The Babylon 5 CCG was put out by Precedence Entertainment. in 1997. The company folded five years later, after putting out a number of conspicuously worse games based on the Wheel of Time, Immortal: The Invisible War (an RPG that deserves its own review for sheer wtfery), fucking Rifts, and the Terminator movies. For Precedence, the B5CCG was as good as it got.
It was actually pretty good, but it did have some crazy bullshit in it.
Win Condition
The object of the game was... actually, that gets a little involved. The object was usually to achieve a Standard Victory, but things could happen that would require you to win a Major Victory instead. There were a very few things that handed those out directly by name, but most of the time you got them by accumulating a value called Power. A Standard Victory needed at least 20 Power and more Power than any other player. A Major Victory needed at least 20 Power and at least 10 more Power than any other player.
You generally got Power from two sources. First, you inherently had a value called Influence, which started at 4, and could be raised to 10 with minimal effort (so 10 Power was pretty much taken for granted) and higher mostly through the core gameplay. Second, you could have one Agenda card in play at a time, and many of them let you count something else as Power.
Observe!
For instance, this Agenda supports otherwise pointless ratfucking.
Example:
There are others, but I think this is the best example.
Each sentence of the rules text on this card has an issue, and they combine to create the actual problem: non-interactive victory.
The first sentence lets the owning player, once per turn, lower their own influence by 1 and raise Babylon 5 influence by 1. The trouble with that is that raising your own influence is trivial until you get to 10 influence – so as long as your influence is 10 or lower to begin with, the cost is negligible. On the other hand, raising your influence higher than 10 (mostly) costs resources and effort and requires letting the other players interfere with you; it's the core gameplay that I'll get into later.
The second sentence gives you your win condition, but the problem is the amount of power it gives you. +20 power is an enormous amount, but more importantly, it's more than enough to win even if your influence is only 10 or even less. Which it will be, because you've been transferring it away every turn.
The result is a player who has almost no incentive to engage with the core gameplay. They don't need to gain influence, and they don't really even need to defend themselves from influence loss. They do power transfers and play the few cards that directly increase B5 influence, and they put an almost untouchable clock on every other player. You could win against an Alliance of Races deck, but you couldn't defeat it, because it wasn't even really playing the same game you were.
Alliance of Races meant that the Human faction won basically every sealed deck tournament, because it's a Human-only agenda and it was fixed in their starter deck (along with a couple of key B5 boosting cards). It was, in a single card, a more rapid and reliable win strategy than anyone else could reasonably put together out of a starter and a couple of boosters.
Here's the kicker, you couldn't even play Alliance of Races as a counter to Alliance of Races. Like, if you could, then you and the other AOR guy would wash on AOR power, and whoever had more influence would win, and you'd be back in an actual gameplay situation. But only a Human faction player could run AOR, and there was a maximum of one Human faction player per game. That's a thing I'll get into more in the next post, when we explore the much larger Bullshit #2: You Can't Play Your Deck.
edit: Misremembered the name of the company.