dboeren said:

They have Twilight Imperium as an in-house property. Although I strongly doubt that an LCG without a major license is ever going to happen.

I think TI isn't a bad place to start for a strictly multiplayer LCG.  If they design the game to be played with 4ish players, and completely base the game around that rather than to to work in a 2-player version, there's potential.  Some decks could be very military themed, some could focus on politics and diplomacy, others on science to support a bit of everything.  I think the hardest part would be limiting the number of races (i'm assuming this is what the factions will be based on); or maybe just having all or most cards be neutral, with having race cards like identity cards from netrunner be the basis of your deck.  Maybe you really like playing the Barony of Letnev, but feeling like trying a more political type deck even though your strength would be militaristic.

I think there's potential in there, especially since FFG can make up source material as they go.

If there was a Twilight Imperium LCG then yeah, the factions would probably map to races.  It looks like there are 10 races total?  That's certainly on the high side and a potential issue.  I'm also not sure how much drawing power the TI brand name actually has.  I suspect the number of people out there who have played Twilight Imperium is smaller than the number of people who know any of the other themes.  Netrunner gets by because of ~20 years of pent up fandom for Netrunner, not because of the Android setting.  Call of Cthulhu has 8, I think that's the most factions of the LCG's so far, and one of those was added years later.

BSG seems better for draw since there's a recent TV series, but may have trouble finding enough factions?  I never watched it so I'm unsure whether any natural lines exist to split Humans & Ceylons into more factions.

dboeren said:

Humans could have Military and Civilian. Cylons could be split between the "kill all humans" faction and the "peaceful coexistence" group. Not particularly strong, IMO. I dunno if having factions is particularly important to FFG's design process, though.

Personally, I think the Buffy/Angel license would be a great pick. There's still a strong fanbase almost a decade after they went off the air, and the comics are top sellers for Dark Horse.

I want to say that in TI there were originally 6 races, each quite different from one another; the pile of other race came through expansions and new editions. Sticking to the original 6, and splashing in the other races as neutral or faction specific cards would. Not be very difficult: the space-pirate-like Mentak can be neutral with their mercenary behavior, while the Embers of Muat were enslaved by the Jol'Naar for a long time, making it easy to see them in Jol'Naar faction specific cards.  I won't disagree with you that big licenses would probably do better, as would games that weren't strictly 3+ players.

On BSG, I feel like the simplest option would be to make it another asymmetrical 2 player game.  But, I feel like part of what made the show so successful, the intrigue and interpersonal drama, would get lost in the fighting.  I can almost see like a reverse netrunner, where the cylons make "runs" on the human player and then trigger horrible things for them.

If Twilight Imperium originally had 6 races that solves that problem, I was looking at TI3 for my faction count.  I think anywhere beween 5-8 is the good range.

Hadn't thought of Buffy, but I question whether it has enough fans in the right age brackets.  The younger crowd brings a lot of disposable income.

For more recent TV shows, maybe Sopranos or Walking Dead?  I hate to even suggest Walking Dead though as they already have a couple of fairly bad boardgames out for that show.

I played the Buffy CCG once, it wasn´t very good. Sopranos might make for an interessting setting, not sure about The Walking Dead though.  Yeah zombies and the show/comic are pretty popular, but to be honest I´m not thrilled to play a zombie lcg or CCG/TCG for that matter.

On the BSG being asymmetriacl:

I thought of this before, but then relized that that wouldn´t work very good with the paranoya the tv-show and the broadgame made so good. I think either it has to be a strictly multiplayer where one unknown person is a cylon (would hate that, cause I would want to play both multiplayer and two player). Or it might be that each player plays human and each character that gets played has to add a face down card from a cylon deck, that can only be revealed to players through certain rare cards. In this deck there are thre kind of cards: cylon, sympathizer or human. Each player plays some kind of cards on the characters that give them points. Goal is it to make it to earth, without a cylon. The opponents could also interact with each other but only if a cylon is revealed to stop them from getting to earth.

sharoth said:

I fail to see what that has to do with the strength/popularity of the license. Wizards' Star Wars TCG was horrible and Decipher's Star Wars CCG was a beast to learn, but the Star Wars LCG is both simple and very, very good.

sharoth said:

I don't know, I had the notion that an asymmetrical zombies game (zombies vs. survivors) might be able to be pretty good.  Humans are having to protect themselves, forage for supplies, stuff like that.  Zombies are mutating, trying to break in, destroying potential resource sites.  It could potentially be done I think.

dboeren said:

I was thinking about the same (Walking Dead license, perhaps), though I'm wondering if the room for growth isn't too limited. This might be better as a board game, and there's at least out there that I know of that already does that (and there's probably more). And personally, I'm getting a bit tired of zombies.

Saturnine said:

Cryptozoic has the Walking Dead license and have already made a board game based on it.

Zombies are universal enough that a specific license probably isn't necessary, and not having one means fewer restrictions.

Decide you want to have "special" zombie types like Left 4 Dead?  Now you don't have to worry about someone saying that the Walking Dead (or whatever) universe doesn't have that kind of zombies in it and shutting down your idea.

Not sure if it has been suggested or mentioned (haven't read the entire thread), but any chance that a Marvel and/or DC LCG would be possible? Comic licenses might be too expensive, but I really do miss Vs. System and the new Marvel and DC Deckbuilding games have started to get me excited about a possibility of an LCG.

Majestix said:

Both licenses are with other companies. Cryptozoic just released the DC deckbuilding game and Upper Deck has Marvel.

FFG just needs to buy out Legend of the Five Rings from AEG and rerelease it as a LCG before they do anymore damage to it. It'd work great as a LCG formatted game and really save the game for the awful death of bad design it is dying right now.