The re-name game: Card Hunter for tablets becomes Loot & Legends

Death isn’t even excited that he won. He’s just chilling. Levitating some dice.

PC and Mac gamers have been hunting cards in Blue Manchu’s tongue-in-cheek online CCG Card Hunter for about a year now, and the game has earned universal rave reviews. Despite being browser-based like those Ask.com toolbars your mom keeps installing on her computer by accident, Card Hunter is a legit tactical tabletop RPG experience. RPS‘s Adam Smith called it “as good a turn-based skirmish game as I can remember any studio releasing in a good while”.

But what about us mobile types? Card Hunter’s been on our radars for a long time now, with an expected release on iOS this year with Android to follow. Mobile developers DropForge Games recently announced that the game was changing its name to Loot & Legends. Why ditch a perfectly good name that your fans already know?

I recently bugged developer Joe McDonagh about this question and others and he sent us these never-before-seen screenshots along with his answers, which I’ll show you after the jump.

So much loot. And, one presumes, legends.

Pay attention for this bit because it gets a bit novelty straw here. Ex-PopCap man Joe McDonagh co-founded Blue Manchu Games, where he created Card Hunter alongside industry notables like Magic The Gathering designer Richard Garfield and Irrational Games co-founder Jon Chey.

After Card Hunter launched last year, though, McDonagh left to found a new studio in Seattle: the mobile-focused DropForge Games. “I’ve been building kick-ass team here in Seattle with the goal of making digital CCGs. I see it as PopCap meets Wizards of the Coast — most of the people here followed me from PopCap.”

You can see the appeal for PopCap folks after EA squeezed the life out of their classic franchises Plants vs Zombies and Peggle – going to work for DropForge must have felt like a return to the golden era of PopCap, where McDonagh had been the franchise director on the universally beloved digital pachinko game Peggle.

Here’s where it gets a little confusing: to source DropForge’s first project, Joe McDonagh picked up the phone and called his old colleagues at Blue Manchu. “We licensed Card Hunter from Blue Manchu,” McDonagh told me. “I was one of the directors of Blue Manchu, and I worked on the original Card Hunter, so it’s been an easy and smooth transition.”

Okay. So we have original browser-based Card Hunter producer Joe McDonagh making the new mobile-based Card Hunter at his new studio. But the devs have decided to change the name of the mobile edition to Loot & Legends. How come?

“We think the game deserves a wider audience, which is why we’re making it on tablet,” says McDonagh. “We thought changing the name might make it a more broadly appealing.” Uh. Okay.

“It also means I won’t have to field any more questions about the awkward spoonerism inherent in the name.” Ohhhhhh. Now I get it.

Loot & Legends doesn’t have a concrete release date yet, but it’s getting closer — iPad first, with Android shortly thereafter. McDonagh has already started planning DropForge’s next project: another digital CCG collaboration with Richard Garfield.

You can keep tabs on DropForge on Twitter — ditto Blue Manchu.