The Booster Pack/Episode 28 transcript

Transcript of an episode of The Booster Pack podcast. Part 1 of the interview covers the Star Trek CCG.

The Booster Pack #28: The making of the Star Wars CCG with Tom Braunlich (24 August 2022) is the second half of a two-part interview in which SWCCG co-designer Tom Braunlich describes developing the game in 1995: the design retreat with Rollie Tesh at Richard Borg's house, the deck-as-Force concept, the light and dark sides and destiny numbers, mining the films and Skywalker Ranch's prop department for cards, nightly card-review sessions with Warren Holland and Jerry Darcy, the first World Championship in Vail, Young Jedi, and a planned Harry Potter CCG. Participants: Rands (host, CCG History), Tom Braunlich.

Source: THE BOOSTER PACK #28 — The making of the STAR WARS CCG with Tom Braunlich || Decipher || TCG SWCCG, The Booster Pack Network, YouTube (uploaded 24 August 2022). Part 1: THE BOOSTER PACK #27 — The making of the STAR TREK CCG with Tom Braunlich.

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. Sponsor and subscription announcements at the end are left out. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].

Transcript

[00:25] Rands: Hello and welcome to the Booster Pack. My name is Rands and this is the show where we unwrap the stories and crack the mysteries of collectible games each and every episode. And today, well, let's just hyperdrive past one of these famous elongated intro, shall we? And just cut right into it, basically. Because this is actually part two of an earlier episode. You see, on our earlier episode, we discovered that our guest who is joining us again today had created so much card game history that it couldn't be contained in a single installment and in fact needed an expansion pack. That's right, this podcast. Now, on our previous episode also, we learned that our guest was a game designer, one of the first in the collectible game genre, who teamed with their partner Rollie Tesh and a company called Decipher at the dawn of the collectible card game craze to create a CCG based on one of the most loved science fiction television series on the airwaves at the time, Star Trek: The Next Generation. That game would become the Star Trek CCG and was printed by Decipher in one form or another for 13 years and still today is survived by its federations of fans who create new content for it. However, that is not the topic of our conversation today. In fact, today we are going to be talking about another collectible game that they followed up from Star Trek with, one that was based on another huge sci-fi property and has its own legion of fans that keep the game going long after it was went out of print, creating new content for it and all giving it a sort of immortal status.

[01:51] Rands: That game, of course, is the Star Wars Customizable Card Game from Decipher. And that game would be one of the top selling collectible games of its era only being outsold by Magic the Gathering itself during the heyday of its lifespan. Now, just join me in welcoming again to the booster pack somebody who isn't just a world-class game designer. They're a world Pente champion, a US national chess master, and an accomplished author. I am thrilled to be able to say these words once again. Welcome to the booster pack, Tom Braunlich. Tom, thank you for joining me again. How do you do?

[02:28] Tom Braunlich: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

[02:31] Rands: Excellent. I love I loved having you on the first time. I can't wait to find out what we can find out about the Star Wars development process. So, let's jump right in, hey? So, last time we sort of left off with you know, you guys launching Star Trek and sort of starting work on Star Wars. So, tell me when you first heard about Star Wars being the next big possibility for you guys as game designers.

[02:50] Tom Braunlich: Well, at some point during the middle of the Star Trek development just a little bit before the our first sets were finished. Decipher already had enough experience to realize it was going to be successful and they wanted to immediately grab the Star Wars license because that and that's ultimately the biggest license around. And it was also a perfect license for this type of gameplay. And so, essentially right on the heels of the launch of Star Trek we began work on the Star Wars. I think even before the license was completed, we started working on it in the hopes that it would come through. And and that began what I call my lost year. What an appropriate word considering some of the rules in Star Wars. It's it started out okay. Rollie Tesh and I went down and to Florida to the house of a friend of ours who is a game designer named Richard Borg.

[04:05] Tom Braunlich: And he had a nice little place down there where we could relax and talk about the game from a big picture perspective of how it should play, thinking about things like the depth of the ecosystem, would it be able to handle all this Star Wars stuff, and the and you have to have a gameplay that can contain all that type of thing. And that was very useful and we came back from there with a general plan of how we wanted the game design to work. And the I think that's where we came up with the main what I think of as the main features of the game plan. And the sort of the proprietary elements of this particular design, so to speak. And my big contribution was the concept of using the draw deck as your force, you know, it represents a tool not only just as a draw deck of cards, but something you can manipulate, something that you can count off cards to spend force and that type of thing.

[05:28] Rands: I think that particular mechanic is something that has permeated and is revolutionary to customizable card games or collectible card games, because many other games have borrowed that similar sort of feature. And I do want to talk about it a little bit later on in a little bit more detail, because I think it's fascinating. I did want to ask though, like obviously, you know, you said you guys went you went down and sort of looked at it from sort of a blue sky sort of big picture sort of perspective. And and I in the previous episode I called you brave for departing from Magic the Gathering's design when you approached Star Trek. This time when you're approaching a similar franchise and approaching something that's similar a lesser game designer or less brave game designers would just be like, well, let's just sort of carbon copy what we've done before considering it's a similar setting and create, you know, just a Star Wars version of our previous rule set. What inspired you obviously to do something so vastly different with this game? And what was your sort of you and your team's approach? Like how what did you know you wanted to capture about Star Wars and its fandom and put on the table?

[06:26] Tom Braunlich: Well, that's that's just the thing. Star Wars well, Decipher's approach, like we talked about last time, was to live up to the license, live up to the beautiful Star Wars universe. And and it has a lot of differences from Star Trek. It's not this you know, it's not this Federation go doing missions, being good guys out in space, and fighting bad guys. It's this whole Star Wars is much more about good versus evil, you know, light versus dark, the Force and these type of concepts. And so our just like before, we wanted to capture the flavor of that somehow in the gameplay. And at the same time it had to be a deep gameplay in order to encapsulate the you know, maybe a thousand cards that the set actually gets to. And and so that's that was our approach again and it so that we let that drive the gameplay.

[07:39] Rands: It was it was really interesting. It's a real revolutionary gameplay in itself. You know, there's obviously different locations and I think what people fell in love with about it is it really did feel like you were immersing yourself in Star Wars as a universe, not just, you know, hey, this is a lightsaber battle card game or something like that. It was something more, you know, so expansive. You almost, you know, pulled out further from what you'd done with Star Trek and sort of added so much more in as well. You know, so many more minute details that people couldn't replicate in almost any other way. Sure, there was role-playing games from West End Games for Star Trek and stuff like that. But it is I mean, sorry, Star Wars and stuff like that. But nothing quite like this in a mechanical sense. None of the board games really lived out. And I want to pull out something you said there. You know, you said that Star Wars is so different because it's this sort of eternal sort of struggle, this, you know, Joseph Campbell and, you know, type of good versus evil storyline, right? Something you guys decided to do and I don't know if it was very early on. I would love to hear when it was. Like, you guys decided almost in a completely, you know, counterpoint to what a lot of collectible card games were doing or what somebody even at the time would think, you know, normal for a collectible card game. But you separated the pool of cards into two distinct categories. Tell me about that. Where did idea come from of being like, oh, wait a minute, there's going to be a light side and there's going to be a dark side and those two things are, you know, incongruent with one another.

[09:00] Rands: They'll never sort of meet in the middle. Tell me about what you remember about designing that part of the game.

[09:06] Tom Braunlich: Well, you mentioned Joseph Campbell and that was something that was on Warren Holland's mind. He loved the concept of the hero's journey and that story and we even, I think, we viewed the Joseph Campbell interview with Bill Moyers, that the famous, just to help give us ideas, you know. Trying to see if there's ways that we could get kind of a hero's journey feeling in the gameplay. That proved to be a little bit over, you know, a little bit too but we could the good versus evil and the sort of the mythology in Campbell's sense, the mythology of the game with light and dark and symbolisms and that type of thing. And so I think we decided early on that it had to be light side and dark side and light force and dark force light characters and dark characters. And there was simply no way around that. Of course, that created a lot of challenges for us. And I think Rollie came up with some of the ideas that were necessary in order to try to get the math of the game to work out.

[10:23] Tom Braunlich: For example, the concept of the destiny numbers on the cards. Each card the basic concept of the destiny number essentially from a gameplay perspective was that cards would be drawn from the deck in order to essentially simulate the roll of the dice on anything that you try to do in the game. And in order to balance these large this large ecosystem, the cards that were strong in terms of their individual gameplay would have a small destiny number on the card. So that if you packed your deck full of these strong cards, you would be stuck with a lot of low destiny numbers when you had to draw for to see if you achieve something. And that was a mechanism that we hoped would survive long enough in the game design that it would help balance everything and get would give the people managing the set later on some tools to do that with.

[11:34] Rands: I love that and I love the use of the word balance in there because it did feel like almost, you know, like in that Star Wars sort of sense, a balance. You know, as more powerful a character is, the less powerful they are when you draw them for destiny or something like that. And that's a great implication in that particular game. I think it really felt thematic. It really felt like you were going, you know, to speak to that Joseph Campbell stuff we were talking about before. It's a game where you feel like you are sort of going on a journey. You start at one location and grow out. You know, it's not a singular character. It isn't a specific hero journey, but it is definitely a journey of heroes. And you meet characters along the way. You meet, you know, different assistants and different droids and everything like that. I really love the fact that you guys built all of the essence of Star Wars, not just the theme or the plot, but the essence of Star Wars into the game as well. So, before we move on to talking about some of those more really revolutionary things like the, you know, the life decking or force decks sort of mechanics we were talking about just a second ago. Tell me, before you sort of laid down that version of the game, before that locked in, do you remember if there was any other versions that you experimented with early on? Perhaps, you know, like other capturing other vibes of it. Maybe, you know, attacking one another's base or, you know, fighting for a supremacy or, you know, a lightsaber battle as I pitched before. Were there any other permutations of the particular game, if you remember, in that lost year of yours?

[12:53] Tom Braunlich: Let me premise my response by saying that not only was it 25, 27 years ago, but my memory is going to be pretty fuzzy in this interview because there was so much going on and we were so busy that literally months and months would go by and I would not have any idea what was going on in the outside world. My memory of that year is working 80, 90 hours a week on the details of these cards. Once we got the once we got the basic design the way we wanted it then we had to jump in and start working on the details, right? And that's where Jerry Darcy came to help out with that and other people and we worked on the game the cards from a graphical perspective and the art department there did a great job with that, you know, splitting up the look the sleek look of the evil empire cards and the beat up look of the, you know, the rebels.

[14:14] Tom Braunlich: They did a great job with that, but once we had that and we're working on the you know, we went straight into the meat of the project. So, I can't I can't remember any other designs that we had. I think we talked about doing more of a lightsaber battle type of thing, but that didn't have the breath to it that was needed for all the cards that we knew we're going to have to do. Because we knew we talked about the fact that this is based on the original Star Wars movie trilogy which is only what about 6 hours of screen time. And and we can find a lot of cards in that imagery, but it's but still it's only 6 hours compared to what 170 something hours in Star Trek. And so we knew we were going to have to do a lot to fill out that universe. And and a lightsaber battle type of gameplay is not going to do it, you know. We later on have some a lightsaber battle type game when we did the Young Jedi set, which I liked a lot.

[15:30] Rands: Yeah, that is definitely a favorite for many who remember it from that sort of episode 1 era. And unfortunately, I don't think we're going to have too much time to really delve into the Young Jedi, perhaps some other time. But, I do want to just mention that. Obviously, you know, you mentioned how much effort and work you put in. Within the space of 2 years, you had two major collectible card games coming out based on two of the biggest properties, you know, obviously there's a lot of pressure in that, but also that they captured the theme, you know, back to that sort of Warren Holland sort of design philosophy that we need really need to encapture the way that these games felt. And I can imagine that working 60 hours, 80 hours a week was incredibly hard and obviously very hard to remember the minute details. But, on behalf of, you know, the communities that still play them, I got to say thanks so much because those games not just, you know, might have only taken you 2 years each, you know, a year each to design or whatever, but they're still being played, you know, like we said, almost 27, 28 years later in some cases, by the fandom that loved them, that loved to sort of explore those missions. Now, before we move on to the actual mechanics and get into the gritty stuff of the game, tell me, you know, you mentioned there filling out the universe, you know, harvesting, no pun intended, harvesting the world of Star Wars for any sort of characters, all sorts of minutia, like every sort of thing. Tell me about like how you approach that. Like did you guys end up creating some sort of stuff out of little things yourself?

[16:47] Rands: I know there were some characters that got named after people at the site for it later on. I don't know if anything that happened earlier on like you. And and I mentioned before the role-playing games for Star Wars, which at the time was by West End Games. Did you liaise with them to sort of see what else you could sort of pass out of those movies?

[17:06] Tom Braunlich: We we used a lot of different methods to derive the most from the movies. One thing we did was we just simply scoured every frame of those movies. For example, the famous bar scene at the start of the first movie, you know, where they go into the bar and Tatooine, the cantina. Every shot in that, we you know, whatever was in the background, we tried to make a card out of it, you know. And a lot of the weird aliens there were glimpsed literally a split second in the background and you didn't get a good picture of them, but what Decipher did was they got a an original copy of the film in [unclear] mm. Very high definition. And they arranged to buy a an editing machine, a very expensive one, I think it was from Europe, to get very high definition of things in the background.

[18:22] Tom Braunlich: And so that was one way we were able to get them together. And sometimes the art department had to fill in some blanks on the character, you know, but they were very good at doing that. And another thing that we did, we fairly early on in the project, we took a trip out to Skywalker Ranch, you know, which is Lucas George Lucas's design ranch that he has out in California, which was amazing. They they opened up their prop department to us for us to use. The art department arranged to have good photographs taken of all these various props, you know, things like various lightsabers and just little doohickeys that were in the movie that they had there. And that was a lot of fun going there to that place. He's such amazing. He owns a whole valley. And you drive into the valley and there's all the parking is underground so that it's not accessible. And then you come up and there's one building that's a huge library and another building for offices and so forth.

[19:40] Tom Braunlich: And you'd be walking down a hallway and there'd be these display windows and you look at and you're just walking along and here's a display of Indiana Jones' bow whip, right? And here's a light saber that belonged to somebody. It's really interesting. And so we got a lot of you know, noun cards out of And but what I remember most is the taking all these random things and thinking about how they could be given power in the game from a mental standpoint. You know, we didn't want to just have a bunch of random stuff. We wanted it to be all everyone to be interesting, you know. So sometimes we would have to you know, a lot of the things that were done in the movie were just background stuff. They didn't really put much thought into them. But we you know, we tried to figure out what these things might really do and we would propose something in and to Lucas Film and try to get official approval for to say that on the card, you know, and that process went on quite a long time and it was ongoing for years, I think there.

[21:00] Tom Braunlich: But what I remember the most for that development year of the game was the very long sessions that we would have which I call brainstorming sessions, but they were really they were focused on individual cards. And so, what we would do is I had a an apartment that was had kind of a large living room. And after hours, after regular work hours, everyone would come over to my apartment. You know, Warren Holland, Rob, and Jerry Darcy, and Rollie, and we would all sit around. We move the furniture to face this big wall I had, and we'd project up on the wall these giant images of cards that were proposed to use in the game, right? And we would just talk about them, you know. And we would incrementally improve each one, you know. And Warren would sit there and he was very he was a real taskmaster.

[22:18] Tom Braunlich: He would not let any card go by that he didn't love, right? From a both from a marketing perspective, but also from just a artistic perspective, or the flavor of the game perspective. He wanted every card to feel good, you know. And I was there to try to think of interesting gameplay for you know, to try to achieve some of those effects. And so, it was Jerry Darcy, and other people were there to think about the cards from an art perspective, you know, and what's possible to do in the imagery. And and then I think Jerry would concentrate more on the particulars of the numbers that we were proposing for the cards, you know. Often, I would propose some kind of crazy function for the card to have, you know, cuz Warren would keep saying, "This card's not interesting." You know, so I'd say, "Well, what if it did this, you know?" And, sometimes we'd go overboard, but that's what I remember and that went on for a long time.

[23:34] Tom Braunlich: We would after we would be up until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning sometimes doing this. And then, go sleep and then do it all over again the next day and it just went on and on like that. And that's why I say it was the year that my lost year because I really have very little memories of what was going on that year.

[23:59] Rands: Well, I want to speak to like that just crazy intense period that you guys were working. You know, like, you know, we talked about building a universe out of, you know, the thematics of the game, but also like, you know, you spoke there a little bit about how you guys looked at every single card and made it look like it was doing what it would in the universe of the show. You know, a lot of lesser card games might just say, "Hey, what's this blaster going to do?" Plus two ability to some character or whatever, you know, it's just a plus number and then move on. But, you guys really made it feel like it was a thematic and enjoyable part to the point where, you know, you really sort of started to invest in like, you know, obviously, decks like Mains and Toys came along later on, which is where characters would, you know, be able to use their specific weapons and stuff like that. And you guys built that into the game where a lot of other games wouldn't do stuff like that. I think that's really great, really revolutionary. But, I do want to call out something you mentioned a while back there. I just want to mention, cuz it's not something that I think the vernacular of collectible card games sort of uses, but you guys were in a unique situation because you were adapting a license. You used the word noun card before and I've heard the word verb card as well. Do you want to break down what that sort of means for the audience in case they've never heard that terminology before?

[25:06] Tom Braunlich: Well, again we want the cards to have power and we want every they represent either things or actions. You know, characters, things or actions. And the characters and things are tangible and we wanted to bring out the I forget the exact phrase that Warren used for it, but we wanted every card when you held it in your hand to make you feel like you were holding part of the Star Wars universe or you were holding that character and using that character. Not just a you know, we didn't want just an abstract picture of a blaster. We wanted you to feel the blaster in your hand, so to speak.

[25:58] Rands: Mhm. Immersiveness, yeah.

[26:00] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, it's the I think the terms noun and verb cards were just one of our shortcuts for what we were trying to achieve with what you feel when you play the game.

[26:13] Rands: So, I mean, speaking of playing the game, obviously there is so much in the game. You know, it's one of those games that, you know, for some people love it, some people hate it, but there's an appendix of literally hundreds of pages that sort of breaks down how every sort of action works and stuff like that. And you know, they say that no one player can memorize all of the rules. It's really fantastic, but I do want to talk about sort of more of the baseline rules. Some of the stuff that came out of, you know, your initial sort of blue sky design sessions and stuff like that. And we mentioned sort of the deck being a huge part of the force, the essence of, you know, the balance of the world and stuff like that. And one of my favorite things that comes up in there is something like you didn't decide that every player just draws a the at the beginning of their turn. You guys decided that hey, whatever you force is left over goes into your hand and it really helped fuel that gameplay. Do you remember that's one of my favorite unique aspects about the game. Do you remember where an idea like that came from? Was that born out of you sort of enforcing this sort of force equals deck sort of philosophy?

[27:10] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, I can't remember how that came about. I think it was just in our brainstorming. Once we had the general idea of using the deck in that way, those things all seemed to be very natural. Which is another thing we wanted. We wanted the game that at least the conceptual rules to be intuitive and seem natural that way. And I believe that we achieved that and it's funny because after laboring over those type of questions for a long time and settling finally on the way that we did the deck and the way the force works in the game and things like destiny numbers and so on, we had options, you know, but we decided on this. But again, we were trying to make it seem natural and intuitive. And later on when we had at the first big tournament for the game and all there's a lot of really great players there who were a lot better than I was at figuring out how to construct a deck and so forth.

[28:25] Tom Braunlich: But I was what I was there at the tournament. It was held in Vail, Colorado. And I really enjoyed it because the players that most of them had not been involved as playtesters or anything, you know, they were just coming to the game the way most people did. And they to them the rules were like from God, you know? Like etched into tablets. Yeah, I mean the you know, a rule that you know, they'd be talking about a certain rule as if it was most natural thing in the world and I knew that we it could have gone either way, you know, could have been completely different. We then we just happened to just settle on that, but in their mind it didn't and I realized at that point that we had achieved to a certain extent what our goal was is to make it seem natural for the Star Wars universe and intuitive, right? And so I think that the way that deck works to simulate your well of force and that type of thing is very intuitive people and even though the game became unwieldy with all these extra rules and clarifications of the rules and so forth, which was kind of unfortunate, but it's inevitable.

[29:44] Tom Braunlich: I think that people can understand the basic concept of the game pretty easily and then it's a matter of just working out the details when you get into the play.

[29:52] Rands: Well, I completely agree and we sort of mentioned this when we spoke earlier about Star Trek, but you know, it was that sort of gameplay that was resonant. If you'd seen a Star Wars movie, if you'd seen, you know, what Luke does with his lightsaber, you could sort of parse it out in a more casual way. Obviously, tournament players are going to be tournament players and get down to the rules as we mentioned before and I would love to pick your brain about that world's tournament that you mentioned there, the 1996 one. But we'll we'll we'll sort of abridge that for a moment. I do want to ask though, speaking of these little minutia that sort of things, do you remember anything of the game system that sort of came out when you guys were doing the play testing before it was released? You know, people like, you know, Chuck Kallenbach was coming into the scene and you know, a bunch of other play testers as well were coming in and flying into Virginia to help out and have big play test sessions just before you guys launched. Do you remember anything especially interesting from sort of those sort of lessons?

[30:45] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, we had I think a couple of intense play testing sessions in early like in September that year I think. And I was not involved in organizing those. I think Jerry Darcy and maybe Chuck and others in these Decipher is already growing a big staff of people who were game play experts who were working on all these details that was over my head. And these some of these guys were the top players in the world, you know, and they were very brilliant. They would they were there to try to break the game, you know, they were trying to look for loopholes in the rules that were overlooked. They were you know, they we said be a rules lawyer, you know, try to find a rule that isn't worded well and you can exploit it, you know, that type of thing. And I think mainly that's what we were doing is trying to break what we had. We weren't doing much last minute game major changes to the rules. At least we didn't want to.

[32:02] Tom Braunlich: And and I don't remember any thing that came from that was major just probably tweaking the rules here and there and maybe rewriting them a little bit, you know, because a loophole was found. That's mainly what happened at those play tests.

[32:20] Rands: Well, I mean I'm I mean it was those play tests are now so legendary and I have some play test cards that are proxies here that have been shared with me as well. And I will ask you about one specific one in just a second. But before we get into that, Star Wars as we spoke about felt so evocative. Like there was so much built into to system. And we talked about earlier how you distincted, you know, like light side, dark side. That was always almost a threat, you know, in that sort of in that same way that Star Wars is, in the same way that, you know, the Joseph Campbell writing sort of laid out. Tell me, do you remember how you guys decided to manage the sort of gameplay that would be different between those two sides? What did you want sort of light side to be, and what did you guys want to dark side to be? Or did you just think that, hey, these guys can do whatever they want? Or did you want to evoke a different gameplay between each side?

[33:08] Tom Braunlich: I think you definitely wanted to evoke the flavor of those two sides of the force, you know, good versus evil and so forth. So, to some extent, the functions that we put on the light side cards were quote good, you know, there was not any there was not any horrible underhanded things that they could do. And some of the dark side cards were not constrained by that, you know, they could do little more evil things. But off the hand, I can't remember some examples of that, but I think we did do a lot of that.

[33:49] Rands: Well, I mean, I think that I think that you're 100% right. Like, there are different things, like, you know, the dark side, especially in the early days, felt like they were this huge military force. And the light side felt like they were a little bit trickier and could sort of get around and sort of escape and stuff like that. And I think that's another thing that really stamps the game in that sort of immersive sense. Now, there's a lot of cards in that first couple of sets. I'm not sure how far your specific card designs sort of on how you were involved in those specific, you know, card-by-card designs that you were talking about earlier. But there's a couple of that you know, some were dubbed sort of weird cards, things that you guess they encapsulate sort of what the movie is, but in such an interesting way, almost in a party game sense. Like, in the early set, you know, you've got something called hypo, which is a hypodermic needle that forces people to literally tell the truth within gameplay. And the you know, then Brainiac as well, who's who's I think number is actually pi. Like you've got to figure out what pi is. There's so much great stuff that sort of broke that realm there. And one of my favorite things is this was shared to me from one of the original playtesters, but you guys had this card early on that was obviously got weeded out. I don't know how you guys would have themed this, but it's called Saturday. And Saturday is a card that you would get a bonus if the day you were playing on was Saturday.

[35:08] Rands: Do you remember having stuff like that in the original set?

[35:11] Tom Braunlich: Oh, and so we had all kinds of weird stuff like that in you know, that were thrown out early on. And that sounds like one that Rollie would have created. But yeah, of course a lot of that got weeded out, but credit to Warren though, he liked it when we could make something like that actually work, right? Like like on Brainiac with his pi number and a few other oddball cards like that. He liked it as long as it didn't just create problems, right? You know, so having a card with Saturday is just kind of I think it got thrown out probably because it just doesn't fit the theme very well, but if there was there if there was a quote from the movie about Saturday, you that would fit, you know.

[36:06] Rands: Maybe it could have been Life Day from the old holiday special or something like that. I do want to ask about obviously, you know, it's fascinating and obviously this is so many years ago. But obviously you guys did an amazing work and you sort of spoke to them before. There was a bunch of people who were coming in and sort of joining the team and you guys were iterating, you know, making a collectible game is an iterative process and you guys are constantly iterating. Now, eventually the game does come out. What do you remember about launching the Star Wars CCG? Do you remember being at any conventions or was there anything that really surprised you about when it came out? Were you sort of surprised by how rabid fans were for it, how much love there was for it? Tell me about what your memories of it once it hit the market were.

[36:47] Tom Braunlich: So, to me it was a kind of confusing. I don't remember having a quote debut party or anything like that, although we might have. But all I remember is feeling relieved that it was over and knowing that we'd made, you know, we'd done the best we could to create a structure that we hoped would support the future sets that were bound to come out, you know. But I was not going to be so involved in those. The you know, the guys at Decipher you know, their design staff grew to I think a dozen people after a while. I mean, they were really and these guys knew what they were doing. They understood the cards more than I did. I would go help some with the new sets and help with playtesting and stuff, but I mean, my card decks were very you know, I would like to, you know, have all Jawa decks and things like that and just for fun and my decks would get obliterated by the But after the first year or two I was less involved with that work and so things calmed down for me somewhat and we would work on future things that Decipher was contemplating, you know, like when we did the Austin Powers game and stuff.

[38:21] Tom Braunlich: That.

[38:23] Rands: So, I was going to say, I do want to talk to you about some of that if we get time in just a moment. And as I as you sort of you know you sort of lay down the groundwork and to Decipher's credit they start bringing in fans, people who are really good players, people who are really amazing at the game itself to sort of help expand the game and sort of keep that essence and that sort of evocative sort of resonance that you guys have laid down. But bringing that sort of more gameplay sort of player mindset to it. So, I will spare you any more questions about the you know, the complicated sort of you know, inertia about you know, how did you feel about Sense, Alter and Control being a major thing and all those sort of you know, minutia sort of things. But I do want to sort of just ask you know, a little bit more broadly like do you have any sort of final memories of like your contributions to Star Wars CCG as it moved out of your hands as it went from you know, Premiere to New Hope to Hoth to Dagobah and it moved through the series. And I guess as to tack onto that question and sort of join it together as well. Do you remember having any experiences like when you guys started adding the same characters again? You know, Luke Skywalker went to Commander Luke Skywalker etc. Etc. Tell me about any memories you might have from sort of the later years of that game.

[39:33] Tom Braunlich: Well, I don't have a lot of memories about that. I mean, to some extent the seeds of those sets was laid down in the original set because we were trying to plan in advance for those and save cards for those, you know. And you know, we knew that because we only had a few hours of the movies to draw from that we had to utilize everything. So, you know, we tried to be create as much flexibility as we can and that we had these kind of general plans for those sets. And even some of the cards that are in those sets were designed earlier on, you know, and we just in some cases we were able to put icons on the cards in anticipation of something that was not going to be introduced until later. It's just like for a while it was a useless icon, you know. But, as far as the nitty-gritty for those sets, I was not so much involved anymore.

[40:49] Tom Braunlich: It was the other guys that were doing that work. And I think some of those guys did fantastic work. And and one day I may speak to them about this little work as well. And and I think that some of the way that universe built in the same way that, you know, Star Wars or eventually been known as New Hope built was built on by, you know, The Empire Strikes Back and then Return of the Jedi, that game continued to grow in its universe as well. And and all of the threads are there at the beginning, but, you know, everything gets explored, every corner gets explored. And keep in mind that we also were aware that it was inevitable there's going to be need to be cards that fix problems that came up in earlier sets, you know. And it's that's the problem we had in Star Trek and we knew we were going to have it in Star Wars and it's kind of inevitable. And so, these guys were much more in tune with what the problems were it from a, you know, it's one thing to kind of under sort of understand the problem, but they had to come up with an elegant solution of some kind, not just trying to do a magic bullet or something like that. And to try to we wanted to try to think of a problem that comes up as an opportunity to bring in something that is good, you know, not just a patch, but a set that would, you know, come up with a solution that would actually feel interesting and good.

[42:19] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, yeah. So, I think that was done on a few occasions. But, yeah, those guys they did a great job and continue to do so, and it's you know, for many years.

[42:35] Rands: Well, I mean, I would agree with that statement wholeheartedly. And as well, I loved, you know, while it got some criticism to sort of silver or you know, a rather sort of approach that you know, decipher took, you know, not banning any cards, which is a complete outlier from the other CCGs in the world. If there was a card problem, they'd just get rid of it. You guys would use that as a lesson to sort of create bigger design space for yourselves and sort of explore that. There's a ton of other minutia in that game that I think is fantastic. Things like attack run, where it's literally recreating moments of the Death Star. You know, you've got to have an X-Wing. You've got to have TIE fighters and stuff like that. There's so much fun in that game and such a deep well to explore, as deep as Star Wars lore in and of itself. I do I don't want to stick on it too long, because we do have some community questions as well. But just quickly, do you have any speaking of Star Wars and sort of expanding it out and we sort of mentioned it before, Young Jedi and Episode I. Like eventually that comes along and you guys are sort of tagged to sort of be the visionary design for what became Young Jedi. Do you have any really quick memories of that experience and even, you know, secretively working on a product for Episode I, while Episode I was still like shrouded in secrecy?

[43:49] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, that was very exciting. We had to sign non-disclosure agreements with Lucasfilm, and we got advanced copies of the script to work from, so that we could at least be thinking about, you know, what the game would do. It was going to have to be a standalone game. But earlier on Warren had the idea to do this Young Jedi game which is viewed as sort of a you know, a battle game and not the full universe but concentrating on the Jedi aspects. And the taking advantage of the fact that there was some really cool lightsaber battles coming up in that movie and we knew that it was going to happen. And we got to see some advanced footage of that great lightsaber battle at the end, you know, and boy that was amazing to see that. So yeah, the And and then when we got to that design my contribution to that was the way the battle worked using the math of it, you know.

[45:15] Rands: The battle plan, if you will. Is that what you mean?

[45:17] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, the battle plan. I felt that was an elegant way to do a battling and it allowed enough depth of gameplay that you wouldn't get tired of it after a while, you know, that it would there was a lot of different ways to approach it. So so that was fun to work on but again working with Lucasfilm with the secret stuff going on was quite fun. And then we when the first movie came out we Warren rented the entire theater and we took everybody to go see that episode one, you know, which was a lot of fun.

[46:01] Rands: What a literal climactic moment, you know, you guys would have to be like walking around using code names, hushed and secrets for months and months in advance. And all of a sudden, you guys get to finally see this amazing movie in its entirety. I love that and obviously to speak to your design as well, I think it's another great idea to using that battle plan. It's very fast-paced. It's very much you know, it doesn't need like hours of attention like a Star Wars customizable card game did. It was great for kids. I really do appreciate the work you guys have sort of laid out on that and stuff like that. Now, before we do go out, I do have two more questions for me and then some questions from the community and people who are listeners. And I do want to ask, we are jumping forward a little bit because we don't have a ton of time, but you guys did a lot of products for Decipher. You know, you mentioned Austin Powers in there and unfortunately we can't talk about the fun innuendo and stuff that was in that game. You did Animorphs, which was a personal favorite book series of mine way back when. But something that came out a little bit later and I'm not sure how you were involved in, but I'd love to get your take on it was after sort of Star Wars sort of went away from Decipher for unfortunately, they sort of shaped and remolded your game mechanics into a proprietary sort of franchise or IP of their own called Wars. Did you have any opinion on that? Were you consulted? Do you have any stories in regards to Wars itself?

[47:17] Tom Braunlich: No, I wasn't really involved in that. Warren told me that they were going to do that. You know, but that was a marketing decision, something they needed to do to you know, from their perspective. And I said go ahead, you know, do whatever you want.

[47:34] Rands: Well, I mean obviously, you know, the game lives on and now it even although relatively small compared to Star Wars, it has its own set of fan fans as well. And you know, people who listen to this show always say, "Why aren't you doing more Wars content and stuff?" So, the world that they created is still loved as well. So, you know, you guys being the embryo of that particular game is obviously means a lot to the fans of that game.

[47:56] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, I really love that people are still playing the game. I have two nephews that even now still play the game when they whenever they get together at a family reunion or something and I just I think it's great that the game has that ability and people still play it.

[48:11] Rands: I love that. Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. That was my actual last question is how do you feel about creating not just one but two games that have endured almost three decades now. Three decades from since you started working on them almost. How do you feel about that? You know, you said new generations are sort of learning the game, you know, from you and I know a lot of people who are still playing the game from way back when and now starting to show their kids and you know, there's a teacher in Minnesota that's using Star Wars CCG as a learning tool as well through math and problem-solving and stuff like that for their sort of like, you know, middle school students. How Tell me about how that makes you feel. Tell me about, you know, as the person who was sort of shepherding this project from literally day one. Tell me, you know, how that hits you.

[48:54] Tom Braunlich: Well, it's great because, you know, if any kind of creative thing that people are involved in beyond the money involved or anything, what you really want is to please other people, especially if it's something like this that you personally love, you know. And that was the thing about Decipher. Everyone there was big fan of Star Trek and Star Wars and we wanted to do something that would be worthy of those franchises. And so to know that we did create something that is still loved, not you know, not just loved for a while and then forgotten, but is still loved even now. It makes you feel good and I think it's that's true for any creative person. But especially for a game like this that was such a big part of my life for 5 or 10 years, you know, it's just it's wonderful to know that people still enjoy it.

[50:05] Rands: It's absolutely fantastic. Again, that speaks to those hours of work you guys put in just sort of really capture that feel. As we mentioned in the previous episode, if you just made Star Wars or Star Trek's version of Magic, I don't know if that even the license would have wouldn't have endured this so far. Like, you know, your fans of your games are so invested in them they want to continue adding to them by creating, you know, cards that they've made in their own Photoshop and stuff like that.

[50:28] Tom Braunlich: And another feeling I have though is feeling a lost opportunity as well because you know, after the first movie came out, the Decipher had the rights for that. They lost the rights shortly after that. And there was some machinations going on in the game industry. They were behind that. And also, Decipher had a crisis a financial crisis because they had a embezzlement problem that just sucked all the cash out of what they could do, you know? And as I recall you know, of course, Warren wanted to do the entire second trilogy. And so that we could continue doing you know, even more like this and unfortunately, that was all lost. And we also for a while we it looked like we were going to do a Harry Potter series. And that was you know, he was trying to get the license for that. And for a while, Rollie and I were off trying to create a Harry Potter CCG.

[51:44] Tom Braunlich: And that I'll tell you that would have been a one because our plan was to actually allow you to cast spells during the game even without a card. You wouldn't say, you know, you wouldn't have to have the card to cast the spell. You could just say the words to cast the spell and it in the game, you know, we were trying to make that work so that you felt like you were literally a wizard. And you know, the spell of course would have a game play effects, but you were saying the words. I remember some of the when we were talking about this with Bill Martinson and some of the other guys there, they're shaking their heads and saying, "How is that possibly going to work, you know?" But Warren loved that idea, you know, cuz that's what I like about Warren. He loved doing that because it was so much in the flavor of that franchises whole thing, you know. And I think we would have come up with something that would have worked and it would have been really exciting game, but unfortunately you know, it wasn't it didn't happen, you know, but so I kind of miss I kind of when thinking about it on those years, I think of not only that we did some good stuff, but we could have kept doing it if it weren't for some misfortunes that Decipher had.

[53:16] Rands: It's absolutely shocking or you know, disheartening for me to hear that these sort of things didn't come to fruition. Obviously, you know, Decipher ended up getting Lord of the Rings, but to have Harry Potter in there as well would have been an absolute amazing stable that hopefully would have been able to keep them going and keep these sort of games engaged. Especially, you know, nowadays the sort of franchise we're talking about, Star Wars, Star Trek were still a little bit fringe in those days. Nowadays, they're the biggest mainstream things that you could possibly embrace, you know, like Star Trek has a new series starting every year and Star Wars has a new movie or TV series I guess nowadays coming out every year. Like it would have been amazing to see. And I just want to speak to that Harry Potter thing cuz I had no idea you were going to mention that. And in fact, I didn't know anything about that. And that really excites me. Like the great thing about collectible card games, and I think people who have designed them know that what players love about them is the games in the context of the game make those players feel powerful. You know, if you're in playing Magic or something like that, you cast a spell and you're like, "Wow, I have this big effect." Psychologically, you feel like there's a lot of power there. And what you guys sounded like you were doing was embracing that without the reliance of the cards. I would have loved to have seen the design work in the immersive nature of that experience, that Harry Potter sort of dual power without even the need of the cards. I mean, talk about, you know, appealing to a different market, appealing to a different thing.

[54:32] Rands: Talk about the excitement at Toy Fair you would have had there when you take it off the cards and give the power to the people. I love that.

[54:40] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, I don't know if we would have been able to make that work, but that was the way we're we were heading and we were going to try to do that in some form. And and that's how it was at Decipher. They they were open to those type of wild ideas. But you had to make it work as well, and that's why we were often late with our deadlines. But yeah, I just I agree, it would have been fun. It would have been very interesting.

[55:11] Rands: I think you know, to speak to Decipher's infamously like late sets, you know, I think a lot of people now looking at them hindsight all agree that it was worth the wait. Obviously, the reason people felt so bad at the time is cuz they were so excited about sets coming out one after the other. That sort of brings us to the end of the main part of the interview. I do have some questions from the community I would love to put to you if we've got the time. So, very quickly, obviously there's a couple people I want to shout out and sort of just say, "Thank you so much for the question, but we won't have time to get to it." [unclear] asked about sort of battle destiny and attrition. If you remember anything about having to add that to the system, those sort of rules for Star Wars. Do you remember having to add that just to keep the board state changing? Like just to keep things changing or is that not something you have too much of a memory of?

[55:56] Tom Braunlich: I don't have too much of memory of that, sorry.

[55:59] Rands: Yeah, exactly. And part of that lost year, no doubt. You know, later on you started to having used years, but that year was certainly a lost one. I do want to mention as well Joshua Morris asked a great question about how much latitude you guys had with the Star Wars franchise. We sort of spoke about that, how you guys sort of dug into every single piece of lore. And I know for later sets there were definitely some people who started exploring, you know, and naming things after people at Decipher, little references. Obviously, we haven't even talked about how cool the Easter eggs are in some of the cards and the Easter egg hunting contest as well. So, thank you so much Josh for asking that question. Obviously, we don't have a ton of time to dig into that today.

[56:38] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, I sort of I sort of answered that a little bit earlier. The way we interacted with them and in some cases even went to visit them and get that stuff. And all of the lore things had to be approved and or justified, you know, so it was you know, we would suggest this lore and then we would explain why we thought it was good lore, you know, we'd have we footnotes to it. Say, you know, this comes from, you know, such and such a source, you know, that this we think this would be a good name for this character for whatever reason. But admittedly, some of those characters we were just making up names

[57:23] Rands: Yep, yeah.

[57:23] Tom Braunlich: Some of those cantina background I can't remember the name of the sisters, but that was obviously one of the famous ones from those early sets. I think Jerry Darcy was involved in most of that and he had a lot of fun with it. You should ask him about it.

[57:38] Rands: Yeah, I will definitely love to have a chance to talk to Jerry at some point further down the line on this show. Now, Austin Chandler asked about and we sort of talked about it again, we sort of talked about it earlier, so hopefully their question was answered. We talked about how creating, you know, magic bullet cards or silver bullet cards and versus errata, like how you felt as the game designer in that capacity. But, we sort of spoke to that. They Do you have a preference over what they did? Do you prefer them to do that than ban cards? Yes?

[58:04] Tom Braunlich: Well, I think so, and that was Decipher's design philosophy. You know, when we originally designed it, we hoped that there wouldn't be very much of that, but we knew that there would be, and then of course in the end there was a too much of that, a lot of it. But, so, there was no choice at that point. Once you commit to your ecosystem, you have to work within it. Yeah. And and sometimes there's just no way to fix a card that has the math wrong on it or something. You just have to use errata or whatever.

[58:41] Rands: I understand completely. Now, again, our fourth sorry, community question comes from Majin Telestar. He does ask about something we sort of spoke about earlier, but he just wants to ask about Premiere and how your sets were sort of structured. Were you designing New Hope cards as you were designing sort of cards for Premiere? How far ahead were you sort of planning in that capacity? Obviously, once it gets to Hoth, it starts to become a different design team. How far were you involved when it comes to sort of planning out like things in Premiere like captives really didn't come into play until a little bit later on.

[59:17] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, we tried to map out a road map of the next several sets and anticipate what would be in them and do whatever we could to make it easier for those sets when the actual design work came for them. And we were able to do that to some extent. We had you know, I talked before we had these gigantic spreadsheets that were, you know, with one entry for each possible card and all the data for it. And what set we thought this should go in and so forth. And we tried to you know, of course, from a marketing perspective Decipher wants to have strong stuff in each set, you know, so not only from a gameplay perspective, but from a collectibility perspective. Cuz remember it you know, we're we're thinking of this as a gameplay thing, but about half of the sales of these games went to collectors, you know, and they never you know, they put them in three-ring binders or whatever they do with them. And see some people would even have a full set to play with and a full set just to have, you know, as a collector, right?

[1:00:32] Tom Braunlich: So, we needed to try to anticipate that in for the entire next three or four years. And we did as much as we can, but we also knew that there was going to be some scrambling to, you know, when it became necessary to work on the actual set.

[1:00:50] Rands: Mhm. Well, we talked before how iterative the collectible game process is. You know, you've got to keep like despite the fact that you plan, you've got to keep, you know, learning from the things that have come before it and keep adding and keep, you know, recontextualizing cards, whether it's through things like errata, whether it's through new releases, whether it's just through adding new things to the universe that people can explore. And I loved what you guys did. And again, so disappointed I didn't see that Harry Potter game. But my last community question comes from Andy Talaga. He asked a really I thought was a really insightful question. You know, Star Trek was a CCG that you guys obviously did before Star Wars and we sort of spoke about that in the earlier episode but he said that he asked that, you know, because that game later on sort of stayed with Decipher, it didn't lose the license, they re-simplified it in what was called a second edition. You know, they sort of cut some stuff out and sort of pruned some stuff out. Had Star Wars gotten a second edition, he wanted to know what you as the original game designer would have liked to have seen more streamlined or sort of taken out. Do you have an opinion about that?

[1:01:53] Tom Braunlich: Oh boy, that's tough. The second edition for Star Trek I was not involved with. I think that was Chuck who did most of that and I know that was a lot of work for him to do it. Not just, you know, like pruning a tree, you know, you got to Again, we I always thought of these things as ecosystems. And to some extent an ecosystem you know, it's like Jurassic Park when they when the animals start doing things that you don't predict and get out of cages, you know? It's like the it's to some extent a CCG that the dinosaurs get out of the cages after a while and you know, so if you're doing a if you're later on and you're trying to do a simplified version of it, that's what you're going to try to do. You're going to try to mend those fences and you know, take out the cards that were problematic and learn from what your mistakes were when the in the original design and try to create a much smoother and simpler, more elegant version.

[1:03:11] Tom Braunlich: But that at that point it was already above my level to do something like that because the game had gone beyond my understanding of the minutiae of it at that point, you know, once it got past the first premier episodes.

[1:03:29] Rands: Well, as well, we spoke earlier about Wars as well, and that sort of reworked the system in some interesting ways as well that sort of added that in. That's I mean, I guess, you know, if you take a, you know, a 10,000 yd view of the situation, that could be, you know, a sort of the Star Wars 2.0 that we might have seen from Decipher had they kept the license. Who knows? Now, I love that metaphor that you used about Jurassic Park. You know, you've got me thinking up images of Sam Neill running down corridors going, "The operatives are loose. The operatives are loose." And other such and other such experiences. Now, we have one last thing to do before we leave for the episode. It's really quick. It's our lightning round of questions called cracking questions. All right. So, in this particular in this particular game, all it is a lightning round of four simple questions to go out on. Three are common, silly questions, and one is a sort of more serious game designer question. All you've got to do for me, Tom, is tell me what color you'd like me to crack open. These have been randomized from a card pool of about 35 cards that I have, and we'll see what questions you get asked on the way out. What color would you like to go out on?

[1:04:36] Tom Braunlich: Okay, I want yellow.

[1:04:38] Rands: Yellow? All right, no worries. Let's see what is in yellow. Again, these are randomized, so let's find out what you go out on this yellow alert. We didn't We talked about the previous episode. That was again a magic bullet for red alert that we talked about earlier. I love that history there. All right. So, your first cracking question, that's a silly one, common question. What is the nerdiest thing you own?

[1:05:03] Tom Braunlich: Oh, the nerdiest thing I own. Well, I'm a big chess fan, and I've got a collection of chess sets here in a display case, and I have it lit up so on a timer so that at night when the room is dark it lights up and you can see it.

[1:05:21] Rands: So cool. That is that you know the ultimate strategy game chess is and I'm I'm so glad obviously you know we mentioned how much you are a chess master and stuff like that. So you know I love hearing about that. So your second common question is oh an interesting one for you cuz you worked on so many if you could work on a game for any IP that you haven't previously worked on what IP would that be?

[1:05:48] Tom Braunlich: Oh well hmm. Well I think it would be the new Star Wars stuff that they're coming out with like the Mandalorian and the Boba Fett stuff. I just really like the stuff they did. I was talking to some friends of mine the other day about the Boba Fett series and I don't want to spoil it but the last episode of that has a mammoth thing on Tatooine with just about the whole kitchen sink from Tatooine thrown into it and it was wonderful and I was thinking oh my god there'd be so many cool cards that we could come up with from that.

[1:06:33] Rands: I love that answer and I honestly didn't know that you were still thinking every time you see one of these new franchises come out like what could we do with this? You know the first person You're not the first person I've spoken to who said that like they can't turn that part of their brain off. They can't turn off that side that's like how can I break that into the game that I worked on cuz you know you said you worked on it for you know two years three years or whatever and five years even and just it became such a ingrained part of the way that you looked at that franchise. I would have loved you know beyond Harry Potter or anything I would have loved to see what you guys would have done with modern Star Wars.

[1:07:05] Tom Braunlich: Yeah it would have been so much fun. Yeah, every time I'm together with Warren and any, you know, new movie is coming out, we just think, "Oh my gosh, there'd be so many cool cards in that, you know, you could do." I'm so glad that people like, you know, like the Star Wars, you know, Players Committee and in the Star Trek Continuing Committee are mining those things for great ideas, you know, they're sort of looking at those things and creating their own images and rule sets for these games. So, I'm glad that somebody out there is doing it in such a sound capacity, too.

[1:07:38] Rands: That's cool. It's very, very cool. Now, I cannot believe we got this one in your random pack. It is the ultimate Sophie's Choice for you, but I'm sure you'll have a pretty definitive answer. The last common question of this set is would you rather be a Jedi or a Vulcan?

[1:07:57] Tom Braunlich: Oh my gosh, is that a nerd question? That's It's like when I was a kid, we would argue about who would win in a fight, Bruce Lee or Muhammad Ali, right?

[1:08:09] Rands: Right, right. Yeah, the old famous Superman versus the Flash conversation as well.

[1:08:14] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, I think I would have to say Jedi because they have more of the superhuman skills that than Spock had. So, I think I would go with a Jedi.

[1:08:24] Rands: Absolutely, I understand. A lot of pressure there, a lot of a lot of ways to have to stay pure and stuff. I love it. All right, so this is your rare question of the booster pack, the one that might make you think a little bit harder. Which gaming genre that you haven't worked in would you most like to give a try and why?

[1:08:43] Tom Braunlich: Well, Rollie and I worked on a lot of different types of game projects. But we never did any what used to be called video games and now I guess they're you know, online mega player games. We only did one small video game. And I think we could have come up with some interesting ideas. But it was the again the problem was we were in the traditional game and toy business. Which did not really connect with you know the computer games. And and so we pretty much made a decision to stay within that. We worked on a lot of different things, but it would have been nice to create a immersive video game like they have now. And I really love some of the modern games with massive multiplayer games which back in the '80s when video games were young and they were coming out I remember talking with people about someday these things are not going to just be two-dimensional strategy games on the screen.

[1:10:02] Tom Braunlich: They're going to be three-dimensional. It's going to be multiplayers. You know, in those days the internet was just starting, but I you could you knew that people were connecting. I remember having a you know my little computer at home and with a dial-up telephone modem stuff like that. So it was already happening and you knew that they were going to be there someday just like that movie Ready Player One, you know. Like we could see that happening 30 years from now the way the current trends are still going. And you know, to be able to design that would be like CCGs times a thousand, you know. It can be imagine anything you can imagine you could create in those games. So it must be really exciting for people who work on those.

[1:10:59] Rands: I think you're right and I honestly think as immersive as you guys made literally, you know, piles of 60 cards sometimes, I think your talents would have been well and truly applied. You know, you were just ahead of your time. You guys were making options and doing things, you know, like in Star Wars, you could go to a docking bay to fly somewhere else and you know, you know, actually captive other cards and all that sort of stuff. I think it would have been fantastic to see you guys skill applied to whether it's an original world or anything like that, you know, it's all just a matter of, you know, technology catching up with what you can do. I think it's fantastic and I would love to have seen something by you guys especially how immersive, you know, the card games you created were.

[1:11:39] Tom Braunlich: Yeah, you can I mean I don't play many online games, but I have seen some of the Star Wars online stuff and I found them disappointing because they were just like massive battles, you know, that's all they were. You would be one of the characters and you get power up your character and then they get in then they battle and they die and they respawn and they go and they go That is not Star Wars to me. Star Wars would be more like some of those What's that game that has infinite number of planets that you can go to? Like [unclear] or whatever it's called? Yeah, something like that where you were a Jedi and you have like some kind of general mission, but you have to travel to planets and track down some clues and things and talk to people and you're talking to other people who are actual players, not non-player characters, you know? And you're trying to achieve things. I think there are some games that are like that. They're not licensed with any of major properties. They're just on their own. And you know, there's various types of gigantic space galaxies that you can play in and I think Star Wars ought to be like that.

[1:13:01] Rands: Well, to speak to you know, you got you have been building immersive Star Wars experiences like I said for 27 years now. I mean, that would be a great idea. I think what we were talking about as well was maybe Fallen Order. I think sort of uses some of that element and stuff like that in the Star Wars game, but I feel like a full-fledged game where everything is unique and you know, everything is completely self-contained would be fascinating. Now, while we're talking about building worlds, we sort of mentioned it in our previous episode and I would love for the listeners of this episode to hear about it. You're doing some writing at the moment that isn't out yet, but if they follow me, they're going to hear about it when it becomes available. Tell us a little bit about that.

[1:13:38] Tom Braunlich: Well, it's a science fiction novel that I've been writing. It's called CRISPR Dawn. And I hope that it's a clever story you know that will that involves really unique technology and exotic locations. I've been doing a lot of research on it and I think people will find it very interesting. But I don't want to say too much more about it and it's not quite finished or out yet, but I hope to have it out later this year and I'll let you know and you can let your viewers know.

[1:14:22] Rands: Well, by all means, if you're interested, please follow me either on YouTube, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Facebook. All of that will be linked in the description and we will let you know. Obviously, I'll be talking about it with Tom. Maybe he can even come on for like a mini interview or something just to tell us a little bit about it when that sort of comes out and you guys can learn about it cuz if you're Star Wars fans, it sounds like you know, special technology, exotic locations. It definitely sounds resonant of somebody who would love Star Wars and I am excited to hear about it. So, that sort of brings us to the end of this episode, Tom. Thank you so much for joining me for a second time and sharing those amazing stories. Like, you were definitely at a threshold of history and could definitely make games that I think many people who have played them fantasized could only fantasize about. So, again, thank you so, so much. Goodbye from me. Goodbye from you, bud?

[1:15:07] Tom Braunlich: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking with you.

[1:15:10] Rands: It's always an absolute pleasure talking with you, Tom. It has been one of my favorite episodes so far. So, thank you guys so much for joining us. Thank you, of course, to Tom for joining us on this episode. And until next time, remember, And there you have it, our episode with Tom Braunlich. Like, it was absolutely amazing talking to Tom about what he created all of those decades ago, almost three decades ago. And just to get his perspective on how he approached the game and how his philosophy about game design and, you know, even the work that he put in emanates through the game to this day and was able to be picked up by many other creators. Well, hopefully some of which I'll get to talk to on this show one day. Thank you so much for joining us as well. And thanks, of course, to Tom for sharing those stories.

See also

• Tom Braunlich · Rollie Tesh · Warren Holland · Jerry Darcy · Creators of SWCCG
• Radio Free Decipher/Episode 14 transcript · Radio Free Decipher/Episode 16 transcript (Braunlich and Tesh, 1999)