If you want to understand the big hype surrounding Ravensburger’s new trading card game, you have to talk to Julian Hammer. He spends 20 hours a week with “Disney Lorcana” and has already spent around 4,000 euros on the tickets. “It’s addictive for me. I’m always up for playing,” says Hammer, 35, a driving instructor by profession. He holds the cards with the Disney characters in his hand and sits between other players at a long table in the Karlsruhe games store Spielepyramide. He comes here twice a week to duel. When he’s not here, he gambles online. At the end of February, Hammer won the world’s largest Lorcana tournament to launch the third card set in Kaiserslautern.
For Ravensburger, the Upper Swabian game manufacturer, the game is a direct hit. When he released it last August, tickets sold out in just a few days. At toy fairs, visitors lined up hundreds of meters and for hours to get their hands on the game.
Lorcana brought a lot of money into Ravensburger’s coffers in difficult times. Because people are more thrifty due to inflation and the multiple crises, the European market shrank by five percent last year and the American market by as much as eight percent. Ravensburger’s traditional range – board games, puzzles, children’s books – also tended to follow the negative market trend. But Disney Lorcana worked great: at the end of 2023, Ravensburger had sales of 669 million – an increase of almost twelve percent.
“Lorcana was the largest product launch in our company’s history.”
The Ravensburgers have partially alienated the Disney characters and given them new characteristics. On the cards, Donald Duck sometimes appears as a musketeer, sometimes as a perfect gentleman, Cinderella not only wears clothes but also knight’s outfit, and Aladdin is a street boy or heroic bandit. Everyone knows them, almost everyone loves them: Of course, the game benefits from the great popularity of the Disney characters, some of whom are a hundred years old. Licenses always do well on the gaming market.
“Lorcana was the largest product launch in our company’s history,” said Ravensburger’s managing director, Clemens Maier, at the Nuremberg Toy Fair at the end of January. Three years ago, when people had to stay at home due to the Corona lockdowns and business with puzzles and board games was booming, Maier initiated the development of the game. He suspected that the boom would not last and decided to make the largest investment in the company’s 141-year history: He released a mid-double-digit million amount for Lorcana.
It was a risk not only because of the large sum involved, but also because Ravensburger had never developed a trading card game before. This market is its own: There is an active community that plays tournaments and always wants new cards and expects the manufacturer to constantly develop the game further. Each player puts together their own set, called a deck, from the cards they have collected and competes against others. The expert in the trading card market is the US company Hasbro, which generated around one billion US dollars with its fantasy card game “Magic: The Gathering” in the 2022 financial year.
The man who invented Lorcana used to be a judge at Magic tournaments. The American Ryan Miller has been developing trading card games for half his life; he has seen many games come and go. At the end of February you can reach him via video call at a promotional event in Cannes, France. “For me, Lorcana is a combination of my two greatest loves: Disney and trading card games,” he says. When his old friend Steve Warner from Ravensburger called and asked if he wanted to help develop the game, he jumped on board straight away.
Ravensburger has been cooperating with Disney for 60 years. Three years ago someone had the idea of making a collective trading card game. Miller and Warner began to delve deeply into the Disney world. The two thought up and rejected two dozen game architectures until they had one they were happy with. They were given designers, marketing people and sales people to support them and today they have a team of 60 people. Miller sensed early on that they were doing something very special. “But I didn’t expect the game to have such an impact either.”
Just a few days after the launch in Germany, North America and eight other European countries, the sets were sold out in many places. Rare cards were traded on online exchanges for 1,000 euros and more. Ravensburger reprinted and produced too much, says Nico Gribowitz, the salesman at the Karlsruhe games store Spielepyramide. He points behind the counter, where boxes of unsold Lorcana sets are lying around. “The sales figures have fallen somewhat again.” The prices for the cards on the online exchanges also.
Lorcana opens up a new target group
Now it’s time for Ravensburger to stick with it in order to assert itself in the special market. Lorcana will be released in ten additional countries this year, including the Nordics and Mexico. A new set is scheduled to come out every three months. Managing director Clemens Maier also hopes that his company will become less dependent on the Christmas business. He expects sales to increase again this year.
He wants to lead Lorcana to lasting success, no wonder since the Upper Swabians have only just opened up a new target group. While memory games or the Tiptoi learning pen are aimed more at small children and small-scale puzzles more at older adults, Lorcana appeals to young adults between 16 and 35 years old, people like Julian Hammer, the player in Karlsruhe.
In order to attract gamblers like him, Ravensburger is organizing official Lorcana tournaments from May. Until now, the competitions were organized by game stores and other organizers. Hammer is looking forward to the competitions, which will offer more tempting prizes than a few new sets of cards that he has won so far. He has big goals, wants to qualify for the German championships and dreams of the World Cup. Hammer will continue to train, play and trade online, and put together better and better sets of cards. It’s like an addiction for him.