Tech and Science News
Minecraft Dev's Shutdown Card Game Has Been Resurrected by Fans
Where there's a fandom, there's a way.
Scrolls, the well-received tactical card game by Minecraft developer Mojang, is being resurrected by fans as a free game now called Caller’s Bane.
Scrolls released back at the end of 2014, but developer Mojang announced later in June of 2015 that development of the game would begin to halt, with a commitment to keep running the servers until at least July of 2016.
It actually wasn’t until earlier this year that Mojang actually officially turned off the servers on February 13.
At the time, Mojang promised fans that it would try to work with the community to make Scrolls server software public, letting players host their own servers. Mojang claimed it couldn’t make any guarantees on the success of that initiative, but it appears that Caller’s Bane is the answer to that promise.
To play Caller’s Bane, organizers of the fan project have provided a simple guide to downloading the game and how its new server system works.
Any player can host their own server, but the game is already set up to connect to a community server hosted by scrollsguide.com owner “kbasten.”
Notably, players can alter the rules on their own servers to change balancing, change rules, create new trials, and other possible changes. The bad news is that players will effectively have to start from scratch with their decks and scrolls since Mojang’s data will not carry over, according to a post on the Caller’s Bane blog.
The upside to the Caller’s Bane servers customizability is that server owners can opt to give players a full set of scrolls or change gold and card distribution as they see fit. According to the same blog, Caller’s Bane won’t have an in-game friends list either.
Our review of Scrolls called it “a well-executed digital marriage of a collectible card game and board game with the potential for deep strategic play.”
Joseph Knoop is a news writer for IGN and will always believe in the heart of the cards. Unfurl with him on Twitter at @JosephKnoop.