How Premiere Became Enhanced

With its exciting pool of twenty-one innovative premium cards, Enhanced Premiere for the Star Trek Customizable Card Game is sure to gather many a follower in the gaming community. But how did such a revolutionary product come to be? Evan Lorentz, Decipher's latest addition to its Star Trek CCG Product Development team, sheds some light on the intriguing matter.

"The original intent," recalls Lorentz, "was to design a set of cards that would focus on each of the seven Enterprise bridge crew members. The first obstacle we had to overcome was the fact that our standard 'Enhanced' production process allowed us no more than six different facings [see-through windows on the packaging]. Which meant that one character wouldn't get his or her own facing." Since one of the goals of production was to offer an equal number of facings - ideally two off each - in a box of twelve packages, the number of different facings had to remain even. So the PD team started looking for game-design solutions. "One answer was to combine two characters on a single card," Lorentz says. "And then it hit us: why not combine all of the characters in pairs? So we dropped the original concept and went with dual-personnel cards."

• 21 premium cards - each "two cards in one"
• 6 combo dilemmas
• 6 dual personnel
• 9 mission IIs

With this problem taken care of, the PD team was free to tackle its next challenge. "We wanted Enhanced Premiere to be designed from the beginning as fully playable in a sealed-deck environment, which had never been done with an Enhanced product before," says Lorentz. "Because of production constraints for Enhanced items, however, we were forced to cut back on the number of cards we wanted to include in the product. But what's the minimum number of cards required for your sealed-deck environment to remain functional? Our first reaction was to use our 'combo' model and put a both a mission and an outpost together on one card in order to save space. And then we decided we might as well make every card a combo and create a product that would be truly unique." Thus were born the mission cards with built-in wormholes, and the combo dilemmas - two dilemmas on one card. These innovative design twists, combined with the streamlined rules that govern a Warp Speed tournament, ensured that Enhanced Premiere would not only be playable, but also very enjoyable in its own sealed-deck format.

Throughout the whole design process, specific considerations were inseparable from general ones. Once the PD team settled on the dual-personnel concept, for instance, it remained to be decided what characters would team up on each card. "We were torn between offering logical 'buddy' pairings like Data and Geordi or Deanna and Will," Lorentz says, "and combining the characters in more unusual pairs. In the end, we did a little of both."

Data and Picard, in particular, was a joy for the PD team to create. "We knew that our players were waiting for cards of Data and Jean-Luc Picard as Romulans," says Lorentz, "and for a long time we had been itching to somehow bring them into the game. But the names of Data and Jean-Luc as Romulans are never mentioned throughout the episode they appear in, and we didn't want to come up with phony Romulan names for such prominent characters. But now we don't have to!" Thanks to the naming convention established for Enhanced Premiere, the pair could simply be labeled "Data and Picard." But why not Data and Jean-Luc, in order to follow the first-name pattern used for most of the other cards? "For one thing, because Data would never call his captain 'Jean-Luc.' Oh, and it wouldn't fit on the card," answers Lorentz with a laugh.

Some of the Missions chosen to appear in Enhanced Premiere were selected in part because it allowed the card to be re-printed with an errata or a clarification. Covert Installation II, for instance, now bears the designation 'Neutral Zone Region.' "Observant players might also notice something special about the mission/outpost cards," Lorentz points out: "the little outposts were brought aboard from Activision's Star Trek: Armada computer game."

In the end, Enhanced Premiere emerges as something truly special. Not only does every little tuck box contain a full load of brand new gameplay, there isn't one premium in the product that's standard: every card is a combination of some sort. And to top it all off, the ensemble is fully playable in a sealed-deck environment.

Enhanced Premiere bears its label proudly indeed.

Francis K. Lalumiere
The Juggler (francisl@decipher.com)