A Forced Effort (The Duelist)

For the Premiere set, see Premiere Limited.

A Forced Effort: Star Wars Customizable Card Game is Allen Varney's Premiere review in The Duelist #9 (February 1996, pages 96–99). Designer copy from Tom Braunlich sits under the review.

The Duelist #9, February 1996, page 96.

The Duelist #9, February 1996, page 97.

The Duelist #9, February 1996, page 98.

The Duelist #9, February 1996, page 99.

A FORCED EFFORT:
Star Wars® Customizable Card Game™
A Review by Allen Varney

Star Wars® Customizable Card Game™
Premiere Edition
Decipher, Inc., Norfolk, VA
Format: 324-card set in three rarities; 60-card starter set, $8.95; 15-card expansion set, $3. For 2 players; playing time 30–60 minutes.
Design: Technical Design Services (Dan Burns, Ross Campbell, Rollie Tesh, and Tom Braunlich).
Graphic Design: Uncredited.
Contact: 253 Granby St., Norfolk, VA 23510-1813; (804) 623-3600; DCustServe@decipher.com (problems, product information); DjediMaster@decipher.com (rules questions, feedback); http://decipher.com/

You already know what this review will say. You can have fun with Decipher's Star Wars Customizable Card Game™ if you buy a lot of cards. Buy in big, or you'll get nowhere. The cards look beautiful, and they enhance the Star Wars® universe, but the game isn't all there yet. Forget about finding the main movie characters. Combat works fine. Collectors and devout fans will love these cards, but gamers less intensely interested in the Star Wars movies should treat the design as an exciting generic space combat, not particularly evocative of the films but still fun—if you buy in big.

You knew that. After all, you waited for this game until you turned pale blue, right? As soon as it hit the shelves in late December, everyone you know bought some decks, and everyone gave you an opinion. Or you saw a million posts online. Or you've already played it yourself. Right?

No wonder Decipher didn't send out advance review copies. I write this review barely ten days after the game's release, but by the time these words hit print, every gamer in the English-speaking world will already have bought Star Wars or decided not to. Nobody needs the premise explained. Everyone, except children under two, knows George Lucas' three mega-hit space opera movies, Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983). Every gamer knows that Decipher, publisher of the troubled Star Trek: The Next Generation™ trading card game, has written off its relationship with Paramount Pictures and found licensed happiness with the Lucasfilm studio. Word of mouth about Star Wars has undoubtedly spread as if through hyperspace, faster than light.

What, then, can a review offer? Impersonations of the Star Wars characters, word games, sweepstakes prizes? This piece leans hard on historical perspective, design analysis, and dumb jokes. Hey, I'm not proud.

Q: Why does it take so long to produce a Star Wars game?
A: You have to get signed releases from all those Ewoks.

Though Star Wars was one of the last big licensed properties to arrive in the adventure gaming hobby, it affected the field from the first movie's 1977 debut. The early influence showed up most clearly in SPI's interesting grand strategic war game Freedom in the Galaxy™ (1978) and in the short-lived RPG Star Ace™ (Pacesetter, 1984). Both featured heroic rebels battling an evil galactic empire, although Freedom was an abstract political simulation whereas Star Ace went for goofy zip-zap-zoom planet hopping.

Only in 1987 did the real article finally reach the field, with Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game™ (West End Games). Designed by Greg Costikyan, with a 1989 rules supplement by Greg Gorden, this excellent RPG showed clear understanding of the Star Wars virtues, especially in its sensitive ethical treatment of the Force. It also had first-class production values, a virtue shared by the new Decipher card game.

You liked the look of the Star Wars cards, didn't you? You couldn't miss the similarity to Decipher's Star Trek: The Next Generation cards—the slick design, handsome typefaces, and beautifully reproduced still photos, printed by Carta Mundi on sturdy stock. And perhaps even more than the Trek cards, these have appeal for the non-gaming card collector. The three-line lore descriptions, the newly created backgrounds for obscure characters, the close-ups of blast door controls and droid detectors—devoted fans love these. If you know who Biggs Darklighter is, this is your game.

It all looks as pretty as Star Trek. And the similarities continue, which is the big problem.

Q: How many Decipher designers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We at Decipher are sorry some customers have failed to appreciate the design subtlety of their darkened rooms. Our commitment to excellence is clear to anyone with the proper infrared sighting equipment. Out of generosity, we are spending a million dollars to ship free light bulbs to your retailer.

The complaints gamers made over and over about Decipher's Star Trek game were that (1) the main characters were too hard to find, and (2) starter decks were unplayable. Let's defer the first point and go right to Decipher's Warp Packs for the Star Trek CCG. Speaking personally, if I had to distribute a million bucks' worth of free fifteen-card booster packs nationwide to fix the problem of unplayable starter decks, I would learn from the experience. In later games I would try to make the starters playable. Maybe you, like me, were surprised to find that Decipher has not only made Star Wars starters unplayable, they're even more unplayable than Trek starters. One of these "starters" is just an arbitrary stack of cards.

A company netrep said that if you take the thirty Light Side (good) and thirty Dark Side (evil) cards in one starter and trade half with an opponent, you can each play a game with the requisite sixty cards. Yes, and you can also hold the cards in your teeth, but your hands work better. Two starters—at least, any two of the three starters I got—can't pretend to make practical decks. In your starters, did you get characters like Rebel Pilots and Imperial Pilots with no starfighters for them to fly? Planetary systems with no accompanying on-planet sites, or (in the case of the Death Star) vice versa? Timer Mines that are deployed by mining droids, but no mining droids? Effects that create "nighttime conditions" on a planet, but no cards that use these conditions? Interrupts that depend on your Tusken Raiders or Stormtroopers, except that—oh well. Did this happen to you?

Fortunately, I also had six boosters, and from my 270 cards I cobbled together two barely passable decks. Now the fun finally began, because Star Wars is a sound design, clearly explained in a good rulebook. It's fun to take control of systems and sites and win by sucking your opponent's cards down to zero. Using your deck as a reservoir of Force (life) points is clever, like a game of Magic where your life total equals the cards in your library. Laying out sites in lines, like the spaceline in Trek; deploying characters, then equipping them with vehicles and weapons and neat stuff; slugging it out, Light versus Dark, with power totals augmented by "destiny" draws from your deck; dealing with "attrition" losses mandated by destiny; moving from site to adjacent site, shuttling from a planet into space, flying from system to system—it's all fun.

The design smoothly conjures episodes of heroism, villainy, and fighting-fighting-fighting. Even my weak, emaciated decks, obvious bantha fodder for any player with more cards, still got pulses racing as my generic Rebel Guard and a generic R2 droid held Tatooine: Docking Bay 94 against the Empire's Chief Bast and the corrupt but well-armed tax collector Feltipern Trevagg. (The guard panicked and called in a Shivastanen Wolfman.) Decipher's early Star Trek publicity stressed how "characters in the Star Trek universe are too mature to be blatantly aggressive." The designers are having no truck with maturity in Star Wars. Forget maturity, deploy that blaster rifle! This is war!

The question is, is it Star Wars?

In two respects, I don't think so. The first, character rarity, is discussed below. The second concerns the game's handling of the Force. It surrounds and penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together, but in the Star Wars card game it's just a deck of cards doubling as life points. When you watched players dealing cards onto their Force Pile, then spending the cards to deploy other cards, then re-circulating them from the Used Pile back to the Reserve Deck, did you feel like they were really using the Force, the way Luke used it to cream the Death Star? Did it bug you that in Decipher's system, not only Jedi Knights, but everybody on both sides, was technically using the Force all the time? When Grand Moff Tarkin is using the Force, something feels wrong. The Force, a symbol of ethical conduct, here is reduced to a mere movie term arbitrarily wrapped around a game mechanic.

In one respect this Premiere Edition does duplicate a true (if frustrating) aspect of the Star Wars series—it's not finished. The rulebook says that later expansions will add rules for bounty hunting (capturing opposing cards) and, finally, the actual Death Star that all these Death Star sites attach to. If you had designed this game, do you think you might have found room in 324 cards for the Death Star? Or Chewbacca, or R2-D2? Me too! And what do we have in their place? Piles of nothing: Obi-Wan's Cape, Tusken Breath Mask, Jawa Siesta, Vaporators, "Look Sir, Droids," "Boring Conversation Anyway," "Luke! Luuuke!" and, so help me, an Ommni Box—one of the musical instruments played in the cantina. Every object and every memorable line in the movies looks likely to show up on its own card. This prompts the following question:

Q: How many cards can a Decipher designer make out of the first sentence of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?
A: Forty-nine: Gettysburg, The Lectern, Abe's Speech, Four Score and Seven, Our Fathers, The Bringing Forth, This Continent, New Nation, Conceived in Liberty, Dedicated, The Proposition, All Men, Created Equal, thirty-four named audience members, Applause, and Abe's Back. The Abe Lincoln card costs $75.

When you were looking forward to this card game, and then when you first looked through the cards, you probably thought of all the great scenes you enjoyed in the movies. Maybe your favorite part was in the cantina, or the first space battle as the Millennium Falcon blasts off from Tatooine, or Han and Luke's comic byplay in the Death Star control room, or our heroes in the garbage masher, or.…Like the Star Wars Premiere Edition, this list gets only halfway through the first film. All these scenes involve interesting characters that we care about. These characters, more than the blaster bolts and the planets exploding, are what make Star Wars such a compelling story.

The rarity of the major film characters in Star Wars has provoked bitter complaint. The people who bought a backpack full of Star Trek cards without finding Captain Picard now buy whole boxes of Star Wars without seeing Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, or any other recognizable face. Even the neat vehicles and locations (Millennium Falcon, the cantina) are rare. The same players get uncommon cards uselessly keyed to specific rares. For instance, "Luke's Back" brings the Luke card back to life.

Any buyer of a Star Wars game can legitimately expect the popular characters to show up. In that sense, as in the Force approach described above, the Decipher game fails to capture its subject. Although it's fun to send your Jawas tootling across the Jundland Wastes in a landspeeder to fight military droids led by Commander Praji, you may justly observe that it doesn't feel much like the movies. Yet unlike the starter problem, character rarity is not itself a design issue. The game isn't exactly Star Wars when its Wars lack a recognizable Star, but it still works.

As later unlimited editions appear, the issue of character rarity will fade. However, its existence indicates Decipher's attitude, which emphasizes the collectability of Star Wars over its game play. This has led to a genuine design flaw, known generically in some circles as the "Great Rare Problem."

The Star Wars designers, Technical Game Services, believe in the thrill of the hunt. Designer Tom Braunlich (who also co-designed Trek) demonstrated this when he addressed the rarity issue in a December statement posted on the Internet. The memo's candor is both fascinating and unsettling.

Braunlich wrote that earlier plans to make the major characters common were changed because "collectors who had already pre-ordered boxes were angry that the most collectable characters would be relegated to a cheap card. . . . Not only does it hurt collectability if the main characters are common, but our playtesting found that the playability was also unsatisfactory—and it also lacked logic since common cards can't be stronger than rare cards, and thus the remaining cards in that set made little sense relative to rarity. It just didn't work. . . . The most popular cards simply must be relatively hard to find; that's the nature of these games."

Collectors should feel heartened. Players, though, may note several points for discussion:

(1) "The playability was also unsatisfactory." Braunlich does not elaborate, but presumably the high power values of the major characters created such high combat totals that destiny draws (which boost these totals unpredictably) lost relevance. Also, high ability scores may have reduced the usefulness of weapons and devices, which often depend on destiny draws that exceed the target's ability. If true, fair enough. But these are only technical design problems, fixable in any number of ways. The idea that a Star Wars game inherently suffers because the major Star Wars characters are common is not defensible.

(2) It's a truism that "common cards can't be stronger than rare cards." But in a good design, rares shouldn't be stronger than commons, either; cards should be balanced against one another regardless of rarity. A card should be rare only because it is more narrowly useful or has effects confusing to novices. The statement that the remaining Star Wars cards make "little sense relative to rarity" is, or should be, meaningless. But Braunlich evidently thinks rarity should equal power.

(3) Braunlich also equates popularity with scarcity—"that's the nature of these games." Which games? In Magic, an advanced player with an expensive deck must still respect a common Fireball or Howl From Beyond. If you could build a tournament deck with all the green rares you wanted, would you leave out Giant Growth? Ideally the nature of these games, as opposed to these collectable card-sets, is that they're playable and fun for the whole target audience.

The collector's mentality shows in many Decipher statements. A netrep spoke of the "emotional" impact of finding a rare character and added, "If everyone had Luke, would you like it as much?" As a player, I don't get this. Luke goes in my Light deck, and my opponent is playing Dark; I'm the only one in the game with Luke. If the Light player at the next table doesn't have Luke, am I supposed to feel cool? I can't identify who first said, "It's no fun being rich unless others are poor," but clearly Decipher endorses this idea.

Decipher's arbitrary designations of rarity, involved as they are with players' emotional expectations ("I want Han!" "Then he's rare."), create something of a class distinction among gamers, an artificial system of haves and have-nots based on luck and money.

Q: How can you tell when a game company gets a Star Wars license?
A: The publisher starts wearing sports jackets made of $100 bills.

So you've read this far, even though you already knew what to think about Star Wars. Thank you! It may be pointless to review a game that will certainly sell hundreds of millions of cards regardless of quality. But we can hope that by bringing to light its virtues and flaws, other designers will heed the lessons. Possibly even Decipher, which talks about its "unreasonably high standard of excellence" more often than the record justifies, may modify later Star Wars editions to provide better value. If so, those will be the editions to buy, because the game rules proper deserve respect.

Earlier I listed some of the Star Wars scenes you might consider favorites. I'll close with my own: the peaceful moment halfway through Return of the Jedi where C-3PO is telling the Ewoks about the adventures of Luke, Leia, Han, and the rest. As the droid tells the tale, the audience sits raptly, eyes wide with wonder, hearts caught up in this splendid tale. This scene exactly sums up for me the entire Star Wars phenomenon.

Allen Varney is a freelance writer. His reviews appear regularly in The Duelist.

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DESIGNER'S NOTES
TOM BRAUNLICH

The Star Wars Customizable Card Game was a marvelous design challenge. We had many ambitious goals, all of which had to be executed using only the material in a few hours' worth of film. Fortunately, the richness of George Lucas's fantasy world made this possible.

The main goal of the design was to simulate as much as possible the feel of the Star Wars universe, allowing players to experience the emotions of Star Wars as they play. This meant featuring concepts like the Force, good vs. evil, the large number of droids, aliens, and alien landscapes, plus the excitement of tense battles and heroic actions. The other major goal was to have a fun and quick game, focusing on battle, as the Star Wars stories themselves do.

We achieved these goals by implementing several new elements. The most visible of these is the split of the cards into "Light Side" and "Dark Side" cards, with one player required to play each role. You will notice that the functionality of the two sides also mirrors Star Wars. They are not equal, and each side has cards that the other does not. From a design standpoint, we had to create a "dynamic equilibrium"—the Dark Side is generally more powerful, but the Light Side is sneaky and slippery. It took a lot of experimentation to arrive at a balance of cards between the two sides, which have very different feels but a roughly equal amount of strength.

To me, the most interesting aspect of the game is the way the Force is simulated. The game is essentially a battle of the Force between the two sides, and the one who manipulates his or her Force most cleverly wins.

This was achieved through three very unusual new features—the use of the cards themselves as Force units, the draw deck as the amount of Life Force the player has, and the way this Force is circulated. The cards in your deck indicate Life Force—yet you must also put those cards into play in order to try to attack the opponent's forces and defend your own. Instead of drawing cards into their hand as usual, players "activate Force" from the Reserve Deck, which can be either used to provide Force to "pay for" actions in play or be drawn into players' hands. Force a player uses to pay for things is circulated back into his or her reserves.

This Force circulation creates many strategies and tactics that are unique to SW:CCG. When you play a card, to deploy a character, for example, you accumulate certain advantages; however, doing so also depletes a unit of Force from your Life Force. A player must determine when a deployment is worthwhile, which depends on the current situation. The efficiency with which each player manages his or her Force is critical.

Other features of the game are destiny numbers (which partly determine the outcomes for a variety of actions or battles), and attrition (an aspect of battles that adds realism without getting into complexities like degrees of damage). Attrition also allows for many situations in which a strong military force can be successfully attacked by a weaker force—allowing for the kind of heroic actions that permeate the films.

As you play, remember that the game also had to be designed to have enough depth to last for years and to accommodate all the future cards that will come into play in the expansion sets for Empire Strikes Back, etc. Leaving room to expand means that there are many aspects of play that will be developed more fully as the expansions come out. Jedi skills and abilities will play an ever-increasing role, and concepts like bounty hunters, capturing, Death Stars, and so on have been saved for later. Feedback from players will help us decide the particulars of how to expand, what elements to emphasize, and so on. Decipher is happy to receive comments about game play, and we will attempt to integrate as much feedback as possible.

One fun aspect of working on SW:CCG was the opportunity to name new characters and other cards. For example, many of the aliens that are only seen in the shadows of the cantina in the movie could be shown clearly on cards. Yet most of these characters had no names or histories. Working with Lucasfilm and West End Games, we were able to create names, backgrounds, and other interesting details for them, as well as for miscellaneous pieces of equipment. This new information is considered official and was coordinated to match with other sources of information, including some of the novels and other Star Wars materials. Each of the characters and items pictured, however, is based on canonical information in the film itself.

The research gave us new respect for the richness of the movies, and the SW:CCG cards extend this pleasure by allowing fans to focus on these details and enjoy them close up. The game allows us to play "What if?" scenarios, exploring them and getting a feel for what could have happened in the movie. Playing SW:CCG, you wonder how Luke ever made it through Mos Eisley alive, much less the Death Star. The Force must have been with him! May the Force be with you!

Tom Braunlich is a member of Technical Game Services and co-designer of Star Wars: The Customizable Card Game.

See also

• Magazines · Media · The Duelist · Allen Varney · Tom Braunlich · Premiere Limited
• Inside the Industry (The Duelist 9)

External links

• Duelist Magazine - Issue 9 - February 1996, Internet Archive (Wizards of the Coast, February 1996)