”
D23 is also where Ravensburger laid out the next year of releases, from big rare card drops and artwork for upcoming campaigns and lore books to a promise of a digital way to play at some point in the future. You can already use the Lorcana Companion app to track what cards you have and digital counters for in-person gameplay, but a desire to play a round while you’re waiting for someone in your car or just crashed out on the couch after a long day has been a question for a while now.
When I asked Miller whether Ravensburger would even start bringing something as large and as varied as Lorcana to an app, he once again brought it back to the players. “I have a three and a half year old. I can’t always get out to the store when I want to. [A digital game] allows me to still get that kind of fun of getting to play my favorite game. It keeps me in the community, right? It lets me kind of pick when I want to play. I’ve got 30 minutes, my son just went down, and I’m going to go to sleep soon. I’m going to get online and play. And so, with that in mind, we want to create something that is familiar. That is a home for them. I can’t say much more about what we’re doing with it, but that’s where you start. For a digital game, we just want a home. We want people who love Lorcana to be able to love it more in a way that fits with their lifestyle more.”
There’s a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings coming from the Lorcana team, with talk about making sure everyone can play where they want to play and how they want to play, either as collectors of great art or fun, smaller games to play with friends as you roam a theme park. It’s bigger than the experience at the table because it can be, and simultaneously, it can be a deeply strategic game that can elevate skilled players to a global stage. It’s a massive juggling act, one that has hard-core fans tracking the drop rate of rare cards and lamenting the rise of bot farms buying up special decks to resell like any other physical collector product in 2026.
But I keep coming back to that massive booth, the smiling fans helping people they’ve never met before and the staff who clearly love the game they work on. Lorcana has exploded since I played my first game at D23 in 2024, and when I play again at D23 in 2028, I won’t be nearly so surprised to see the giant Ravensburger booth taking up some well-earned space on the show floor.
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