During today’s : The Next 🐬Chapter livestream, Ravensburger officially announced that this year’s World Championship will take place at the Disney World Resort on June 28-29. When the dates leaked early last week, Disney Lorcana’s new director of communications Greg Tito rushed to Twitch to share that this year’s event will be closed to the public, with only the 28 qualified players and their plus ones ✅able to attend.

This news came as a shock to the Disney Lorcana community, many of whom expected to be able to attend Worlds to watch the competition, celebrate the players, and participate in side events as t෴hey would at any other Disney Lorcana Challenge event. Despite previously being told there would be a fan component at the World Championship, Ravensburger has ultimately decided to change course.

Tito, as well as senior tournament operations manager Steven ‘Coop’ Cooper and chief marketing officer Elaine Chase, are three newcomers to the Ravensburger team who will serve pivotal roles in shaping the future of Disney Lorcana 🅘and its organized play program. I sat down with them to talk about this big change to the Worlds format, their philosophy about future Disney Lorcana events, and their plans to improve communication between Ravensburger and the Disney Lorcana community moving forward.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. As Chase, T🅠ito, and Cooper are yet unknown to Lorcana players, it only felt right to share as much of our actꦗual conversation as possible.

From Quest To Closed Event

TheGamer: When the World Championship was first revealed at D23 Expo last year during the Past, Present, and Future panel, it was described as a big fan event with a Challenge i𓆏n the middle of it. That was when we first learned about Quest and some of the big ideas ౠaround what Quest would be. And it was really positioned like a big fan event. Now it's not, it's just for the competitors. So, I'm curious why that change, and when did that change happen?

Elaine Chase: I'm gonna be super vulnerable with you right now and say, flat out, it is simply because the success of Disney Lorcana took everyone 🐟by complete surprise. At the time that was talked about it, we did not realize the overwhelming response we were going to get for Challenges and Worlds, and how many players were going to be so eager to be part of these things.

When I joined in October, there was one person running all play for Disney Lorcana across both Challenges and stores, and we didn't yet have the championships🌠 planned, and they were happening in eight weeks. We just could not take on the amount of work it takes.

And look, I do not think that we have been as good as we should be about pre-planning, announcing things, or telling players what's going on. It's not because we don't want to, or because we're hiding information, or because we're incompetent. It's literally because we were build💟ing this crazy plane as it was flying. We just really needed to take a moment to hire more people, regroup, and plan things.

So we're going to transition from a team of one person to a team of five people for play [including Cooper], plus someone else for communications [including Tito], plus two more people for marketing. So we're very much growing into meeting the fan demand that we're seeing for Disney Lorcana. We all wanted it to be an open event, and in fact, the team actually did the iteration of, okay, what will it take? How much♊ do we need to do? Can we actually get this all done? And the unified answer was a resoundingly sad no. Unfortunately, we just can't, so that's really, truly, why we had to pivot.

That said, I do truly believe that we can create an amazing Worldಞs event for the competitors and their plus one, and have a really great broadcast to share that experience with all the fans. And we very much expect to be able to announce details of the second Challenge series during the Worlds stream, so you'll actually be able to get a look at what the full season looks like, how it connects, what all the events are, and where you can see them, all at once. You also have a commitment from uꦆs to have a lot more frequent and transparent communications about all things Disney Lorcana, not just play.

Greg Tito: To me, that's what the whole Next Chapter is about. We've leveled up, we've gotten more people, we've gotten support, and no☂w we're going to be looking forward to how we're going to be coꦚmmunicating that and getting all the plans in place for everything coming.

TG: Since that announcement was made at D23 Expo, a lot of people may have started saving for that trip, or put off their♉ vacation plans for the year expecting to go, and in Greg’s live stream last week announcing that Worlds would be closed, it just seemed like the messaging there about creating this VIP experience for the players, and being overwhelmed by the response, didn't quite take into account that people are going to feel like they've been uninvited to Worlds.

EC: At the end of the day, this is that push-pull between people always wanting to hear details before they're finalized, and this is the risk that happens. I don't have a time machine, I wasn't here when that announcement was made. But if you ever hear hesitance to share details on things, it's not because we don't want to be transparent, or we're trying to hide ✱things. It's usually just because they're not done yet. If you announce something before it's done, then this is the risk that you run.

GT: You even need planning to get the communication in place to be able to tal☂k about it. I totally 🌄feel for those fans who were making plans, and we tried to be as transparent as quickly as we could. We'll just be better about that going forward.

Plans For This Year’s World Championship

TG: With the focus now on creating a VIP experience for the players. Can you talk about what that looksꦜ like?

Steven Cooper: It's our first world championship, so we want to make sure that the players who have workꦯed all year long and gotten those invites have a really great experience, and we're going to be taking care of them. We’re paying for their travel, making sure that their accommodations are taken care of. This event is also hosted at Walt Disney World Resort, so it's a really premium travel destination and the most magical place on Earth.

You're already going to have an elevated experience just being there. There's definitely going to be some fun opportunities throughout the week that we're excited to talk about, but tha🍌t alone is going to be really great for them to be around and ﷽have this event at.

Cooper confirms that Ravensburger is working with game stores and local communities to han🧜d out the non-foil version of A Whole New World to thoꦓse who tue into the broadcast.

TG: There are 28 qualified players for Worlds. Are there going to be fourꦐ more than qualify to get it to 32, or is it staying at 28?

SC: It will stay at 28 players for the W🍎orld Championship.

The Future Of Social Play

At D23 Expo 2024, Disney Lorcana Quest was a꧃nnounced. Described as the more social version of the competitive Challenge events, Quest events would feature a variety of Disney Loꦛrcana-related activities and ways to engage with the game in the theme parks. The World Championship was said to host the first major Quest event.

TG: I want to talk a little bit about social play. It was something that didn't really come up in the livestream. Part of the original pitch for Worlds was that it was so ꦍtied to Quest and this idea of havi⛎ng events built around community and social play. Now that it sounds like there's so much work being put into the future of DLCs and Challenge, I'm just wondering if there is still going to be a focus on Quest. Is that something that's still in the cards?

EC: There will be a focus on different 💛ways to enjoy Disney Lorcana, but what I want to do is kind of decouple whatever expectations people have around the word ‘Quest’ specifically, because again, it was 🍸talked about before we had defined things.

But I will say we are working on the following kinds of things: We're putting a really big emphasis on your local game store, and how we build up a foundation of play in your own backyard with the people you can gather wi✅th every week. We want to make sure that those are places where every type of player can have the kind of experience they want.

The second thing is we are working on making sure that we're able to provide that top tier of competitive play - the Challenges, an🌳d having our championships and Worlds, we’re really working on th🌳at.

The third thing we'🔯re working on is making sure that there are just a lot more play opportunities for large gatherings of folks who love Disney Lorcana. You've probably seen recently that there's been this smattering of mid-tier events. Whether it's that event that just happened in Germany a couple of weekends ago in Ravensburg, the event at a show ജin Madrid, or Star City Games in the US, running things too. You'll see more of these play opportunities that aren't part of the Challenge systems, but are still ways that players can gather with large communities of their fellow fans.

We're also working on ways where, if I don't yet know how to play Disney Lorca💎na, you can still have a fun, gamified experience through the awesomeness that is the cards themselves. I don't have details on what that translates into yet, but those are the kind of paths that we're looking at making work, because we really want to bring the joy of Disney Lorcana to as many ꦇpeople as possible, no matter how it is that you want to engage with it.

TG: So this idea of a Cha🍷llenge-sized socia🥂l experience, or what Quest was, that's not something you're considering?

EC:🌸 I don't know that💛 we actually talked about what Quest was or what that means. If we're talking about a large gathering of social players, yeah, of course we can have a large gathering of social players. Does it mean a large gathering of people who don't know Disney Lorcana yet? I don't know what that would look like.

But, if you look at the events that we have had, if yo𝕴u look at the championships at the end of the year, those were all events that had things like Mickey signings and artist signings, and in Paris, we had the voice actress from Moana sing songs there. So we are trying to imbue the Disney Lorcana with an experience that reaches beyond the cards, and we will continue trying to find ways to do that. What I just want to step away from is trying to brand these as separatಞe Quest events, when really, I think they're part of how we celebrate Disney Lorcana and what we want to bring to all the events that we create.

TG: Can you talk at all about what kind of changes we might be ab🐬le to expect from DLCs moving forward🌸?

SC: We real🍷ly can't talk about any changes yet. Just know that during the Worlds broadcast we will be announcing the details for that next season of Challenge, so a lot of those details will be answered then and talked about there.

Pro-Play Gamesꦍ, or PPG, organized alꦡl of the North American Challenge events so far.

Improving Communication

TG: Greg, you have talked about having better communication and being as transparent as possible, and I think that we have already seen that from you, specifically with being able to jump onto that live stream to talk about Worlds last week. Is there anything 💃else you can share about how you plan to improve communication?

GT: Yeah, it's gonna be a lot about opening those doors and having it not feel like there is this void. We are going to continue to just talk more often about things that are exciting for all Locana fans. We’ve got Reign of Jඣafar coming hot on the heels of The Next Chapter stream, and we're going to be sharing a lot of information about new cards and new things like that on live𒈔 streams on our Discord.

The plan for that is to just continue and have more weekly one-on-one live streams. We have that awesome stre💖aming room we got to debut for that quick live stream, but we'll be using that to its fullest extent as much as we can. I'm trying to engage with the community and bring people from the community either to that room or through interviews and things like that. Again, just making it feel like we're all in this together, and celebrating our love of🐼 both the trading card game and the Disney stuff that we are doing.

EC: I’ll add on to that that one of Greg’s tasks is to work out what the content plan is that we're building out towards. What you'll start seeing is different beats of content start coming out and start getting added over time. A year from now, I would expect the landscape of the frequency and types of content that you see coming out about Disney Lorcana from us will be much more robust and built up in a way that's more liℱke what you would expect to see from other big games that have been around for a while.

GT: When we start to see things bubbling up within the community, we’ll be talking about it as it's occurring, not in a reactionary way, but just being part of it. That🥀 livestream from last week is just the beginning of the type of back-and-forth and openness that we want to engender going forward