Anatomy of Failed Design: Star Trek CCG

[angelfromanotherpin]

I've already talked about the Star Wars CCG that came out in 1995 and was a mess of random nonsense for years before it found a structure that worked. Well, that was the second attempt. Decipher's original CCG was the 1994 offering based on Star Trek. (Originally, the license was only for Next Generation material, but they did eventually get access to original series, DS9, Voyager, et al.) Like its younger sibling, the ST:CCG was a mess; but unlike its sibling, that mess was not in the game's narrative.

Because the Star Trek CCG was, in some ways, designed really well. It organically created classic Trek moments all the time. It was just completely fucked in the resource mechanics. The problem was eventually recognized and addressed, but (again like the Star Wars CCG) it was addressed with a series of elaborate newcomer-unfriendly band-aids.

Let me give you a game primer before I get into the details of the flaws.

The object of the game was to collect 100 victory points. There were sundry ways to accumulate these, but the usual way was to complete Missions, represented as a location with an activity that required certain things to complete.

The Romulans need Diplomacy, Leadership, and a pile of Cunning to get their ship back, and they get 30 points for doing it.

To complete a mission, you need to send personnel to the mission.

Andreas Katsulas has Diplomacy and Leadership, but only has 7 Cunning on his own, and needs more people to meet the stat requirement.

Because almost all missions are in different star systems, you need a ship to take your personnel there.

So you play a ship, you fill it with crew, you send it to the mission, you complete the mission, and you get the points. Except that, of course, things never go quite that smoothly. There's always something that gets in the way. In this game, those things are called Dilemmas.

You must have this many ovaries to go on the ride.

Dilemmas were placed (face-down) on your missions by your opponent before play started, usually 3-4 of them, and they led to one of the classic Trek behaviors: Redshirting. The short version is that you'd frequently beam down one of your low-value personnel on their own to see what the Dilemmas might be while limiting your exposure. Some of them were a variant of death-no-save to a random person, and you'd rather lose a nameless security guy than Picard.

Often paired with Matriarchal Society for the obvious synergy.

I really liked Dilemmas, because many of them had their own skill requirements, and they encouraged crews with diverse skills and characteristics, applying a counter to the incentive to have your mission requirements and personnel be as similar as possible. Especially later on when the card pool was bigger, you could make an e.g. Klingon deck where the personnel were all Honor and Strength, and all the missions required Honor and Strength, and get a lot of consistency, but then you'd get hit very hard by Dilemmas that penalized you for not having side interests in Integrity or Medical or whatever.

So, on some level you had a game that played out like two parallel single-player games, racing for points. This was mitigated by the fact that ships and personnel could get directly involved with each other, often violently. If the Feds were ahead on missions solved, they could find themselves having to try to complete missions with the added complication of a hostile Romulan warship threatening to blow them out of space, or a troop of Klingons slicing them up planetside. Again, totally on theme, and arising from the basic dynamics of the game.

Next up: The Original Bullshit.

[Username17]

I only looked into this game a little bit, but it seemed like it was real easy to have Data solve everything and turbo to victory while at the same time it was real easy to just fucking stonewall decks with dilemmas that required esoteric skill requirements.

The difference in skill ratings between ST:NG bridge crew and like anyone else was fucking insane.


This fucker has more Cunning than Romulan spies; and that's not even why you have him in your deck.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

That image is from the game's second edition, which was similar, but meaningfully distinct. The point stands that Data is (obviously) a very good personnel, although he's mostly notable for his high stats. Jadzia Dax and Seven of Nine have comparable skill lists for the other Federation affiliations. Fed characters tended to have more skills than those of other affiliations, but this wasn't the big deal you might think. The net effect was that the Feds were somewhat better at getting past dilemmas than other factions, but they were also somewhat worse at the combat portion of the game, which was roughly balanced.

Dilemmas also tended to be pretty well designed in terms of required skill obscurity vs harshness of penalty.

The big problem wasn't that the assembled crew of the Enterprise could sail through dilemmas and turbo-win (Voyager did it better, and they did it in a different quadrant where half the opposing factions couldn't attack them). The big problem was that you couldn't assemble the crew of the Enterprise. Even scraping together enough crew on the Enterprise to make it go anywhere was unreliable.

[Ancient History]

As I mentioned in the Star Wars CCG Anatomy-of-a-Failure, this is one of a number of CCGs at the time which sortof tried to be a board-game-constructed-by-cards, in that you created the board through the course of play, and then you'd move your tokens (ships in this case) around the board to do things. This isn't necessarily a bad design criteria, although it is rarely one that is done well since designs tend to be linear and you don't want to get your cards mixed up with your opponent's. In extremis (i.e. young and stupid players having fun), this sometimes meant you ran out of normal playspace.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Star Wars constructed its board through the course of play. Star Trek constructed the board before the first turn was taken. But yeah, a standard twelve-mission setup was at least 30 inches wide, which was frequently inconvenient.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Bullshit #1: The cost of the many outweighs the cost of the few... or the one.
The sharper-eyed among you may have noticed that the Data card that Frank posted (from the game's second edition) has a little 5 on it next to Data's name. That's the card's cost to enter play. You may also have noticed that the first edition cards I posted did not have these numbers.

The first edition of the game did not have different costs for cards. You got one 'normal card play' on your turn, which could be a ship or a personnel or a tricorder or whatever; everything cost 'one card play.' There were interrupt cards that weren't restricted this way, but the majority of what you wanted to play slogged into play at a rate of one per turn.

First off, that meant that you were being charged the same for a crazy high-end Enterprise main cast character like Picard or Data as you were for a relative nobody like Ensign Calloway. That would be awful enough if it just pushed you into playing an all-star deck... but you actually wanted a fair number of lower-grade personnel, to provide skill redundancy and take bullets for the heavy hitters.

Bullshit #2: These are the eventual voyages...
Second off, the 'one per turn' play situation made getting started really slow. If you take another peek at the sample ship I posted above, above the Range stat you will see some icons, one gold star and two silver. Those are called staffing icons, and most personnel have either a gold or a silver star to meet them. If you don't have personnel that meet a ship's staffing requirements, the ship does not go.

So to get a fairly standard Gold-Silver-Silver ship moving, you have to spend a minimum of four turns just plopping down cards one-at-a-time. More, if you wanted some insurance against Dilemmas. This is annoying for the same reason that very few Trek episodes start with loading on crew at a starbase – it's not interesting. At the same time, at least a player plopping down a card and saying 'your move' doesn't take very long, so this wouldn't be too bad, except for...

Bullshit #3: Red Alert!

Oh shit! There's a card that straight removes the one-per-turn play limit! (Technically you're still limited to one Event per turn.) It's like a Black Lotus that makes as much mana as you want and doesn't sacrifice. If someone gets this in their opening hand, it's possible that they can drop that entire hand on turn 1 and start mission solving immediately while the other player is still following normal procedure like a sucker. I don't understand how any playtest or even basic game theory could have let this card exist.

By the by, Decipher's unwillingness to ban or errata cards didn't start with Star Wars. When Red Alert shenanigans decided a solid majority of games in an obviously unfair and unfun manner, they responded by printing this obviously inadequate band-aid in the next set:

The big problem was that if you didn't play Yellow Alert before the other guy played Red Alert, they'd already gotten most of the value out of Red Alert, which was dropping their entire hand. After the first RA turn, you could only play cards at the rate you drew them, which was usually one-per-turn, bringing you back in line with the other player. Which brings me to the next thing...

Bullshit #4: You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting.
Barring Red Alert shenanigans, it takes four turns to play out a Gold-Silver-Silver ship and staff it. That's if you get the draws to do it. If you get a bad draw, you're stuck waiting to draw the missing piece(s), potentially for a long time, because you only draw one card per turn.

Unless of course you happen to have this asshole:

Yes, it's Ancestral Recall, making a mockery of your card economy in yet another game. More of a mockery in this case, because the STCCG had a smaller deck minimum than MTG (30 vs 40) and also didn't drop-kick you for running out of draws.

The general upshot is that the basic game economy of draws and plays was extremely restrictive, but also broken wide open by two particular cards. This meant that the real game wasn't about completing missions or winning space battles. The real game was about exploiting the economy-breakers better than the other guy, which was very unsatisfying.

Bonus Round Bullshit: Starter decks don't start?
The game sold in 15-card boosters and 60-card starter decks. Unfortunately, a starter deck was originally just the contents of four boosters in a box (plus a rulebook), and the odds were very low that you could even theoretically play a legal game with the contents.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Were there mulligan rules?

You still end up with everyone dumpster diving for Red Alert/Not Ancestral Recall, but still.

Also how many of these cards could you have in your deck?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Were there mulligan rules?

There were not.

Also how many of these cards could you have in your deck?

As many as you wanted. There was no general x-per-deck limit like you saw in most games. This made the demand for Kivas Fajo Collector essentially bottomless. Even though it was only an uncommon, the prices it commanded on the secondary market were stupid high.

[hyzmarca]

Were there mulligan rules?

There were not.

Also how many of these cards could you have in your deck?

As many as you wanted. There was no general x-per-deck limit like you saw in most games. This made the demand for Kivas Fajo Collector essentially bottomless. Even though it was only an uncommon, the prices it commanded on the secondary market were stupid high.

There should have been a card called Perhaps Something Occurred During Transport that just let you murder Fajo. It would have been perfectly in theme.