A tabletop Persona 5 Royal card game is coming next year.
Atlus and board game publisher Pandasaurus Games jointly announced the game today. The cooperative card game seems to be eponymously titled Persona 5 Royal, and it's expected to arrive on October 21, 2023.
Designer Emerson Matsuuchi, known for tabletop titles like Century: Eastern Wonders and Foundations of Rome, explained that "players will take on the roles of their favorite Phantom Thieves and fight to change the world," echoing the themes of the JRPG.
Pandasaurus co-owner Nathan McNair said he "cannot wait to bring the Palaces, Velvet Room and world of Persona 5 Royal® onto tabletops everywhere in 2023," seemingly hinting that the settings in the card game will adapt some environments and challenges from the video game.
This adaptation comes as something of a surprise – though Atlus does seem determined to bring Persona 5 to every platform and medium possible – but as a turn-based game with a lot of moving parts, Persona 5 Royal is a decent fit for a card game. Of course, with the game freshly revealed and still over a year away, there's a lot we don't know about how it plays.
One big question is how many people will be able to play this co-op game at once. Century: Eastern Wonders is designed for two to four players while Foundations of Rome is billed for two to five, so given Matsuuchi's history and the four-person party system that this project is at least loosely based on, we can reasonably guess that the card game is somewhere around that range, but that is just a guess.
Persona 5 could get a live-action adaptation as Atlus parent Sega pushes to bring games to "new mediums and for new audiences."
