Well, it’s time for a new blog entry. This time I noticed that I still have two starters for Decipher’s “Wars TCG” in a shelf. I bought them a few years ago at the games exhibition in Essen. They were cheap because the game was already dead.
Okay, there are a lot of dead CCGs/TCGs. But this one has an interesting story: Decipher was about to lose the license for their highly succesful Star Wars CCG. In order to keep a large part of the SWCCG fan base, they decided to produce a new Science Fiction game, which uses the rule mechanics from SWCCG. The setting war created by Decipher, so they did not have to buy a license for the game.
And they put some effort to make the setting interesting: Professional author Michael Stackpole worked on the setting and wrote several short stories, illustrator John Howe worked on one of the alien races. And there was even a soundtrack which you could download on Decipher’s homepage (I wonder if I still have the MP3 somewhere on my harddrive).
So the game was released in October 2004 with the set “Incursion”and met a lot of interest at first. My starters are a german version, so there were even translations for the international market. In January 2005 the expansion “Nowhere To Hide” was released and that was it. The second planned expansion “Edge of a Sword” was cancelled despite being far into development.
So let’s summarize: We had a succesful CCG with a very popular license and unique mechanisms. Decipher hoped that the mechanism was a huge factor for the success and produced a game with almost identical rules. It didn’t work. So does that mean that the “Star Wars” license was the only reason for the success of the SWCCG? Well, not exactly. Decipher tried to establish more games based on the license, since the SWCCG was rather complex. Two more Star Wars card games were released by Decipher and couldn’t match the success of the first one. And the new official Star Wars TCG by Wizards of the Coast was stopped at the end of 2005.
On the other hand Decipher could have done a better job with the background story of “Wars”. The only elements of the story are found on the back of the starter packs. In the year 2391 aliens invade the solar system through a rift in space-time. Oh great. The rulebook tells us that there are five playable factions. That’s it. Most of the story was on Decipher’s homepage. And of couse in the little lore text boxes on the cards, but that didn’t really help me to get into the story or even find memorable characters on the level of Darth Vader or Han Solo.
Well, today the Decipher’s SWCCG is alive as a fan project on http://www.starwarsccg.org and WotC’s version is continued as a fan project on http://www.skywlkr.net/idc/index.asp. So the license was probably the main reason for the success of the first game, but being released before the market was flooded with CCGs and the right mixture also helped.
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