Clash Royale: The Grand Arena, a board game adaptation of Supercell’s mobile card battler, has launched on Kickstarter and passed its initial $25,000 goal in less than an hour, IGN reports. Pledges start at $49, with higher tiers adding expansions, and the campaign runs until November.
The game comes out of a collaboration between Maestro Media and Supercell. IGN notes it is not the first tabletop adaptation from that partnership: Clash of Clans: The Epic Raid followed a similar Kickstarter route and raised more than $500,000 before its release.
How The Grand Arena plays
The Grand Arena is designed for two to four players, each controlling their own forces from an eight-card deck built around a chosen Champion. Players take turns attacking each other’s towers, spending elixir to fuel every move. Each tower destroyed earns a crown, and the player holding the most crowns when the game ends wins.
Lead designer David Gordon told IGN the team worked through several systems before settling on that structure, including real-time play against a clock and simultaneous reveals.
Ultimately, we found that focusing on elixir spending in a turn-based card play system yielded a fun experience that most resembled that of the video game.
Gordon also said accessibility shaped the design, telling IGN it was important that a strategy game fan who had never played the video game would find the tabletop version fun. IGN, which revealed the game’s first trailer last week, described the adaptation as faithful to the mobile original.
IGN said it expects The Grand Arena to post numbers similar to The Epic Raid’s before the campaign ends in November. Pledges are open on Kickstarter now, with the more expensive tiers bundling in the game’s expansions.
