Inspirations for Star Wars CCG

Premiere Limited booster box (1995).

The inspirations for Star Wars CCG were chess, the designers' earlier games, Magic: The Gathering and the Star Wars films. Designers Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh met over chess in high school and won world titles in Pente. They designed Decipher's Star Trek: The Next Generation Customizable Card Game before they designed Star Wars CCG (SWCCG). Braunlich said their aim was "to not copy what Magic: The Gathering was doing, but have a game that really captured the essence of these licenses."

Chess

Staunton chess set. Photo: Staxringold.

Braunlich and Tesh met at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, "because we played chess". In 1999 Braunlich said he "had a Masters rating in chess". Tesh said he did not have a master's rating but still beat Braunlich "most of the time"; Braunlich added that Tesh held an expert rating. Braunlich became a chess master while studying journalism at Oklahoma State University. He played in US Opens from 1976 and in the 2007 United States Championship, and his last FIDE rating was 2101. He organized three FIDE-rated events in Oklahoma in 2011 and 2012. He calls himself "a big chess fan" and keeps a lit display case of chess sets.

The two designers wanted the elegance of chess: a game easy to learn but deep. Braunlich said: "we worked really hard to have a balance between simple rules, but the ramifications of the rules are huge and almost unending." Destiny numbers came from the same wish for a self-contained game. Braunlich credits Tesh with the idea of drawing cards to "simulate the roll of the dice". In 1999 the designers said: "I wanted there to be some kind of random element in a game like dice, but we wanted the game to be self-contained." Printed numbers on the cards did that job. Lead designer Jerry Darcy designed the Hoth markers so the Dark Side must deploy far out and march in. He said "the drive of Star Wars CCG was to create strategy and create that kind of sense of chess."

Decipher's own introduction to SWCCG explained the game through chess:

Imagine playing a game of chess where each player could select from 1000 pieces, each of which moved differently. You would select your 16 pieces in secret, and so would your opponent. Sitting opposite him, surveying the board, you would make your attacks based on the pieces you selected, and form your defenses based on the pieces your opponent selected.

Pente

Sample Pente game. Credit: T0afer.

Pente is a five-in-a-row board game invented by Gary Gabrel in Oklahoma. Braunlich was one of its first playtesters, wrote a strategy book for it, and was world champion from 1979 to 1981; Tesh won in 1983. Braunlich proposed the tournament rule that limits the first player's second move, and Tesh proposed the Keryo-Pente variant. Decipher founder Warren Holland met the pair through Pente Games, which sold his Decipher puzzle, and Decipher later sold Pente itself. Braunlich and Tesh then ran a design company that worked for Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley for about ten years, "until the collectible card game craze came along".

Star Trek: The Next Generation CCG

Star Trek CCG card back (1994).

Decipher's first customizable card game was Star Trek: The Next Generation CCG (1994), designed by Braunlich and Tesh. Their route to it ran through an earlier Decipher Star Trek VCR game made under Decipher's Paramount license. Tesh learned of Magic early. Because the pair lived on Bainbridge Island near Wizards of the Coast, they met Richard Garfield and "assured them we weren't gonna copy".

Magic was "basically just a fight", and Braunlich said that was not what Star Trek was about. The Star Trek game scored points only by completing missions and solving dilemmas, along a "spaceline" of locations. Braunlich and Tesh called location-based play "the central element of all of our CCGs", saying it gives "a feeling of being inside the world". Braunlich traced it to "our board game background".

SWCCG kept several Star Trek ideas: 60-card decks, film stills as card art and a row of locations. It also kept the split between "noun" cards, such as characters and locations, and "verb" cards, such as interrupts. It also kept the Star Trek policy of not rotating old cards out. Braunlich said Holland "insisted that we can't do that with Star Trek ... especially since we wanted the cards to be collectible as well as playable".

SWCCG changed the rest. In his 1996 designer's notes Braunlich described a game "focusing on battle, as the Star Wars stories themselves do", with unequal Light and Dark sides in a "dynamic equilibrium". He counted three features as new: cards as units of the Force, the draw deck as a player's Life Force, and Force that circulates back to the Reserve Deck. Braunlich was moved to the Star Wars game before the Star Trek game was finished.

Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering, 2004. Photo: Andre Engels.

Braunlich and Tesh heard about Magic from another inventor and met Wizards of the Coast "a couple of times". They saw that "if we got a good license like Star Trek and did essentially the same thing but with an original gameplay system that we would have a natural." Decipher hired Darwin Bromley of Mayfair Games to work out the math of card collation.

SWCCG's deck works like a life total. Reviewer Allen Varney compared it to "a game of Magic where your life total equals the cards in your library". SWCCG has no life counters or dice, and its first sets had no four-copy limit and no banned list. Decipher preferred to fix strong cards with new counter cards: the only card it banned was Raise The Stakes in Star Trek Premiere. Rules SWCCG shares with Magic, such as 60-card decks and tournament decklists, trace to Magic's 1994 tournament rules.

The films

Luke Skywalker (Premiere, 1995).

Braunlich's first design goal 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". Decipher's introduction told new players "The games really do play like a movie!" Holland, a fan of Joseph Campbell, pushed for the hero's journey. The team found it "a little bit too much" and settled early on Light Side and Dark Side. Decipher bought an original print of the film and an editing machine to capture card images, and Lucasfilm opened its props department to the team at Skywalker Ranch.

See also

• Design of Star Wars CCG
• Games influenced by Star Wars CCG
• Creators of SWCCG · Tom Braunlich · Rollie Tesh · Warren Holland · Richard Garfield
• Star Trek CCG
• History of Star Wars CCG
• Transcripts: Radio Free Decipher/Episode 14 transcript · The Booster Pack/Episode 28 transcript