Legend of the Five Rings (collectible card game)
1995 collectible card game
Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) is an out-of-print collectible card game created by a joint venture featuring Alderac Entertainment Group and ISOMEDIA in 1995 and published until 2015, when it was announced that the game would be discontinued for a rules-incompatible successor that will be part of Fantasy Flight Games' Living Card Game line. L5R takes place in the fictional empire of Rokugan from the Legend of the Five Rings setting, where several clans and factions vie for domination over the empire.
The card game shares some similarities with Magic: The Gathering but has its own game mechanics and flavor, providing "passive" win conditions like the Enlightenment Victory, as well as a version of Magic's goal of destroying the opponent. Games can be very long, with some matches lasting hours.
A major distinctive feature of the game is the importance of the storyline: new fiction pieces advancing the story of Rokugan are published on a weekly basis, in addition to being released with every expansion, and in a quarterly publication, the Imperial Herald. Many of these stories reflect the result of tournaments, where players use their decks to determine which faction will claim a particular prize within the storyline. Two novel lines, covering the Clan War and Four Winds arcs, have been published.
Legend of the Five Rings has garnered many accolades throughout the years, including several Origins awards (such as the most recent 2008 award for best CCG with Samurai Edition) and the 2008 Scrye Players Choice Best CCG Award for Samurai Edition.
History
The game was created by a joint venture featuring Alderac Entertainment Group and ISOMEDIA. It was first previewed at Gen Con in 1995, followed by the release of the first set, Imperial Edition, in October of that year, beginning the Clan War arc. The joint venture was dissolved and spun-out as Five Rings Publishing Group (FRPG), which was then acquired by Wizards of the Coast in 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Legend of the Five Rings (collectible card game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.