One Year of KeyChain
A look back at how KeyChain came to be.
Next week, KeyChain celebrates its one year anniversary since its beta launch on March 31, 2025. We wanted to use this moment to take a look back at KeyChain’s origin story. Plus, we have a few things to tease at the end of this post!
Project Might Club
In December 2024, the first spark of what would eventually become KeyChain was born on the Sloppy Labwork Discord server. KeyChain is a Sloppy Labwork site, which is full of other beloved gizmos such as Sloppy Tourneys, Random Access Archives, and pick and ban tools for various formats. Project Might Club was the designated codename given to a new exploratory gizmo idea: bringing leaderboards, rankings, achievements, and other player progression tracking to KeyForge.
Some of this had been tried before. Dead-Sync from the KeyChain team had previously done rudimentary versions of this in Google Sheets for his game store at the time, parts of which were inspired from discussions with Lokekar and his spreadsheet system with Pink Bunny Games.
However, the goal was to expand that with a robust web app: How could players have a portal consisting of multiple play communities and tie it all into a central profile? These are some of the (purposely very rough) sketches to get some ideas flowing.
Another Flowchart?
Before the site could be built, the team first needed to figure out how everything was connected. What is a playgroup? How do events connect with stats, profiles, and awards? How do leaderboards get updated? These questions led to more questions and several flowcharts, with flowcharts leading to spreadsheets (and… you guessed it… more spreadsheets).
Shiny Things
Even though the site was not yet built, we knew we wanted some sort of achievement system to give people shiny digital trinkets for players to collect and add to their own personal digital award shelf. One of the first things to come together were the idea of the tiered achievements:
Around the same time, we were also ready to start exploring “the brand” of Project Might Club. What would the site be called? How would it look? In something that rarely ever happens in design, we went with the very first idea proposed: KeyChain, along with its associated tagline: “Unlock your KeyForge organized play”.
Building the Site
For those who don’t already know, KeyChain’s resident development wizard jtrussell is the wand-waver for turning ideas into reality. He makes the magic possible. KeyChain did need to be a functional site, after all!
The KeyChain team would like to give a shoutout to their local play communities, who were part of a very small number of users to help kick the tires on early alpha builds of KeyChain as we continued to refine the site, add playercards, and prepare for upcoming features across February and March of last year.
The Rest is History
That brings us to exactly one year ago, where KeyChain launched a closed beta on March 31, 2025. Announced in Bad Penny Press, the KeyForge subreddit, and many other places on Discord, we invited organizers and leaders of game store playgroups to apply to join. We accomplished a lot with the beta thanks to your help, and in October, shipped into general release, opening up the platform to both online play as well as non-LGS playgroups (which we call Organizations) for organized play such as leagues or community-organized regional tournaments,
Pop the Champaign
As a thank you to everyone who has supported KeyChain in any capacity over the past year, we have a few surprises for you! For one, on our one year anniversary on Tuesday we’re releasing a Charm Drop with a few small playercard items to celebrate the occasion.
Tomorrow, before that though, we’ll be sharing with you something you may find particularly useful for your own organized play — for both players and event organizers alike. Stay tuned! — and thank you for supporting KeyChain this past year!
Outstanding work to everyone involved- thank you for being such incredible leaders in the community!
(and as an Illini alum who just saw his team reach the Final Four for the first time in 21 years, I'm glad to see you popping the Champaign! :-D )
Keychain has made such a splash, galvanizing player excitement for the game! Thank you all for working so hard on it, we appreciate you