Radio Free Decipher/Episode 16 transcript
Radio Free Decipher Broadcast 16 (30 April 1999) is the second of two interviews with SWCCG designers Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh, about the design of the Young Jedi Collectible Card Game, the Episode I family box game, Girl Power, Animorphs, and early concept work on Decipher's planned full Episode I CCG. Participants: Carol Wisely (host), Tom Braunlich, Rollie Tesh.
Source: Broadcast 16 - Radio Free Decipher (30 April, 1999): Rollie Tesh, Tom Braunlich (Part 2), Player's Council, YouTube (uploaded 20 February 2022; originally released 30 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[edit]
[00:01] Carol Wisely: Well, I'm here again with Tom and Rollie. We talked a little bit last week, and I got these guys back in for a second interview to talk a little bit more about Young Jedi. Of course, we're getting ever closer. So nice to see you again, guys.
[00:12] Tom Braunlich: Hi, it's great to be here.
[00:14] Carol Wisely: So tell me a little bit more about the development of Young Jedi, Rollie, what that was like, what your first concepts were.
[00:20] Rollie Tesh: Well, like I mentioned earlier, we first researched from the Internet as much detail about the movie as we could, and then we actually tried to construct the movie with pictures and text. Then Tom and I put together a little show, with popcorn.
[00:35] Carol Wisely: I was there. I remember that. It was so funny. Do you remember how close you came? You were pretty close, I think, certainly in areas. It was all done in Word or something and projected onto the wall at the PD house, and we all sat there, and it was very, very funny.
[00:52] Tom Braunlich: I remember us all saying, this is months ago, in a year or so's time we're all going to be sitting in the theater with real popcorn, watching the real movie and laughing at where we were close and where we were way off. A lot of things were way off, but I think the goal of that was to give us all a feel for what the movie was going to be, so that we could try to get the right feel in the game. Of course, that's always the goal for these types of games.
[01:25] Carol Wisely: Now, the other thing that was really different about Young Jedi is who you were developing for, the prime target group. What did it feel like when Warren said to you, first of all, we're going to do a game for 9- to 13-year-olds? Was that a bit of a shock, or a big challenge?
[01:40] Tom Braunlich: It's what I was hoping for, actually. The classic game is so rich in its details. I was hoping for a game that was simpler, that appealed to a broader market, at least for Young Jedi, and I think we've achieved that.
[01:55] Carol Wisely: Do you feel we've achieved that?
[01:57] Rollie Tesh: Oh, absolutely. I'm very excited about the game design, and I can hardly wait to get it out there and have people start poking at it, looking for flaws, things that we've got to go back in and correct. But I don't think there are any.
[02:10] Carol Wisely: Well, if there are, they'll find them, and they'll find them very quickly, but they have fun doing that. They're good at it. It's the energy and the excitement around it. It's going to be great to see. It's not just going to be a game for 9- to 13-year-olds; it's going to be a game for everybody at lunchtime in particular, I can guarantee that. I like it myself a lot. It has less detail than a full-blown CCG would have, but it has quite a bit, and it's very streamlined and quick, which is what I like. You can play several games.
[02:45] Tom Braunlich: As a game player myself, I actually like games that have simpler rules but still allow for adaptive strategy. That's what I like about Pente so much.
[02:55] Carol Wisely: That's true. I like the fact that you can play a number of games in succession really quickly, so if you get completely and utterly defeated, as I often do, in the first one or two, you still feel that each new game is a fresh chance. I can't ask you too much about the game, although we are so close now; we are probably within a few weeks of this game being on the shelves. Is it similar to the classic game in any way?
[03:25] Rollie Tesh: Destiny numbers are still in there. It's still location-based, and that's very much a trademark.
[03:32] Tom Braunlich: And Force: depleting Force is the goal of the game. Those are probably the pinnacles that will be in all of our games, the hallmark of our Star Wars games.
[03:53] Carol Wisely: Now, when you were working on the concept development and also on the implementation with Warren and with the rest of the team, Bill and Jerry, and then Chuck and Tom, and Sandy and all the guys that came in and playtested, and Warren, who's a fairly hard taskmaster: I was present at a couple of those debates, and it always seemed to me that there was this wonderful tension between the story and the game, and between the designers too, a creative conflict. Do you find that a challenge, that you have to stay with the story but it has to work as a game?
[04:30] Tom Braunlich: We try to maximize both of those, and Warren is the type of person that won't compromise in any way on either one of those, so it's always a very big challenge. In addition, we had the challenge of keeping the game absolutely simple and easy to learn, and quick to play at the same time. So there were really three things that we had to try to maximize, which is difficult.
[04:52] Carol Wisely: And you think you achieved that?
[04:54] Tom Braunlich: I think so.
[04:55] Rollie Tesh: And making the cards collectible.
[04:57] Carol Wisely: Talk about collectibility a bit, because my personal belief is that everybody on the planet is some kind of collector. What are your particular collections? Tom, I know you have one or two things you collect.
[05:12] Tom Braunlich: I inherited a few years ago a coin collection started by my grandfather about 150 years ago, and it's a big mess, but I've been trying to organize it and I'm kind of getting into that a little bit. I also collect brass naval instruments of various kinds.
[05:28] Carol Wisely: Do you have those on your boat? Because I know you have a big boat; I've been on it.
[05:32] Tom Braunlich: No, although I often think about mounting them somewhere on the boat. I don't really have it well organized. I'm one of those people that just collects things.
[05:42] Carol Wisely: What about you, Rollie?
[05:44] Rollie Tesh: The only thing I like to collect is travel experience. I don't really care for material goods. I'm not a packrat at all. I just love to travel around.
[05:55] Carol Wisely: You guys went to the eclipse or something a couple of years ago?
[05:58] Rollie Tesh: Caribbean, actually. That was earlier this year. No, last year.
[06:03] Carol Wisely: Are you going to go to the next one that's coming up in England, my home country, this summer? It might be cloudy, though. It's always cloudy.
[06:15] Tom Braunlich: Maybe if we got on a boat down the middle of the English Channel.
[06:20] Carol Wisely: No, that's even cloudier. You need a rocket to see the eclipse.
[06:24] Tom Braunlich: Well, in that case we'll just go to London and hit the pubs.
[06:28] Carol Wisely: Cool. So talk about the collectibility of Young Jedi. What makes it so much fun to collect?
[06:35] Rollie Tesh: For people that collect for visual reasons, I think it'll be really appealing, because it's extremely colorful. Compared with the original trilogy movies, which are rather gray and dark a lot of the time, the Episode I movie is much more colorful, and the YJ cards reflect that. The characters really stand out. I think the art department did a great job, and Dan Burns seems to be very pleased with the fact that YJ is so much more colorful.
[07:05] Carol Wisely: Well, if Dan's pleased, I'm sure everybody else will be, because like Warren he's a hard taskmaster when it comes to the visual. We've hinted at some of the other collectibility issues with Young Jedi. We've never numbered cards before, but we've numbered them in Young Jedi. We've never put rarity icons on cards before, but we've done that on Young Jedi. I think all of that's going to help enormously with the collector. Also, Young Jedi is not going to be an impossible dream to collect, because the set size is small. When we launched Star Wars classic, how many cards were in Premiere? 324. I've got somebody waving at me: 324. And there are 140 in the first Young Jedi set, spread across the starters and the boosters.
[08:00] Tom Braunlich: Young Jedi benefits from the fact that we learned so much from classic that we can implement all of these factors that you mentioned, to make a game that appeals to everybody as fully as possible. I think it will. It's also a much more completable collection than the typical CCG is, because it's much more closed.
[08:20] Carol Wisely: Well, I'm a great one for never saying never at Decipher, so I would not say that there will never be another expansion for Young Jedi, but at the moment we've planned the three, in fairly quick succession, I believe. When you get those three you'll feel like you have a complete whole. But who knows where it'll go beyond that. It's going to be fun to see. So what are you guys working on now? I guess Young Jedi is pretty much put to bed for you.
[09:05] Tom Braunlich: We have been working on some other Decipher projects over the past eight or nine months. We did a game called Girl Power.
[09:12] Carol Wisely: I love it, and that's actually selling very well.
[09:15] Rollie Tesh: That was really interesting. That was a different one for me. It's for young girls, 8 to 12 years old. To get inside their heads was a different experience, and going to all those focus groups.
[09:28] Carol Wisely: I was part of the playtesting, although I'm not 8 to 10. I think you guys did a great job, and the focus group results also proved that it's a really neat board game.
[09:38] Tom Braunlich: It's mainly concept-driven; the package and the name are what's going to sell it off the shelves. Cindy Thornburg did a great job with that. We're honored that she turned it over to us. We just wanted a gameplay system that was simple and yet original, and still appealing enough to have some replay, and apparently it's selling very well.
[10:05] Carol Wisely: It's doing really well. What else have you done for Decipher recently? There's another little CCG you've worked on, I believe.
[10:12] Tom Braunlich: Cindy's group also got the license to the Animorphs series, which is a children's series of books that's extremely popular and also has a new Saturday morning live-action TV show. So we did sort of a small CCG for it. It's not really a full CCG, but it's a card game with similar deck-construction-type elements to it, and that was a lot of fun. That's coming out soon.
[10:38] Carol Wisely: Great. I guess you'll be working on the next two expansions for Young Jedi, or is that really in Bill and Jerry's hands?
[10:45] Tom Braunlich: It's mainly in their hands. We're starting to work conceptually on the next major Star Wars product, the full-fledged CCG.
[10:52] Carol Wisely: To come out later this year, towards the end of the year.
[10:55] Rollie Tesh: During the process of YJ and the other Star Wars things, we've always been thinking about that and building up towards that, but we had to finish the others first.
[11:05] Tom Braunlich: It's been kind of on the back burner for a few months while we were getting the others done, and then we're going to head forward on that.
[11:12] Carol Wisely: Also, something we've not really talked about very much on Radio Free Decipher or on the website: you guys also worked on a box game for Episode I that Cindy's group, the non-card-game group, is going to be selling. It's called the Episode I Customizable Card Game, but it's a self-contained box game. Can you tell us something about that?
[11:55] Tom Braunlich: It's something that I really like. It's all self-contained, with customizability. It's meant for the mass market, and it's very simple, simpler than Young Jedi. It's very much a family game, for two to four players. It's also very quick, but it has quite a different feel to it. Rollie and I play it for fun ourselves.
[12:20] Carol Wisely: How many cards?
[12:22] Tom Braunlich: I think there are 160. It's all self-contained in one box, but you can customize. It comes in four preset decks of 40 cards that you play right out of the box, but then it has very simple rules for doing your own customization in ways that the mass market can handle, where they don't have to put too much thought into it, a simplified type of customizing.
[12:45] Carol Wisely: It's a good way, I guess, to introduce people to some of the elements of customization and lead them on to Young Jedi, which would seem to be the perfect next step.
[12:55] Rollie Tesh: And then Young Jedi will lead on to the big game.
[13:03] Carol Wisely: Well, that sounds like a plan. I have seen it, and it looks beautiful. I think we had the first production boxes in yesterday, and I saw them in the office. It really looks amazing, with all the characters from Episode I on the box. I wanted to introduce that to our listeners because some people have heard about it from distributors or retailers, and there's some confusion about what the connection is. It is an introductory game, but it's not compatible. It's not part of the Young Jedi universe, it's not part of the classic universe, and it won't be part of the full-fledged Episode I CCG universe. It stands alone, but it's a wonderful family game, a great way to introduce everybody in the family to what customizing a deck means, and then lead them into Young Jedi if they want to get into a collectible phenomenon.
[13:55] Carol Wisely: So you've obviously got your hands full for some considerable time, and I guess at some point you'll start thinking about Episode II, although I dread to say that before any of us have really seen Episode I.
[14:10] Tom Braunlich: I'm already thinking about the sequel. It's going to be another guessing game, because that's another movie. At least we're going to know what's in Episode I 100 percent after May 19th now. Not very far to go.
[14:28] Rollie Tesh: In addition to trying to guess the next two movies, it's also going to be fun for everyone to try to guess how they're going to connect up with the original trilogy. For example, a big mystery for me is that in the third of the existing movies it comes as a big surprise to the audience that Vader is Luke's father. So how is he going to preserve that surprise for anybody that watches all six movies when they're all out together?
[14:50] Carol Wisely: The other thing that fascinates me is, given what happened with the classic trilogy after the release of those three movies, the way that universe was built by the likes of West End Games with all their role-playing material, all the novelizations and the extra books, Timothy Zahn and the comic series. All of that's going to happen with Episode I as well, so it'll be interesting to watch that previous-generation part of the universe of Star Wars grow, and all that secondary but canonical material begin to be developed.
[15:45] Tom Braunlich: It's going to be fascinating to watch, especially since Lucasfilm seems to be determined to be much more organized about it this time. They've made plans on how to keep everything in line and make sure all the various licensees are doing the same thing. It's an amazing myth to be creating.
[16:00] Carol Wisely: Well, I think we're running out of time. We don't like to make these recordings too long because of the download issues that people have, so I'm going to close off here for today. Thanks for coming, guys.
[16:10] Tom Braunlich: Thanks. Pleasure, enjoyed it.