Altered TCG now lets you play online with your own cards

Altered, a new trading card game hoping to compete with Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, has launched an interesting innovation. As of Wednesday, Sept. 25, fans now have the ability to play online in a web browser using the cards from their personal collection. It’s a brilliant new feature that is only possible thanks to the game’s digital-first approach to card ownership.

On every single Altered card is a relatively unobtrusive QR code that fans must scan into their phone. The mobile app works exceedingly well, with tactile feedback and clear in-app visuals that let you scan entire stacks in one go. Once scanned into the app, the digital rights to those cards — including some truly unique, one-of-one variants — become locked to players’ personal accounts. Toss the card away, and you can order another one, or another three, or get them all in foil, right through the app.

There are a lot of potential benefits to that digital-first approach, including for the publisher Equinox, which will get a cut of every card sale made on the secondary market. But of all those potential benefits, online play might be the most exciting for consumers. Through its partnership with Board Game Arena, a web-based multiplayer tabletop platform owned and managed by Asmodee, fans can link their digital card collection directly to online version of the game. Once fully integrated, you can play with cards from your own collection in multiplayer matches online.

This novel approach to card ownership comes in the wake of the many different adaptations applied all across the TCG fandom during the COVID-19 pandemic. When lockdowns torpedoed weekly events like Friday Night Magic, players went online using hacked together software and commercially available webcams to play games remotely from their kitchen tables. With this feature, Altered has taken those adaptations mainstream.

And for those wondering about the ethics of Altered’s digital backend, publisher Equinox tells Polygon that its technology does not rely on the blockchain. You can find Altered for sale at your local game store and online.