DESIGN A CARD, ANY CARD
Francis K. Lalumiere

"Last year, this turned out to be way too easy. We hope it'll be more difficult this year." This is how designer Tim Ellington launched, tongue-in-cheek, the Star Trek CCG Design-a-Card seminar.

The Star Trek CCG Product Development team had presented such a seminar at DecipherCon 1999 and it had been quite a success. The group of players in attendance, invited to design their own card, had quickly settled on a picture and had proceeded to promptly come up with suitable gameplay. In no time, the group had a respectable Star Trek CCG card. "And that's the problem," states Ellington with a smile. "We wanted to give people a sense of all the obstacles we usually encounter while designing a new card." What happened was that the group of "temporary designers" hit upon something that pretty much worked right off the bat. This happens internally at Decipher as well, but such an occurrence is the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, the card developed during DecipherCon 1999 was later altered to produce the interrupt Oops, published in The Trouble With Tribbles expansion set.

So a new group of players joined designers Bill Martinson, Tim Ellington and Evan Lorentz and set out to design their very own card.

Ellington began by explaining that the creation of a new card usually follows one of two paths: either an image inspires some particular gameplay, or the gameplay drives the image selection. Whatever the case, many more images are initially selected than what will eventually be sent to Paramount for approval. Out of 800 images, members of the PD team and the Art Department will choose a sub-group of about 200, and only those will make it to Paramount for approval. Approval issues were further discussed, including the difference between the various Star Trek series and movies as far as actor approvals go.

In our case, the group was offered a selection of about a dozen images. Six of the pictures pleased the players in some way, and so the team got a taste of the sometimes painful elimination process as they pushed aside one image after another until only two remained: a shot of the multiplying Enterprises in Parallels, and a picture of the original humanoid who explains the DNA mystery in The Chase. The first image "felt" like a dilemma, so it was given the dilemma template. Everybody agreed that the second one looked like an event.

Players in attendance were then invited to brainstorm gameplay ideas. Many suggestions were made, all of them attached to the image of the original humanoid. So the team opted for that card and dropped the other one. After thirty minutes, half the time allocated to that seminar, the group had agreed on a basic concept that made sense from a storyline perspective and looked like it might work as a game element. But Ellington pointed out that a lot of work remained to be done. Among other things, the team had to make sure the new card didn't conflict with any other card, or create broken combos. "When I first started working at Decipher," remembers Ellington, "we had about 600 cards in existence. It was already complicated to check every new card against that card pool. Now we have almost 1,600 different cards in the game universe."

The new card's game text was related to the missions Uncover DNA Clues and Hunt for DNA Program. It was an event that had many lines of text and a bonus point box. The group started tweaking the game text to get it just right, considering cards already in existence, prominent strategies, aspects of the game that are currently overshadowed, etc. The players soon realized that their text wouldn't fit within the standard three lines allowed for an event, mainly because of the space occupied by the point box. Ellington gave them a choice: either cut down on the game text, or come up with an alternate concept that would get rid of the point box. The team experimented with some alternate game text, but ultimately preferred the one they already had. So it was decided that the point box would be kept, and that the current game text would be dramatically trimmed.

At the end of another thirty minutes, the group had a very presentable Event card. It read like this:

"Plays on table if you have solved both Hunt for DNA Program and Uncover DNA Clues using any three affiliations to solve each."

And it had a box with 15 bonus points inside.

"This works on many different levels," comments Ellington. "The storyline is right, it's a powerful card, yet it's a risk - it can get cancelled, and people will expect it when they see you playing with the two missions." "Which leads to an aspect of the game I really love," adds Bill Martinson, "and that's using stuff like this to bluff." No one said that having the two DNA missions on the table automatically meant that the player would use "Original Humanoid." But the opponent might think so.

"It's a card I would feel comfortable sending to our playtesters," concludes Ellington. Who knows? Maybe a version of that card will find its way into a future expansion set.

But whatever the outcome, the players who participated in the seminar now have a pretty good idea not only of what the design process looks like, but also what it feels like. It wasn't easy to complete the card before the predetermined "deadline"....

As a little reward for their hard work, the players were treated to a "PD Department Behind-the-Scenes" mock documentary put together by Decipher's Kyle Heuer. It's a hilarious little movie that will probably end up on decipher.com before too long. Keep you eyes peeled!

Francis K. Lalumiere
The Juggler