Hey Everyone,

What’s popping! 🔥

Big news! We're hosting our first-ever giveaway draw this week exclusively for newsletter subscribers!

If you’d like to catch it live, hop into our Discord, where we’ll be sharing the live stream link.

If you’re new here, here’s how it works 👇

🎁 Monthly Draws:

Every month, a few lucky members of the OOL family will win premium gaming gear and Origins of Lume merchandise.

✅ How to enter:

That’s it, you’re in! The more total wishlists we hit, the bigger the prizes get.

👉 Wishlist Origins of Lume on Steam

While the core of OOL is built and functional, we’re taking this moment before going live to millions, to step back and refine what truly matters.

Since April, we’ve gathered tons of feedback from expos and players, and we’re putting that insight into action.

Every match in OOL is powered by its schema, the underlying logic balancing things like resource management and rewards. For instance, we recently removed the mana requirement for movement in the Arena. This makes gameplay more intuitive and beginner-friendly, while keeping strategic depth intact.

🔥 Two worlds, Fire and Water will define the first battlefields of Origins of Lume on Steam, with new realms arriving every few months. Players will also get access to the Outcast cards, part of our shared world ecosystem.

In the very beginning, Origins of Lume didn’t look like a game at all. It lived on paper and inside Excel sheets. I sketched arenas by hand, used coins as Units, and logged every move in spreadsheets.

The real turning point came when our mentor, looked at the design and asked me a question that stung:
“If this is just another card game… Why should anyone care?”

That one line changed everything. He pushed us to rethink not just the mechanics, but the value of what we were building. Without his challenge, Origins might have stayed “just another TCG.”

He guided us to explore movement, tension, and uniqueness. That forced us to rethink everything. Why a traditional TCG? Why a static board? What if movement mattered, what if it felt more like chess than just my card vs your card?

That’s how the 7×7 Arena was born.

To test it, I pulled in Faizal (our CMO). He wasn’t a game designer, which was perfect. We wanted someone to represent the public, someone who’d poke holes in the rules. We spent long nights running simulations in Excel, moving virtual pieces, finding flaws. Faizal was a great help in the initial days.

The game worked, but matches dragged to 30–40 minutes. It wasn’t boring for us (everything felt fresh), but no one would play more than once if every round ate that much time.

That frustration became the spark that led to one of our signature mechanics.

 👉 I’ll reveal that in the next issue.