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Since this has now been brought up in two different threads here I'll give my opinions as a separate thread instead of dragging the existing ones way off topic.

The (original) Star Wars CCG made by Decipher was one of the games in the first wave of CCGs trying to cash in on the example that MTG set. It showed up, rode along with the wave of CCG hype, and around the time the market was finally settling into "MTG and whatever weird anime CCG the 13 year olds are obsessing over" Lucaswhatever declined to renew the license and the game died. The license went to WotC for an attempt at an entirely unrelated Star Wars CCG that went nowhere and was quickly abandoned, and the original game has been largely forgotten. But since it has been brought up again I'll highlight some of its horrible game design failures that would have eventually killed the game even without the licensing issues:

1) Too much focus on "movie moments" over real-world gameplay. Remember that scene where the droid sabotages itself so Luke's family will have to buy R2-D2 instead? There's a card for that! In fact, there are several cards for it! The problem was that while it was great to think about how you'd win the game by playing "emergency droid repair kit" in response to "bad motivator" and forcing R2-D2 to go back to the jawas that card was dead weight if your opponent didn't bring "bad motivator". Or if your opponent did bring it but simply didn't draw it at the right time. Repeat this pattern across the entire movie and you had a situation where a large percentage of each set was "movie moment" fodder that you could never use in a real game unless you and your opponent agreed to make special decks and roleplay that scene. And the game as-written gave you no guidance on doing that, you had to learn the game on a high level and then do your own design work to come up with the special scenario decks.

A similar thing happened with characters and equipment. Did it sound cool on paper to have Luke in Red 5 with R2-D2? Hell yeah! I'm collecting those cards and I can't wait to do it on the table! Except because it was three separate cards, none of which functioned without at least one of the others, you'd struggle to get and play all of them at the same time. And even once you did you still needed to get an additional card for proton torpedoes or laser cannons to actually arm the ship and do anything but add a bigger number to battle resolution (see below). So why take the convoluted combo of Red 5 when you can take a generic x-wing with a built in pilot that doesn't need other cards for support? Decipher finally tried to fix the problem late in the game by printing combo cards that were literally a character and their ship/equipment combined into a single card, but often at too unwieldy a price to make them really function in the game and with too much rules bloat based on treating them as a three-in-one combo card instead of a single coherent design.

2) Too much non-interactive gameplay. The core mechanic was that your deck functioned as your "hit points" and you would inflict hit point damage in the form of discarded cards by controlling locations and/or winning battles. Where this went badly wrong was that there were way too many locations and way too much incentive to play passive location control decks instead of active combat decks. Because space units and ground units couldn't interact you'd often end up with a scenario where your space deck has every planet on absolute lockdown but your opponent has a storm trooper standing around in an empty conference room on the death star plinking away your hit points every turn. And far too often the best strategy was to double down on a "go wide" strategy of playing a bunch of sites, each with a token single unit to control them, and draining your opponent without ever fighting a battle. In theory this could have been salvaged, but Decipher proceeded to completely wreck the mechanic with the third major problem:

3) Too many parallel win conditions. This was the incredibly problematic combination of obsessive focus on "movie moments" and a lack of concern for non-interactive gameplay. Decipher started adding on "movie moment" mini-games and alternate win conditions where you'd complete a sequence of events and success gave you a game-ending bonus. But because each of the mini-games had their own separate set of cards you could never cover all of them in a single deck. So you'd end up with your "destroy the death star" deck desperately racing to draw the required cards to fly the trench run while your opponent ignored the attack entirely because they were playing a parallel game of holo-chess. Instead of an interactive battle between opposing forces you had two separate games of solitaire, with each player trying to be the first to reach their win condition and minimal interaction between them.

4) Boring as hell battle mechanics. Ok, you've agreed with your opponent that you won't use any of the mini-game mechanics, you've agreed to focus on space forces, surely this will be a cool game where you build up your respective space fleets and fight an awesome battle to decide the winner! Except no, it isn't. The battle mechanic was that each side added up its total power plus a random number draw and the loser had to sacrifice cards with a total power equal to or greater than the margin of defeat. At best each player might have an ability to play that would add more to their total power or, if they were really determined to assemble the right combo of unit and equipment, possibly shoot an enemy unit before totaling up the power numbers. But most of the time you just blobbed everything and whoever put the most cards on the table won, usually in a very predictable manner because both players could easily tell who had the most power. I have rarely seen a game with such a lopsided ratio of effort invested to fun.

5) Awkward tension between resource generation and victory conditions. Remember how your deck is your hit point total and damage is in the form of discarding cards? Well, generating resources and playing cards also came at the expense of your hit point total because cards on the table didn't count as hit points. So you have your resource engine rolling, you're playing god-level forces on every location and winning every battle, except oops! You drew and played too many cards and now that lone storm trooper standing around in an empty conference room does fatal hit point damage to you and you lose the game. It was absolutely inexcusable for a game that was so focused on generating "movie moments" to have such a completely counter-intuitive win condition based on understanding and optimizing the constraints of a 60-card deck. In a game of epic battles you shouldn't be punished for building a powerful army of all your favorite characters!

6) Rules bloat and finite design space. In the end the fatal problem for the game was one of the boring standard design failures that kills game after game after game: running out of design space because you can't stop publishing new content. With multiple expansions per movie and vast numbers of cards the rules bloat became impossible to manage. Older "movie moment" cards couldn't work with newer cards, parallel win conditions multiplied beyond any hope of control, and too much of the content was bad ideas forced into print because Decipher needed to meet a card quota for the next expansion. By the end the game was borderline unplayable and I would have been surprised to see it last much longer even if they hadn't lost the license.

But let me close on a positive note and mention one of the few good ideas the game had: RNG that balanced on-table power vs. better RNG pool. Many cards had you draw "destiny" by revealing the top card of your deck and looking at a number printed in the corner, a number which had no effect outside of being the RNG pool. The clever bit of the mechanic was that the most powerful cards on the table tended to have the lowest destiny numbers, while less-powerful cards could give you a better RNG pool. Vader might be a monster on the table but if you draw him from your RNG pool he's only a 1, while that weak storm trooper is only suitable for conference room duty on the table but is a 5 in your RNG pool. It's an interesting idea in a pure deck building game but I think it was a really good way of offsetting a bit of the budget issue with a CCG, especially in the old days when you had to buy packs or trade with your friends because you couldn't just buy unlimited copies of any card you want from an online store. If you had worse luck with the packs than your opponent or less money to spend you'd get a bit of an offset in a better RNG pool, while your opponent who had all the rare character cards suffered a bit of a penalty.

Funnily enough Decipher's Star Trek CCG had zero RNG involved in ship combat resolution for most of 1st Ed's life, it was purely weapons value vs shields value and IIRC every ship simply had 2HPs. In a later expansion they added a separate tactic deck that stood outside the draw deck, which had some element of RNG, which would only make a difference if the opposing ships were broadly equal to start with.........

For the record, Star Wars CCG was killed because George Lucas pulled the license.

That's it. That's what did it in.

You can rage against its design, but that's like lamenting how awful GW products are while the management sips champagne in their summer homes. I'd love to "fail" that badly.

The "cautionary tale" is: don't base your design and company's future on a product wholly dependent on a license.

West End Games got burned in exactly the same way.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
You can rage against its design, but that's like lamenting how awful GW products are while the management sips champagne in their summer homes. I'd love to "fail" that badly.

Sure, but this is the thing I was responding to:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Still, as a self-contained card game that required zero maps or tokens, it was a remarkable design for what it was trying to do.

It was a "remarkable design" in the same way that a trashy F2P loot box phone game is remarkable. Yes, it succeeded in cashing in on the CCG fad and made a lot of money from gambling addicts but it was a spectacularly bad game. If you want to ask how to make a game that can generate as much short-term cash as possible for the creator then sure, follow the loot box model. If you want to make a quality game then the Star Wars CCG is an excellent cautionary tale in how focusing on the wrong things will wreck a game.

Aecus Decimus wrote:


It was a "remarkable design" in the same way that a trashy F2P loot box phone game is remarkable. Yes, it succeeded in cashing in on the CCG fad and made a lot of money from gambling addicts but it was a spectacularly bad game. If you want to ask how to make a game that can generate as much short-term cash as possible for the creator then sure, follow the loot box model. If you want to make a quality game then the Star Wars CCG is an excellent cautionary tale in how focusing on the wrong things will wreck a game.

What have you designed and how well has it sold?

Seriously, I despise Stephen King's writing style and I detest his subject matter, but the guy has made a crap ton more money than I have, so I have to respect him for that. He's doing something right.

I happen to like the Star Wars CCG engine. I think it was pushed beyond its limits, but it was an unquestionable success as a game.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
What have you designed and how well has it sold?

I don't need to be an expert baker to recognize a loaf of moldy bread.

And who cares if the game made a ton of money? Presumably anyone reading or posting in this section of the forum is interested in more than just maximizing profits, otherwise they'd be making F2P shovelware mobile games and recycling the same assets (mostly half-naked anime girls) until they hook enough whales to retire. Do you have any comments on the actual game design of the CCG or any of the points I raised, or are you just going to keep up the refusal to engage with the substance of anything?

Aecus Decimus wrote:

I don't need to be an expert baker to recognize a loaf of moldy bread.

If you've never been in a kitchen, you're not really in a position to offer cooking advice.

And who cares if the game made a ton of money? Presumably anyone reading or posting in this section of the forum is interested in more than just maximizing profits, otherwise they'd be making F2P shovelware mobile games and recycling the same assets (mostly half-naked anime girls) until they hook enough whales to retire. Do you have any comments on the actual game design of the CCG or any of the points I raised, or are you just going to keep up the refusal to engage with the substance of anything?

How strange that you now denigrate sales when in another thread you described it as the only true measure of success.

It's a good system and I've already explained what I liked about it. You didn't so I guess its a case of differing tastes. Can't argue taste.

Gonna address these in order

1. Yeah, there were definitely binder fodder cards all over the place but this is hardly unique to Decipher. Every card game like this has a plethora of such cards that never see the light of day.

2. 'Going wide' and doing what you described was a great way for the other player to throw a whole bunch of crap at just one of the locations you were doing this and making you lose a whole tonne of Force from one battle, way more than you would have Force drained for. It was actually a really delicate balance to Force drain as much as you could without leaving yourself too exposed at the locations you were doing it.

3. There was literally only ever one win condition: depleting the opponent's life Force. The way you got there varied deck to deck, but there was no other win condition. If you built a deck designed to do one very specific thing without ever interacting with the other player, you made a bad deck. Stopping the opponent from doing what their deck wanted to do was just as important as executing your own strategy.

4. Sorry, no. The battle mechanics in this game were amazing. It was a lot more than just tallying power against each other. There was a lot of unexpected moments from interrupts and reacts, whether or not you brought your own weapon cards made a substantial difference in which characters would be forfeited on the other side, and attrition was such a good mechanic that could lead to some very Pyrthic victories where you technically did win but lost so much materiel that you're in a much worse position afterward. Whether you chose to lose life Force or forfeit characters at the location to satisfy your battle dmg was an important decision point for the losing side as well. The battles were excellent.

5. If you accidentally drew your whole deck and killed yourself, you're an idiot. No one ever did this. If you knew your life force was low, you tried to do what you could with what you had on the table. This made late game strategy really interesting, because you might have had a lot of stuff in hand to help your situation but at what cost?

6. This is your only point I actually agree with. The game did get unwieldy toward the end, especially with the inclusion of ep1 cards that derailed many of the popular deck archetypes. Hunt Down decks vanished with the sudden inclusion of so many Jedi. As with the first point though, I feel like every CCG hits this point so it's not really fair to hold this one against the Decipher game specifically.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:


5. If you accidentally drew your whole deck and killed yourself, you're an idiot. No one ever did this. If you knew your life force was low, you tried to do what you could with what you had on the table. This made late game strategy really interesting, because you might have had a lot of stuff in hand to help your situation but at what cost?

For the most part, you are correct. This was something people who were learning the game did, not anyone who understood what was going on.

I note you left out the purposeful option, which I saw a couple of times. The most common was a way to concede without overtly setting one's hand down. Once it was obvious that the other player had gained an irreversible advantage, drawing yourself to death was a way some people conceded.

The other - which I only saw once - was a tightly contested tournament game where both sides had taken heavy damage but the light side had managed to get a Force regeneration machine set up. The DS player knew that not only would the LS player win, but the longer the game lasted, the bigger the margin of victory would be. The DS player purposefully augured in so the game would appear a close one (which it was to that point) in the record books.

Over the years, I've culled my collection by selling off various cards and the values have held up remarkably well. My wife and kids refuse to let me sell them even though we rarely play.

I still have all of my cards in binders and even though I haven't played in years, I will never sell them. I adored that game. It's a pinnacle of my childhood.

Having never played in tournaments (I was too young at the time), I had never seen anyone purposely draw themselves to death but your examples do make sense. The margin of victory example sounds especially crafty!

Thank you for addressing the actual points here instead of just insisting that the game made a bunch of profit therefore it must be good. I disagree with a lot of what you're saying but I appreciate having an on-topic discussion.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
1. Yeah, there were definitely binder fodder cards all over the place but this is hardly unique to Decipher. Every card game like this has a plethora of such cards that never see the light of day.

It isn't unique but the reason why they were binder fodder is important. Compare with MTG:

In MTG there's a lot of stuff that is below the power curve but it at least functions. A vanilla 2/2 for 2 CMC is not playable in most competitive constructed formats but it still functions if you have to take it for some reason. There are limited formats where you don't have free choice of cards a core strategy element is doing the best you can with stuff that would be below the constructed power curve, as well as the pseudo-limited environment of casual groups where you don't always have the best cards because you aren't willing to spend much money on the game. In those cases the vanilla 2/2 works just fine and is even an essential part of the game. What you don't see often in MTG is cards which are completely dysfunctional outside of very specific situations, the kind of stuff that is dead in your hand because you're never going to see the one edge case scenario where it does anything.

In the Star Wars CCG there was all the usual stuff that was binder fodder because it was too far below the power curve to ever see play in competitive constructed formats but there was also a ton of stuff that was just plain non-functional. All those "movie moment" cards were dead weight in every format other than cooperative roleplaying games. You opened a pack and you immediately threw all of them in the trash because even in limited you'd never be able to play them.

2. 'Going wide' and doing what you described was a great way for the other player to throw a whole bunch of crap at just one of the locations you were doing this and making you lose a whole tonne of Force from one battle, way more than you would have Force drained for. It was actually a really delicate balance to Force drain as much as you could without leaving yourself too exposed at the locations you were doing it.

Depends on the game scenario. If you could meet your opponent head-on and win you probably wanted to do that. But let's say it's my space deck vs. your ground deck. Each of us has little hope of winning by contesting the other's sites, even our best shot is still going to lose the battle. So we both are incentivized to go for the minimal-interaction play and hope going wide and draining uncontested sites is fast enough to win. I admit that it wasn't a fatal flaw initially and maybe could have been addressed by balance changes early in the game's history but once the routes to victory started to proliferate later on it was just too unlikely that you'd have the ability to go head-on with your opponent's strength and have any hope of success.

For comparison, consider "competitive" 40k and secondary objectives. Objectives like table quarter presence, where you just deep strike a unit into a table quarter and then score points for doing it even if your opponent promptly kills that unit on their own turn, are horrible non-interactive design. Even when they aren't dominating the meta the existence of a non-interactive strategy where you can win by passively existing leads to bad gameplay experiences and 40k would be a much better game if that nonsense was removed.

3. There was literally only ever one win condition: depleting the opponent's life Force. The way you got there varied deck to deck, but there was no other win condition. If you built a deck designed to do one very specific thing without ever interacting with the other player, you made a bad deck. Stopping the opponent from doing what their deck wanted to do was just as important as executing your own strategy.

Only if you define "win condition" very literally. Blowing up the death star or winning a game of holo-chess might not have literally said "you win the game" but the benefits were decisive and resulted in the rest of the game being mopping up the last few force drains and making your victory official.

And always being prepared for interaction may have been viable when the parallel routes to victory were largely limited to space vs. ground. Once those side games started to proliferate there were just too many to reasonably cover them all. With only 60 (IIRC) cards you couldn't meaningfully interact with a possible opponent's jedi training, holo chess, death star trench run, etc, especially when many of the cards required to interact with each of those parallel routes to victory were of marginal value if your opponent didn't bring that thing and you still had to fit your own victory conditions into those 60 cards. You had to pick a subset of the game to focus on and accept that it was going to be a race to combo off if your opponent brought one you didn't cover.

4. Sorry, no. The battle mechanics in this game were amazing. It was a lot more than just tallying power against each other. There was a lot of unexpected moments from interrupts and reacts, whether or not you brought your own weapon cards made a substantial difference in which characters would be forfeited on the other side, and attrition was such a good mechanic that could lead to some very Pyrthic victories where you technically did win but lost so much materiel that you're in a much worse position afterward. Whether you chose to lose life Force or forfeit characters at the location to satisfy your battle dmg was an important decision point for the losing side as well. The battles were excellent.

This is subjective, but in my experience most of that stuff was on 40k levels of obvious. Surprises and genuine clever plays were rare, most battles were a formality of each side doing the obvious things and then totaling up the score.

5. If you accidentally drew your whole deck and killed yourself, you're an idiot. No one ever did this. If you knew your life force was low, you tried to do what you could with what you had on the table. This made late game strategy really interesting, because you might have had a lot of stuff in hand to help your situation but at what cost?

An idiot, or a new player. A game can't just be good for hyper-competitive experts, if a newbie can accidentally lose the game by being too successful at what seems like the obvious route to victory then it's a major NPE and a design failure.

As for strategy, it may have been interesting in an abstract mechanics sense but it was completely inappropriate for the theme. This is Star Wars, a setting of epic heroes and their adventures. Carefully managing your bookkeeping and avoiding becoming a victim of your own success might make sense in, say, a stock market investing game where "oops, the SEC decided that was illegal" is a perfectly thematic outcome. But in a Star Wars game it sucks that you can lose because you built too much of an epic fleet, and you have to ask yourself if it's worth playing Luke/Vader/etc on the table vs. keeping that card in your hit point pool.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
I still have all of my cards in binders and even though I haven't played in years, I will never sell them. I adored that game. It's a pinnacle of my childhood.

Having never played in tournaments (I was too young at the time), I had never seen anyone purposely draw themselves to death but your examples do make sense. The margin of victory example sounds especially crafty!

I only played in local tournaments and was very proud the first time I actually won a game. I registered with Decipher and everything, having one of those "1,004,456th best players in the world" or whatever rankings.

The core of my collection is intact - what I sold were the umpteenth duplicate of Darth Vader because my wife and I typically had a half-dozen built decks for each side at any given time.

I also sold the Episode I cards because I hate the prequels. They went pretty high, which made me quite happy.