The Star Wars TCG

I'd never liked Star Wars, but I was asked to work in a Star Wars game. It made me appreciate Star Wars more.

Wizards of the Coast agreed to make a Star Wars card game.

When they did, there was already a Star Wars card game in existence, one with a rabid fandom, but the original company lost the license.

Opportunity?

We would find out…

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Richard Garfield and Mark Rosewater has worked on a design, and were expected to hand it off to Mike Elliott to lead development, but the design stalled as it was argued that the design was fundamentally unsound and couldn’t work.

For whatever reason, there was a shakeup on the development team, and they need two more bodies, so David Eckelberry (who’d logged a lot of time on the D&D side) and I (mostly on the Magic side) were added to fill the team.

As a non-Star Wars fan, this felt really weird.

It was a little like being a single person at lamaze night.

This can’t be right.

Eventually I got together with Dan Cervelli, stared at the math that was supposedly the “unfixable knob” in the design, and figured it out.

We toyed with the theory and Dan coded up the model, and voila — the design DID work!

We ended up getting design credits on the game because of this effort, and in retrospect, I wish I’d just spent my time at Wizards learning things from Dan because he was secretly the most valuable person in R&D, but all the too-smart people in the room (myself included) failed to see it.

Anyway, this sort of thing happens a ton during the design phase, where some sphinx or poobah will ask a philosophical question to try and stump a group from making progress, and just working through the problems slowly without getting weighed down by frustration often does the trick.

Having infinite stamina may in the long run be better than having infinite intelligence.

(But why not both?)

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One of the major non-major debates we had during this time was this one:

Which is better — A New Hope or Empire Strikes Back?

Rosewater said it had to be A New Hope, because it set the stage for everything to come, and most others argued Empire Strikes Back, because it has the most impactful scenes of any in the series.

But looking back, I don’t know that there’s a clear reconciliation.

It’s a just a question that will stand unanswered, a question for which there is no closure.

Let’s just appreciate the things we can know.

(That the best movie in the franchise is not Return of the Jedi. On that I think we can agree.)

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The Star Wars TCG (an arena-based game) sold okay but didn’t make a profit — the guarantees were too high.

I rolled off after the first few sets (Eck took the reins of the franchise), and hadn’t thought of it again until I played…

Marvel Snap…

Which is very similar to The Star Wars TCG but without its worst design aspect — dice.

I only played a session or two, to understand the basics, but I felt like I 80% knew how to think about all of the design aspects of Marvel Snap based on prior experience, which felt pretty neat.

It’s a relative of a game that almost didn’t make it through the gate.

But perseverance is worth a lot.

I give Eckelberry a lot of credit for his grit in getting a serviceable product out the door (without a ton of support).

Richard and Mark were onto something with their initial design, even if it didn’t fully hit the mark the first time around. Future us would benefit.

And many thanks to Dan for his mindshare and coding skills; may they have solved more pressing problems in the years since.

May the force be with you.