Design of Star Wars CCG

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The design of Star Wars CCG began in 1995 with Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh, the designers of Decipher's Star Trek CCG. Braunlich and Tesh wrote the core rules, Warren Holland approved every card, and Jerry Darcy led the design of the expansions.[1][2][3] Premiere shipped in December 1995. After Decipher lost the license in 2001, the volunteer Players Committee took over design and has made virtual cards since 2002.[4] Inspirations are covered in Inspirations for Star Wars CCG.

Origins

Braunlich and Tesh, Pente champions from Tulsa, Oklahoma, had designed Decipher's Star Trek: The Next Generation CCG.[2][5] Braunlich said Decipher "wanted to immediately grab the Star Wars license" before the first Star Trek sets were finished. He added: "even before the license was completed, we started working on it".[1] The two designers moved from the Seattle area to Norfolk, Virginia, to work at Decipher.[2] Darcy has said a mass-market partnership with Parker Brothers helped Decipher win the license; the Premiere Two-Player Introductory Game came out of that deal.[6]

Braunlich and Tesh began with a retreat at the Florida home of game designer Richard Borg and "came back from there with a general plan".[1] Braunlich calls the following year "my lost year", with "80, 90 hours a week on the details of these cards".[1]

The team

Braunlich and Tesh were outside consultants, not Decipher employees.[3] Tesh described their role: "Tom and I are essentially the conceptualization. I think we come up with the original ideas and then turn those over to people like Bill and Jerry".[2] The Premiere design room was Braunlich, Tesh, Holland, sales and design head Ross Campbell, and Darcy. Sessions ran "from like 10 o'clock in the morning till 2 o'clock in the morning".[6] Art director Dan Burns ran the art department.[3]

Holland had the final word on every card. Braunlich called him "a real taskmaster. He would not let any card go by that he didn't love."[1] Bill Martinson, lead designer of the Star Trek game, edited SWCCG card text with Holland.[7]

Darcy joined Decipher in 1995 in Star Trek customer service and moved into design "based on proximity".[3] He ran the game "unofficially" from A New Hope and as lead designer from Hoth.[6] In 1999 he described the job: "Chuck Kallenbach, Tom Lischke and Mike Reynolds will come up with card ideas and I'll tell them what's wrong with them."[8] Sandy Wible and Darcy were the core design team for Dagobah.[7] Lischke, a top tournament player, was hired after Hoth and acted as "the tournament player's advocate".[9] Kallenbach, a playtester since before Premiere, joined Decipher in 1997.[10][11] Braunlich said the design staff grew to "a dozen people".[1]

Core mechanics

The Force and the deck

Braunlich called the draw deck as the Force "my big contribution".[1] Tesh described how it started: "we started with the idea of each player having a base that you were building up and the opponent was trying to destroy. And then Tom had the idea ... what if it was the deck that represented the base".[2] The deck became the scoring device "because we were wanting the game to be completely self-contained and elegant". Tesh said "the whole concept of the flow of the force grew out of that".[2] The Used Pile and Force Pile took "weeks and weeks" and "a lot of different versions".[2]

Destiny

Braunlich credits Tesh with destiny numbers: cards "drawn from the deck in order to essentially simulate the roll of the dice". Strong cards got low destiny numbers, which Braunlich hoped would "give the people managing the set later on some tools".[1] The designers expected that good players might memorize the order of their cards, and decided "if they're that good ... they deserve that advantage".[2]

Attrition

At first battle destiny was simply added to power. Darcy said Braunlich and Tesh then saw that "the person who's the most powerful is just going to keep winning. There's no come from behind element. And so let's add attrition so that even if you win, you lose something".[6] Kallenbach links attrition's complexity to playtesting: weapons were left out of the first tests because "we know they already work".[10]

Force drains

Two accounts describe the origin of Force drains. Kallenbach said that at the first in-person playtest, battles at empty sites drained whole decks. Overnight, playtester Mark Tuttle proposed Force icons on both sides of a location to limit the damage, and the group agreed "It's going to balance the game".[12] Darcy said he and Tesh hit a stalled test game and "realized we needed a tiebreaker of some kind". He added that "multiple people came to that conclusion".[6]

Light Side and Dark Side

Holland wanted the hero's journey of Joseph Campbell in the game, which "proved to be a little bit too much". The team "decided early on that it had to be light side and dark side and light force and dark force".[1] Darcy described the balance: "the dark side is meant to be quicker, easier, more seductive ... But it's a false choice. It presents as more powerful, but it actually isn't."[7] Light Side characters had higher forfeit and slightly higher destiny; Dark Side characters had more power and lower deploy costs.[7]

Systems and parsecs

When Darcy arrived, systems and sites existed but movement between systems did not. He drew the galaxy map from West End Games' Star Wars roleplaying game on a blackboard, so that hyperspace moves "would just be a matter of subtraction".[6]

Making the cards

Card reviews

The Premiere team met after hours in Braunlich's apartment and projected "giant images of cards" on the wall. Braunlich proposed card functions, Darcy worked on "the particulars of the numbers", and the group "would incrementally improve each one" until "three or four o'clock in the morning".[1] Holland wanted every card to make players "feel like you were holding part of the Star Wars universe".[1] There were no balance formulas. Kallenbach said: "Everything was seat of the pants."[10]

Images

Decipher bought an original print of Star Wars and an expensive editing machine to capture frames, and the team "scoured every frame of those movies".[1][13] Lucasfilm opened its props department at Skywalker Ranch for photographs.[1] Background aliens from the cantina became cards. An image was a hard requirement: when Kallenbach proposed a card, Tesh asked "what's the image?"[10] Artists spent most of their time removing film grain, and later created images by computer.[3]

Lore and Lucasfilm

Card lore had to be approved by Lucasfilm. Braunlich said "all of the lore things had to be approved or justified", with notes giving each source, and Darcy handled most of it.[1] Lucasfilm let Decipher name unnamed background characters. Darcy recalled the answer: "Can we name it? Knock yourself out."[3] Decipher drew lore from West End Games' roleplaying books: "From a lore standpoint, we definitely stood on their shoulders."[3] Kallenbach named some Jabba's Palace aliens by drawing Scrabble tiles.[10]

Playtesting

Darcy called early playtesting "by today's standards, shamefully naive".[6] Decipher flew testers to a hotel for a few days of play and brainstorming. "You get one shot to get as much feedback as you can", Darcy said, after which the cards went to the printer.[6] Braunlich said testers "were there to try to break the game".[1] Testers received packets of photocopied cards to cut out and play.[10]

By Dagobah, top tournament players signed NDAs and tested remotely with their own groups.[7] Decipher had no full-time testers, which Darcy later called "a absolutely necessary component".[7] In 1998 the team said its playtest system was "bigger than it's ever been" and included "three or four current or ex top ten players".[14]

Expansions

The team planned expansions from the start. Braunlich said "the seeds of those sets was laid down in the original set", and some icons were printed before their rules existed.[1] During Premiere, Darcy wrote the set list on a blackboard: Hoth, Dagobah, Cloud City, Tatooine, Endor, Death Star.[6] Each set drew only on its part of the films, which left Dagobah with Luke and Yoda as its only Light Side characters.[7]

Lucasfilm's re-release of the films was a surprise: "we had no idea that George was gonna wanna do special edition".[9] Special Edition was meant to lift falling sales and gather the rules into "a one-stop shop".[9] Its operatives were added late and became a known mistake.[9][10]

Rarity

Braunlich said "about half of the sales of these games went to collectors", so Decipher wanted strong cards in every set.[1] The 1995 team treated rarity as a balancing tool. Darcy later said "that proved false" and that "the extreme rarity of the mains was unfortunately limiting".[6] SWCCG cards had no collector numbers or rarity icons until Decipher added them for Young Jedi.[15]

No banned cards

Decipher's policy was to fix problem cards, not ban them. In 1998 the designers said the only card Decipher had ever banned was from Star Trek Premiere: "We want to make sure that every card you have, you can play."[14] Darcy said this was "a passion of Warren's".[6] Braunlich wanted fixes to be "an elegant solution", but said "in the end, there was too much of that".[1] Printed counter cards that filled that role are covered on Silver bullets.

Regrets

Darcy said he "utterly failed" his goal of avoiding permission decks such as Sense and Alter. He "spent the rest of my time on that game trying to fix that mistake".[6] He took the blame for creatures and for the capture rules.[3][7] A rule meant to let the Dark Side deploy to Dagobah after a Light Side drain there was lost "in production".[7] He also judged that designing for tournament players "in retrospect was a mistake".[9]

Players Committee

Decipher's planned last product, internally called "Reflections Virtual Gold", included about 100 "virtual cards" with blank game text. A players committee would post the text on the web every four to six months; Lucasfilm turned the plan down.[4] In December 2001 Holland announced the Players Committee to post replacement text for existing cards. He called it "a small body of fans consisting of some of the best players and playtesters in the world".[4]

The Players Committee's design and development team creates virtual cards, evaluates the meta for errata, and runs iterative playtesting.[16] Designer Ryan Jellison said the team makes at most about 30 cards a quarter, because proofing, graphics and coding for GEMP all touch every card.[17] Volunteers code cards in Java through a GitHub repository, and some cards need new functions.[17] A character's game text is limited to five lines. The team avoids keywords and shorthand and writes rules out in full, as Decipher did.[17] Jellison said "every card that we make has a home somewhere", unlike the "common chaff" of Decipher's sets.[17]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 Booster Pack Throwback 28: Decipher's Star Wars CCG with designer Tom Braunlich, The Booster Pack (24 August 2022), 00:02–01:01. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Radio Free Decipher 14: Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh, Decipher, interview by Carol Wisely (16 April 1999), 08:42–12:30. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 The Jerry Darcy Interview, KendallCast, host Kendall Halman (21 November 2020). Audio: Internet Archive. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Radio Free Decipher special: Warren Holland, Decipher, interview by Kyle Heuer (28 December 2001), 19:40–24:21. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  5. ↑ Booster Pack Throwback 27: Decipher's Star Trek CCG with designer Tom Braunlich, The Booster Pack (10 August 2022). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  6. ↑ 6.00 6.01 6.02 6.03 6.04 6.05 6.06 6.07 6.08 6.09 6.10 6.11 Jerry Darcy on Premiere, A New Hope, and Hoth, KendallCast (3 May 2021). Audio: Internet Archive. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 Jerry Darcy on Dagobah, KendallCast (2 November 2021). Audio: Internet Archive. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  8. ↑ Radio Free Decipher 12: Jerry Darcy, Decipher, interview by Carol Wisely (2 April 1999), 01:21–01:35. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Corran on the Horn 13: Jerry Darcy on Special Edition, KendallCast (10 October 2022). Audio: Internet Archive. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 Corran on the Horn 16: Chuck Kallenbach, KendallCast (22 November 2022). Audio: Internet Archive. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  11. ↑ Decipher Talks LOTR Part 1: Chuck Kallenbach, TheOneRing.net (17 May 2002). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  12. ↑ Booster Pack Throwback 07: Chuck Kallenbach, part 1, The Booster Pack (26 May 2021), 24:32–26:07. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  13. ↑ Ben Lindbergh, The Force Is Strong With This 'Star Wars' Subculture, The Ringer (21 May 2018). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Radio Free Decipher 2, Decipher, host Kendrick Summers with Jerry Darcy, Chuck Kallenbach and Tom Lischke (11 December 1998), 15:27–18:55. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  15. ↑ Radio Free Decipher 16: Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh, part 2, Decipher, interview by Carol Wisely (30 April 1999), 07:29–07:34. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  16. ↑ Star Wars CCG Players Committee Organization Chart, Players Committee (6 May 2024). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 SWCCG PDS2: Ryan Jellison PC Designer Interview, ISB Troopers, HB Capital Weapons, Bill Bisco (YouTube, 18 May 2025), 15:44–27:30. Preserved copy: Internet Archive
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