What Happens When Your Online Game Goes Offline? Card Game Maker Has An Idea.

Online games have always had one major point of contention among fans—what happens when the servers the games run on are taken offline and players left without access to their content and accomplishments?

Card game developer Bushiroad are trying to circumvent this issue with their new smartphone game Five Qross, the company stated at the Anime Festival Asia in Singapore this week. While Bushiroad say they’re committed to supporting Five Qross over a long term, they’re also integrating actual physical cards with the digital game.

Five Qross players can either earn characters in-game or purchase physical booster packs which will come with randomized characters. These boosters will focus around different animations, such as the first expansion’s Infinite Stratos. They’ll have the card’s stats and illustrations on the cover, with a QR code and serial number on the back. You can use the game’s QR scanner to zap or manually input a code and voila, the character is now tied to your account and will appear in your inventory.

Within the sealed booster packs, if you chance upon a rare card, that rare card will be further sealed within its own plastic. Further, a white piece of paper just thick enough to withstand transparency is on the back, blocking the QR code and serial numbers. This could lead to a great re-sellers market, but also reassures players they’ve got something mint on their hands.

Additionally, Bushiroad say that some cards will only be available physically, and not digitally, adding further value to the physical card sets. You can check out somebody cracking open a box of boosters and finding some of the rare cards in the video below.

Five Qross is an asynchronous game, so players can have fights against others while on-the-go without having to worry about finding a suitable opponent who’s also online. It features a party of nine characters set up on your 3×3 board that will go up against foes in their own similarly set-up board of characters.

This region-free game—Bushiroad said to email them if players don’t find this the case to help them overcome the issue—is also cross-operable among various platforms, so players can log on with the same account on their PCs or phones on the go. Also, while the game isn’t currently in English, they have stated the intent to craft the menus and other interfaces for an English audience to understand as well.

Five Qross is out now for PC, iOS and Android. Scan the barcode below for a special character!