Ex-Irrational Talent Announce New Studio, First Game

Card Hunter is a collaboration between new studio Blue Manchu (formed with many former Irrational developers including Irrational co-founder Jon Chey) and Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield. And that's why you should care about a free-to-play browser-based collectible card game.

Blue Manchu hasn't gone into great detail about its just-announced debut project, but the official site and trailer (below) are stuffed full of a wonderful tongue-in-cheek classic Dungeons & Dragons sensibility that brings the fourth-wall-breaking board game Munchkin to mind more than anything else.

This cryptic explanation from design director Jon Chey in an interview with Gamasutra doesn't help much: "Imagine you’re playing a board game/card game, only it’s largely a single-player experience. The best way to describe it is, imagine I take an MMO, and every time you fight a monster, instead of playing a timer game with with pull downs and buttons that you click, you’re playing a turn-based strategy game."

One huge relief is that you win cards by playing the game, not by buying booster packs. Blue Manchu has to be planning on making money off of Card Hunters somehow, but apparently that's not one of them.

There are a lot of words in there that I'm on board with: turn-based, board game, card collection, strategy. I'm not sure if I quite understand what Chey is getting at, but I look forward to finding out how those elements come together – especially since I'm a huge fan of another PC game that Garfield helped design.