Design Log: Stardate 09.24.2002

The More Things Change...

In my last design log, Demo Delight, I mentioned that the designers were hard at work ironing out some glitches that had cropped up during the Gen Con demos. You're probably wondering what happened after that. Well, what's happened is quite a number of changes, to both gameplay and card templates – that's why you haven't seen any online demo decks yet.

For example, in that last design log I said there was a number on each mission that determined how many dilemmas you would face there each time you attempted it. That has changed, as designer Evan Lorentz apprised me today. "Dilemmas now have cost numbers like other cards, currently ranging from 1 to 5. If you attempt a mission with nine personnel, I'll draw nine dilemmas from my dilemma pile, and choose 9 points worth of them for you to face."

So assuming you stock dilemmas that average 3 points, I would have to face about three dilemmas each time I attempt the mission? "Not necessarily. If you overcome a dilemma, you place it under the mission, and it means next time I can draw fewer cards and will also have fewer points to work with. Suppose you overcome three dilemmas before getting stopped. Next time you attempt that mission with nine personnel, I can draw only six dilemmas and choose 6 points worth for you to face. So you'll only face two this time."

Of course, the costs reflect the difficulty of passing a dilemma and the magnitude of its effects – a dilemma that just stops your crew and is easily overcome with a common skill might have a cost of 1, while one that requires more obscure skills and/or kills crew members could be worth 4 or 5. So I can harass you with a lot of 1- or 2-point dilemmas to slow you down, or hit you with a couple of nastier ones that will hopefully kill off some important crew members.

And the evolution continues. "Just in the past few days," says TCG Design Studio Director Tim Ellington, "we've made significant changes to the spaceline structure and ship movement, which will enable a multiplayer environment. So we need to do some rebalancing of the cards before we'll have demo decks to show you."

So it's going to be a bit longer before you get to see all these changes in action. Nevertheless, we do want to show off a little preview of a few different card types so you can see how they're shaping up, and we just got approval from Paramount to do just that. Click on the thumbnails to see an enlarged card image.

As you can see, the new design – while quite reminiscent of first edition cards – offers a slightly larger image area as well as much greater flexibility in placing game text and lore, with a single text box that allows anywhere from one to seven lines of game text. That's a huge improvement over the paltry two lines available on first edition personnel cards (or even the three lines on events, interrupts, and dilemmas), and is sure to result in more understandable gameplay as well as more interesting special abilities on personnel.

Other design tweaks include space for longer card names and for subtitles (that's how "personas" will be handled in second edition), updated affiliation icons, and colors (in addition to card type icons) distinguishing different types of verb cards.

But not everything has changed, by any means. Affiliation border colors are essentially the same; personnel still have Command and Staff stars; ships still have Range, Weapons, and Shields; missions still have quadrants and spans and point boxes; and dilemmas still have planet, space, or "either" icons. Even a lot of card titles are the same (though the functions may be different), like the previewed Worf and Kurak. And scanning through a selection of dilemmas I spotted quite a few familiar titles, such as Chula: Pick One to Save Two (which does substantially the same thing it did in first edition) and Alien Abduction (which doesn't).

Remember, these cards are not final – both the gameplay and the artwork are still subject to change. As soon as things have settled down a little more, we'll have some demo decks for you to download.

Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal
Star Trek Intelligence Officer

September 24, 2002

TOP

MAP