Radio Free Decipher/Episode 14 transcript
Radio Free Decipher Broadcast 14 (16 April 1999) is the first of two interviews with SWCCG designers Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh, covering their background in chess and Pente, how they met Warren Holland, the Star Trek CCG, and the origin of SWCCG's Force, Used Pile and destiny systems. Participants: Carol Wisely (host), Tom Braunlich, Rollie Tesh.
Source: Broadcast 14 - Radio Free Decipher (16 April, 1999): Rollie Tesh, Tom Braunlich (Part 1), Player's Council, YouTube (uploaded 20 February 2022; originally released 16 April 1999). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript
[00:03] Carol Wisely: Hi, this is Carol Wisely with Radio Free Decipher, beginning the first of two interviews with Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh. Let's start with you, Tom. First, would you introduce yourself to all our Radio Free Decipher listeners?
[00:14] Tom Braunlich: Well, I'm Tom Braunlich, one of the designers of the Star Wars and Star Trek games, and plenty of the other products for Decipher as well. Outside of this life I've been a game inventor for approximately 20 years now, I guess. I got involved early on with a game called Pente, which was a strategy game that was very popular in the early '80s. I had a master's rating in chess, and just kind of stumbled into the game business.
[00:40] Carol Wisely: Great. And Rollie, introduce yourself.
[00:42] Rollie Tesh: My name is Rollie Tesh. I met Tom in high school, and he then got me hooked on Pente as well. Although I don't have a master's rating in chess, I still beat him most of the time.
[00:55] Tom Braunlich: You will say that. An expert rating is very good too. He's beaten me at virtually any game I've ever played against him. [unclear] is one that I remember distinctly.
[01:05] Rollie Tesh: Risk is my fondest memory.
[01:08] Carol Wisely: You beat me at Risk too, and that's a game I've been playing for more years than I care to remember. Still not well, though. So you guys met at high school. Where was that?
[01:20] Rollie Tesh: In Tulsa, Oklahoma, at Booker T. Washington High School, which was the first voluntarily integrated high school in the United States. We both came there from different parts of town and just happened to meet because we played chess.
[01:35] Carol Wisely: So were you in the school chess club? No CCGs back then, I guess.
[01:40] Tom Braunlich: No, those were the old days, the primitive days.
[01:44] Carol Wisely: Did role-playing exist at the time?
[01:47] Tom Braunlich: I think Dungeons & Dragons, yes, at that time. I didn't play that very much, but I had some friends who did quite a bit and I sat in a couple of times. That was not a big thing at our school, so it was more chess.
[02:00] Carol Wisely: So what got you to Pente? Were you Go players?
[02:04] Tom Braunlich: No, not really. It was just by accident that we got involved in Pente. The game was developed at Oklahoma State University, where I was going and where Rollie was living at the time, and the inventor was looking for experienced players to develop the game, fine-tune the rules and so on. He turned to us because we had some experience with those things.
[02:40] Carol Wisely: Playtesters, in fact. Who's the inventor of Pente?
[02:43] Tom Braunlich: Gary Gabrel.
[02:45] Carol Wisely: And is he still involved with Pente?
[02:47] Tom Braunlich: Yes, he's living in Boulder, Colorado now, and in fact we just had a reunion tournament recently to promote the new 20th anniversary set that Decipher's doing.
[02:55] Rollie Tesh: Tom and I traveled back to Oklahoma to play in the tournament. There's a guy from Austin, Texas, who has been studying for 20 years, and Tom and I, of course, were just winging it.
[03:10] Tom Braunlich: We were winging it. We had a great time, and I thought we did pretty well, considering, but he came very well prepared and defeated us both.
[03:18] Carol Wisely: Well, it's a great game, Pente. I played it at many a Toy Fair in between customers. For those of you out there who know Pente, it classically comes in a long red cylindrical tube. At various times we've done a black tube version, and now we do a 20th anniversary version, which is in the flat box that you'd see in Toys "R" Us.
[03:45] Rollie Tesh: So there's the red tube too.
[03:47] Carol Wisely: Yes, I just mentioned that. I need to listen more closely. Just teasing, Rollie. So you got into the games business, and you guys were professional game designers, which always fascinates people, and worked with Pente for a while. When did you first meet Decipher?
[04:05] Tom Braunlich: Warren Holland, who's president of Decipher, had developed over here in Virginia his product called Decipher, which was a coded jigsaw puzzle with a hundred-thousand-dollar prize to anyone who solved it. He showed it to Gary Gabrel at Pente Games, and Pente sold that for a while. That's how he initially met Warren. Then a year later Pente was sold out to Parker Brothers, and Warren took his own game back and started his own company. So we've known him ever since.
[04:35] Carol Wisely: Way, way back. What was the first Decipher product you worked on?
[04:40] Tom Braunlich: Not counting Pente, which Decipher now sells, I think the first one was No Dice. Typically, it was a game that we sold to Decipher but it wasn't our invention. It was the invention of a friend of ours, a professional designer who lives in New Jersey, named Jim Winslow.
[05:00] Carol Wisely: Oh yes, I've met Jim. He's a great guy.
[05:03] Tom Braunlich: We've worked with him on a lot of projects. It's kind of typical of the things that Rollie and I do, because we know a lot of inventors around the country and we work together on a lot of projects.
[05:15] Rollie Tesh: That was mainly Tom and Jim Winslow. It was a strategy game, but it had the feeling of being a dice game. There was no luck, but it still had that feeling. It was really cool.
[05:25] Tom Braunlich: It's called No Dice because it felt like backgammon. It had an element of [unclear] in it, but there were no dice in the game.
[05:35] Carol Wisely: But it's not on the market anymore.
[05:37] Tom Braunlich: Well, there are many good games that are not on the market anymore.
[05:40] Carol Wisely: So what was the next? Did you work on the Star Trek How to Host a Mystery?
[05:45] Tom Braunlich: No, but we did the VCR game.
[05:48] Carol Wisely: Ah, The Klingon Challenge.
[05:50] Tom Braunlich: Yes, and that's how the whole Star Trek thing started. It eventually led into the CCGs. That would have been back in about '92 or '93, I guess, the VCR game.
[06:00] Carol Wisely: Then you guys were based in Seattle at the time, and I guess that's how you came across Magic: The Gathering.
[06:07] Tom Braunlich: Actually, we heard about Magic from another inventor on the phone. It was a coincidence that we happened to be in Seattle, where the inventors, or the marketers, Wizards, were located. We met with them a couple of times and learned more and more about CCGs, and realized 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.
[06:40] Carol Wisely: And Star Trek then came out in '94. Are you guys big Star Trek fans?
[06:45] Rollie Tesh: Huge. I'm not necessarily a Trekker, but we certainly had to become Trekkers to design this game. I've never worn pointed ears.
[06:55] Carol Wisely: So you worked on Star Trek, which at that time was just based on The Next Generation, I believe, because Deep Space Nine was a future thing, and Voyager, and the original series was way back in the past. What do you remember from that process?
[07:15] Rollie Tesh: Well, from my point of view it's all a blur. There were long periods of time where we were delving into each of the episodes and pulling out things that would make cards, and trying to fit them into a system. It just seemed to take forever.
[07:35] Carol Wisely: How would you describe the basic concept of the Star Trek CCG game in a sentence or two?
[07:50] Tom Braunlich: Well, I think the essential element of all of our CCGs is that they're location-based, so you have a feeling of being inside the world. Then the characters and starships, and the whole mission-solving dilemma thing, which I've always thought was such a great aspect of Star Trek because it's so similar to the episodic nature of the property.
[08:15] Rollie Tesh: The goal was to try to simulate the feel of Star Trek as much as we could. Certainly the way every episode involves going to a new planet and having some kind of dilemma that you have to overcome was key to the series, so we tried to integrate that into the play with the idea of dilemma cards and so on.
[08:35] Carol Wisely: Great. And then when did you start working on Star Wars?
[08:38] Tom Braunlich: I think about a year later. Warren was in discussions with Lucasfilm for quite a while before it was actually committed to, but basically the following year we started working on Star Wars too.
[08:50] Carol Wisely: And was that a very different experience? Were you still on the West Coast at that time?
[08:55] Tom Braunlich: I think we moved to Norfolk, where Decipher's located, just about three months before. As soon as we found out we were going to do Star Wars too, we realized that we had to be here in Norfolk.
[09:10] Rollie Tesh: Because there were stories of eight-hour-long telephone calls between Decipher and the West Coast. In the early days it was just Tom and me and Warren, and Dan, and so it was very long days for a while, until finally Jerry and Bill and all the other fantastic staff came aboard and started taking the pressure off us.
[09:30] Carol Wisely: So you worked on the classic game. Do you still work on the classic game to a certain extent, or have you moved on to other things?
[09:38] Tom Braunlich: Well, we'd like to work on it more than we do, but starting a year and a half or so ago we started working on the new Episode I stuff, and we've been pretty much out of the more recent Star Wars things.
[09:50] Rollie Tesh: Tom and I are essentially the conceptualization people. We come up with the original ideas and then turn those over to people like Bill and Jerry, who are so good at implementing the ideas and fleshing them out.
[10:05] Carol Wisely: So let's go back to classic for a moment. When you were designing the concept of classic, what do you think of as the breakthrough moment?
[10:25] Rollie Tesh: I think we started with the idea of each player having a base that you were building up and the opponent was trying to destroy. Then Tom had the idea at some point: what if it was the deck that represented the base? And then it clicked with us: what if the deck was just simply the scoring device? We were wanting the game to be completely self-contained and elegant, and the cards themselves could act as the scoring devices. So the whole concept of the flow of the Force grew out of that, which is so integral to the Star Wars game.
[10:55] Tom Braunlich: Right, and when you lose your deck, you're out of Force and you're dead. And on top of that, I think the most interesting thing was how we arrived at how you manipulate your Force using a Used Pile and a Force Pile. I've said this before, but when you go to a tournament now and you see people just manipulating those cards, it's like it was the most natural thing in the world. We spent weeks and weeks trying to figure out how that would work, and went through a lot of different versions.
[11:30] Carol Wisely: It must be amazing, because that gets so fast it's a blur sometimes. Having been involved in promoting and teaching that game, once you get that over and you see the expert players, they are aware of every last card. It blows my mind. Somebody will show a card for just a split second, and both players immediately know what the ramifications of that are.
[11:55] Tom Braunlich: And also where their destiny draws are. That's the other thing.
[11:58] Carol Wisely: If you play against an expert, I've pretty much found they absolutely know what they're going to turn up for destiny once you're a little way into the game. I don't have that kind of card memory, so it's just as likely to be a location as it is to be a six for me, and that messes my plan up most of the time.
[12:15] Tom Braunlich: It's funny, when we were developing those systems we thought a really good player ought to be able to memorize the order of his cards after a while, for the last few cards at least. We were worried about that for a while, in fact. Then we thought, well, if they're that good, they deserve it.
[12:30] Carol Wisely: Oh, they are that good.
[12:32] Rollie Tesh: I don't think we ever really expected them to be able to do that consistently, though, but apparently they do.
[12:37] Carol Wisely: And many cards have been developed that play on that. There are many cards that people play just to put a card back into the destiny flow at the right time, and that's become a really big strategy.
[12:48] Tom Braunlich: That sounds like one of Jerry's ideas.
[12:50] Carol Wisely: It's a great one. It beats me every time. And what about destiny? When did that concept arise?
[13:00] Tom Braunlich: That might have been the very first thing. I wanted there to be some kind of random element in the game, like dice, but we wanted the game to be self-contained. So just the idea of putting numbers on the cards to represent the dice seemed so natural that I don't understand why everybody's not doing it.
[13:20] Carol Wisely: Well, there are many, many CCGs out there with many, many game mechanics. I think the Star Wars classic game is a beautiful game system. It's very, very rich now, because I think we're up to 1,800-plus cards, and that gets very fascinating and challenging to control everything that happens. Thanks, folks. In my second interview with Tom and Rollie next week, we'll get onto the subject of the work they've done on our new Episode I game, the Young Jedi Collectible Card Game, which will be out in a few weeks' time.
[13:50] Carol Wisely: For those of you listening who've made it through this interview waiting for news on Endor, I don't really have any yet for you, although it's looking increasingly like Endor will be out at the beginning of June, and Blaze of Glory some time after that. I don't have any more firm dates than that, so hang on in there.