Cost: $10 start, $2.95 booster From: Decipher, P.O. Box 56, Norfolk VA, 23501-0056 Players: 2 Playing Time: 45-60 minutes Type of game: Card Complexity: 5 Skill level: 3 Reviewed by: J.P. Trostle, Issue 3.2, Spring 1995
With some certainty I can claim to be a life-long Star Trek fan: one of my earliest cognizant memories is watching "The Doomsday Machine" in 1967, when I was three. So after 28 years of near-constant exposure to Star Trek— and in the wake of the Magic phenomenon— imagine my excitement last winter when a game company announced a collectable card game based on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Still, I consider myself a discerning consumer of both games and Trek, and in spite of my euphoria I can say this about ST:TNGCCG: there's good news and there's bad news.
The good news is: 1) Decipher has produced a sharp-looking game, with well-designed cards that have a catchy high-tech sheen to them; 2) the ideas behind the rules are creative and reflect both the feel and philosophy of the TV show; and 3) the rules are not a carbon-copy of Wizards of the Coast's innovative Magic: The Gathering. The bad news is: none of the above actually makes Star Trek a great game to play. The cards sure are pretty, though.
In ST:TNGCCG you represent one of three familiar affiliations-Federation, Klingon or Romulan-as you race to successfully earn more Mission points than your opponent. This is done by putting starship, personnel and equipment cards into play, which are then gathered up and moved along a row of Mission cards referred to as a "spaceline." Missions have requirements which must be met, and if a player can match the abilities printed on their various crew cards to those on the Mission card, they receive however many points the Mission is worth. The more difficult a Mission is to solve, the more points it is worth. Along the way, the crew must overcome dilemmas, events and interruptions thrown down by the opposing player. The first player to earn 100 points, or to have the most points when one player runs out of cards, wins..
Every card— be it ship, personnel, event or Dilemma— is taken directly from episodes of The Next Generation, and virtually all artwork was captured straight from Paramount's video masters of the series. Credit should be given to the graphic designers who spent the time slogging through hundreds of hours of tapes to find the frame they wanted; unlike regular Star Trek trading cards— which always seem to grab a shot willy-nilly— the ST:TNGCCG artwork was carefully selected and digitally edited so that only the subject of the card is in the frame. The Mission cards are particularly stunning.
Taking a cue from Magic, the layout of the card has the name and photo of what the card represents on the top half of the card, while statistics relevant to game play are listed on the bottom half. Art and text are surrounded by a computer generated faux chrome for a nice finishing touch. (While I'll try and avoid too many comparisons to Magic, ST:TNGCCG— like most other collectable card games— would never have been created if Magic hadn't cut such a wide swath through the gaming world. Although a game should be judged on its own merits, comparing and contrasting the two is inevitable.)
Each type of card has its place in helping the players solve the various Missions. Ships move personnel and their equipment up and down the spaceline, and have three attributes each: Range (movement), Weapons and Shields. In addition, the larger starships have such built-in equipment as Tractor Beams, Holodecks or Cloaking Devices (depending on the affiliation).
Outposts represent the "home base" of a player, and are a launching point for ships. Outposts also allow damaged ships which have "docked" at the card to be repaired. When a player puts personnel into play from the cards in his hand, they "report for duty" at the outpost.
Personnel are absolutely essential toward solving Missions. They also make up almost half of the cards available in the game. Besides the various races in the Federation (humans, Vulcans, Betazoids, et. al.), the Klingons, and the Romulans, there are a handful of "unaffiliated" cards that may work with any group. These include Ferengi, Cardassians, and various galactic mercenaries. Each personnel card represents one individual from The Next Generation, from Captain Picard, Data and the rest of the highly-coveted bridge crew, to lowly ensigns and guest stars who have only appeared in a single episode. Personnel have three attribute ratings: Integrity, Cunning, and Strength, and belong to one of seven areas of Classification (Officer, Science, Medical, Engineer, Security, V.I.P. and Civilian). In addition to the classification, or "expertise," of the character (which usually counts as a skill), each character has between one and six skills to draw on to solve missions. Examples of skills include Stellar Cartography, Navigation, Diplomacy, Leadership, Computer Skill, Honor, Treachery, even Music and Barbering.
Personnel also have rank, used to command and pilot a ship. If a card has a gold cluster next to the text box, they can command the big starships; if they have a silver star, they can pilot smaller ships and science vessels; and finally, if they have no stars, all they can fly is shuttlecrafts and runabouts (one note: according to the rules, anyone can pilot a ship. This can lead to scenarios where you might have Worf's son, Alexander, zipping around in a Runabout).
Equipment cards enhance the attributes or skills of personnel. For instance, phasers and disruptors add to the overall strength of a crew, medical kits allow Officers to have a "medical" skill, and tricorders allow some crew members to add to the skills already printed on their cards. And your crew will certainly need all the help it can get as they travel up and down the spaceline attempting to solve missions.
At the beginning of a game, both players sort their decks into three distinct piles. The first pile is Mission cards, which each player then lays face up along a single row forming a border between them. The second pile is composed of Dilemma cards, which are then placed face down under various Mission cards. Dilemmas represent the main challenge your crew must overcome before they are allowed to complete a Mission. Usually you place Dilemmas under your opponent's Missions, but one tactic is to place Dilemmas you know you can easily overcome under your own cards, as some Dilemmas deliver bonus points if they are solved. Both players then place one Outpost somewhere along the spaceline. Finally, you take your remaining pile— which includes Ship, Personnel, Equipment, Event and Interrupt cards— shuffle it together and deal out a starting hand of seven cards (unlike Magic, there is no maximum to the number of cards one can hold in one's hand).
The last player to have layed down a Dilemma card goes first. Each turn you may place one of the following cards into play: one crew member, one ship, one piece of equipment, or one Event card. Event cards come in two types: either they create an obstacle to slow down your opponent, or they give you an advantage over your opponent. Once in play, Event cards usually stay on the table, although that is not always the case. There are over 40 Event cards available in the first series, from Espionage cards that allow you to attempt Missions that are not of your affiliation, to the Atmoshpheric Ionization card, which interferes with personnel beaming to and from a planet, to Nutational Shields, which allows each of your ships to boost their shield ratings for each Engineer you have on board.
After a number of turns both players will have managed to put enough ships and personnel into play that they may want to start sending out expeditions along the spaceline. To send out a crew, you simply gather up all the personnel and equipment you want on a particular ship, place all those cards under the ship card, and begin moving them along the spaceline toward Missions you feel you can accomplish with the cards you have on onboard. When your crew finally attempts a Mission, you flip the entire stack over and must first deal with the Dilemmas underneath before moving on to the Mission.
Diehard trekkers will recognize each Dilemma from specific Next Generation episodes, although for game purposes the wording on most Dilemma descriptions has been generalized so as to separate it from its original plot. Dilemmas run from simple obstructions (such as the Impassable Door, a forcefield which requires that one member of the Away Team have Computer Skill) to difficult encounters (such as the entity Nagilum, who will automatically kill off half your crew unless that crew has personnel with at least 3 Diplomacy skills, or the crew has a combined strength greater than 40) to near-impossible perils (such as the extremely powerful Borg Ship, which, once discovered, will move along the entire spaceline attacking everything in its path). If a crew can overcome a Dilemma, they may move onto the next Dilemma in the stack. If they are unable to overcome a Dilemma, then they are "stopped" for the rest of the turn and may do no further actions until the next game turn. After all the dilemmas in a stack are overcome, the crew may attempt the Mission.
There is one other major type of card in the game, and that is the Interrupt. Like Events, Interrupts come in two types: those that cause your opponent problems, and those that give you an advantage. Unlike the other types of cards, Interrupts may be played at any time and in any number. Some Interrupts allow you to take an extra turn, while some, such as the Escape Pod, or Emergency Transporter Armbands, allow personnel to escape from exploding ships and other dire predicaments. Something I haven't mentioned about ST:TNGCCG is combat. This is due to the fact that the designers have played down the concept of combat as part of the game because the TV series played down violence as an acceptable solution to problems. In fact, in a move very much keeping with the flavor of the show, if you are playing the Federation you CANNOT be the aggressor and initiate combat. No matter your affiliation, no points are gained in fighting an opponent (although it certainly is one way to whittle down an opponent's cards), and fighting often reduces both sides down to the point where neither player can earn any more points from Missions.
The combat rules they do have are fairly simple— if the fight is ship to ship, and your weapons rating is larger than your opponent's shield rating, you damage the enemy ship. Damage it twice and it is destroyed. If two Away Teams on a planet fight each other, then add up the total strengths of the Teams; the Team which has the smaller strength loses one crew member at random. Combat does not occur on a regular basis, and, more importantly, there are easier ways to wipe out an opponent's ship and crew than risking your own fleet.
The major problem with the game can be summed up in one sentence: The rules should have been sent back for at least another rewrite, and then it should have been playtested more. For one thing, the rulebook itself is poorly written, leaving several important elements of the game without clear explanations and definite rulings. To cover this, the designers say— far too many times— that the cards themselves are self-explanatory and should resolve any questions about how they may be played. Unfortunately this is not always true.
While the cards look great, the writing on them is mediocre at best, and the text pertaining to game play is often open to multiple interpretations. More than a few of the Dilemma cards offer no clear indication as to when a crew "overcomes" them, or whether they will "stop" a crew or not (this particular problem has lead to far too many heated discussions in our gaming group). As stated above, sometimes the "classification" of a character counts as a skill, but sometimes it doesn't. A personnel card which has the Engineer classification can be used to solve Missions or overcome dilemmas which require an Engineering skill; however, an Officer classification does not count as a "Leadership" skill for Missions and Dilemmas, but it counts as Leadership during combat. Some personnel have "super" expertise in some areas. For example, Picard is a "super" diplomat with Diplomacy x2, or two Diplomacy skills, and LaForge is a "super" engineer— but this is not written out as Engineer x2 on his card: you are to count his Classification as one skill, and the Engineer skill in the skill text box as his second Engineering skill. Confused? So are most of the people who have picked up the game. These are the kind of kinks which should be worked out in an arduous playtest. I have heard several arguments from people that Magic: The Gathering also had rules problems when it first came out, and this is true. But ST:TNGCCG appears to have been rushed onto the market to capitalize on Magic's popularity. Even if Decipher started working on the rules in September 1993, soon after Magic hit the gaming world, they would have only had a few months to create and playtest the rules to get the game out by its original release date. Compare this to the two years Magic spent in development.
One important element that suffered in this rush was game balance. There are three cards in particular that often guarantee a player's victory. The cards are: "Red Alert" (which allows a player to play as many ship, personnel and equipment cards as they want per turn), "Static Warp Bubble" (which forces your opponent to discard one card before the end of their turn) and "The Traveller: Transcendence" (allowing a player to draw two cards per turn and nullifying the above mentioned Static Warp Bubble). Due to the advantage these cards gives a player, if they have them, they will always put them into a deck, and if a player doesn't have them, and is playing against someone who does, they are virtually guaranteed to lose. Since normally only one card may be played per turn, Red Alert is particularly nasty if it is found in the initial draw, allowing a player to drop ships, personnel, and equipment onto the table at will. While this doesn't assure victory, on more than one occasion I or my opponent was able to play Red Alert, field a ship and crew and solve at least one Mission, all on the first turn. The lead it can give someone is often insurmountable.
In a small group of gamers who only have a limited pool of cards to draw on, this could quickly kill interest. Besides the unbalanced play, some of the rules seem arbitrary. In the basic game, for instance, your deck must have exactly sixty cards. Why? No explanation is given, but I think Decipher was anticipating that some people would only buy one 60-card starter deck and expect to be able to play with that (not that this is possible, as you'll see below).
Another arbitrary item is that you draw your cards at the end of your turn. The only reason I can see for this is that Decipher wanted to be "different" from other card games, but all this does is trip up people. Even my non-gaming friends thought this rule was dumb because, again and again, people forget to draw a card when their turn is over.
The biggest arbitrary rule of all is that a player may only put one non-Interrupt card into play a turn. Since cards do not have purchase costs ("In space, no one can hear you tap") this appears to be the simplest solution the designers could come up with to get cards into play. Not only does this allow cards like "Red Alert" to throw the game out of whack, but it can also make for long, slow stretches of time in the game while each player puts one card into play, puts one card into play, puts one card into play, puts one card into play, until they have enough to tackle a Mission. Plus, if you lose most of your personnel tackling that first Mission, it may be quite awhile before you have enough cards on the table to get back into the game.
My final rules complaint is this: while the ideas behind the game are very clever, they don't always translate into a compelling game. To earn Mission points, you must make sure you have the skills and attributes needed, and this often involves checking and rechecking, adding and readding the numbers and skills on your cards. More often than not, a Dilemma card will take out just the crew member or equipment you need, leaving you unable to solve the Mission until you get a similar card into play, go back to your outpost to pick it up, then return to the Mission card. Solving a Mission is often anti-climatic.
And if you are unable to replace certain cards that have been removed from play or retrieve them from the discard pile (there are several Events and Interrupts that allow you to rescue discarded cards), you may find yourself in a position where nothing you have in play will allow you to solve further missions. All you can do then is putter around, biding your time until someone runs out of cards and the game ends by default (that's another questionable rule: if someone runs out of cards, the game ends and the player with the most points— no matter what the total— wins. This is true even if both players have several large ships with full crew complements still on the board, and are still able to solve Missions.)
One of the things Decipher has borrowed directly from Magic: The Gathering is the method in which its collectable card game is packaged and distributed. Starter sets of ST:TNGCCG contain 60 randomly distributed cards and a rules booklet, while booster packs contain 15 cards each. Like Magic, ST:TNGCCG was first released in a "limited" version which was printed with black borders, while all future "unlimited" releases will have a white border. There were 363 cards in this initial series, printed in an availability of 121 common cards, 121 uncommon cards and 121 rare cards (Decipher has also touted a plan to release "ultra-rare" cards in coming months through special promotions, although as this writing no definitive information on these ultra-rares was available). While this system worked well with Magic, it works against ST:TNGCCG. The Star Trek game system is specifically designed around matching cards, and if you have one card and don't have something to match it with, that card is useless. Due to the random distribution of the cards, people buying only a starter, or even a starter and a booster or two, will mostly likely not have enough matching cards to put together one decent deck. Decipher encourages people to substitute other cards if they are lacking a particular outpost or Mission card, but if you don't know what to substitute this solution lacks viability. Decipher also encourages people to get out and trade for cards they don't have, but even if you were to get enough cards for one good deck, all you will have is one deck, and playing it will get old after a time.
Part of the appeal of Magic was its versatility, the ability to pull cards from a limited pool and make up a variety of decks. ST:TNGCCG's cards don't offer the same wealth of combinations. Whereas a single Magic card can affect a broad range of other cards, many of the Star Trek cards only have a single use. To further complicate this problem, many of the ST:TNGCCG cards require a second card to be of use. All Vulcan personnel, for example, have the Mindmeld skill; unfortunately, you must have the Mindmeld Interrupt card to activate this skill. The only solution to this shortcoming is (and I'm sure it will make Decipher happy) is to buy lots of cards. This is a solution that may not be attractive to too many people.
ST:TNGCCG has been released in the wake of the unprecedented success of Magic. While Magic was originally designed so that players could enjoy the game drawing on a limited pool of cards, its creators never imagined that gamers would go so crazy over it to the point that they are spending hundreds— or thousands!— of dollars on a card game. The designers at Decipher not only imagined people buying tons of Star Trek cards, they seem to expect it.
While Decipher is planning to release a "true" starter set later this year (the set will contain one Federation deck and one Klingon deck, and have all the right personnel to solve the Missions in the set), it is unfortunate they didn't start off this way (another collectable card game currently available, Galactic Empires, does offer a basic starter set that has all the cards you need to start playing out of the box). There was a backlash in our gaming group when it was discovered you needed to buy a lot of cards just to play a decent game, and that kind of reaction doesn't bode well for Decipher. Of the hard-core gamers in our group who did buy lots of cards, almost all have already tired of ST:TNGCCG and moved on to other games. But two of my non-gaming Trekker friends who have the game— and who benefited from solid working decks as Christmas presents— are quite happy with it and still enjoy playing. As for myself, in spite of my complaints, I like the cards I do have, and enjoy an occasional game. For most gamers, however, this won't be enough to justify investing in Star Trek: The Next Generation Customizable Card Game. o
J.P. Trostle (jape@aol.com) is an editorial cartoonist and gamer, and has written gaming stuff for TSR, Steve Jackson Games, and the late, great magazine Gateways.