TCG: Advantages and disadvantages compared to the CCG

Hi all. If someone's intrest in games like these could be measured on a scale of one to ten (10 being the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and 1 being someone who has never played any) I would be at about a 4. I know some of the older card games, have some experience with old fashioned role playing (very little, actually) and LOVE old board games (espically Star Wars related ones).

This being said, I recently got into the TCG and find it lots of fun. I was aware of the CCG, and remember buying a couple of starter decks when the game first came out. While i liked the game, I never really followed through on it.

Not being a real member of the gaming community, I didn't know that Decipher had lost their liscense to SW. In fact, when I first saw the starter kits for the TCG, I just thought they were the new cards for the old game. Perhaps that's why Im so into the new game now, I can get in on the ground floor this time.

I am aware that a lot of fans of the old game dont quite care for the new one, and many are probably cheezed at the way the licesning had just abrubtly changed like that in spite of all the gaming fans of the old game. This is understandable. I knew a lot of people who sunk a LOT of money in the old game.

What I dont want to do in this topic is start a debate about which game is better. What i love about all games (espically ones with the same brand name) are the diffrences between them. What I'd like to get opinions on are what is good and bad about how the TCG stands up to the old one.

Personally, here's what I like about the TCG.

1. It's eaiser to get started. I remember being pretty fustrated back when the CCG came out and I bought two starter decks and STILL didn't have enough of the right cards to play a proper game. Now a pre-constructed TCG deck also isin't quite complete, but with only a handfull of boosters, I was ready to go. I guess I just didn't like the way characters in the CCG had to have weapons to be effective, and ships needed pilots. That just doubled the ammount of cards i had to look for, and made deck building about as fun as filling out a tax form.

2. Newcomers and neophytes have a chance at winning aginst even a seasoned player. I taught the game to a very understanding friend (God bless her for putting up with it) who didn't even know what a TCG or CCG was, and who has never even seen the Original SW films. The first game we played, she won! Ever since, she's been hooked and she's learning the complexities of the game fast.

3. I like that one ultra powerful card cant beat you. Back in 96, when the CCG was starting, I had a friend I used to play the game with. I remember he bought TONS of cards for it. In all that money, he got one Darth Vader. If I played aginst him, and that Vader came out, it was over. Case closed. Perhaps I wasn't doing something right, and could have done something better strategy wise, but you guys know what I mean. Given enough time, a powerful card can still be destroyed, thus preventing a punk's loss.

What don't I like?

1. I loved the location aspect of the CCG. I thought it recreated the feel of the SW universe greatly.

2. I thought the cards looked fantastic!

3. I liked the intresting way that cards were handled in the CCG; With the diffrent force piles and such.

4. I liked the complexity of the old game. Although what I love about the TCG is it's simpler design, sometimes the geek in me longs for the thicker rulebook of the CCG.

Well, that's about it. Im sorry about the long intro post, but i just wanted to get this all out.

What does everyone else think?

 

CCG player myself.

I think the major thing is getting started. The TCG seems to be much more user friendly, especially with all the version of main characters. The CCG finally got good preconstructed starters with Death Star II, but it is challenging to bring a player up to speed.

I personally like the Lore on the CCG better than the quote in the TCG. I always like finding out about background characters. The TCG has those background characters, but doesn't shed as much light on them as the CCG would.

 

that's an intresting point about the background lore. Some of that stuff was kind of cool.

As to the quotes on the TCG, or at least the ATOC set anyway, I thought the quotes pointed out how flat the dialouge was in that particular episode. (otherwise, i loved ep. II by the way, just for the record)

 

Is there any chance that Decipher will again get the rights to SW Cards? I'm mad b/c I collected all those fricken cards and now there are no more. I will start my silent protest if they don't.

 

I can understand how you feel. Geez I knew people who had whole BOOKS of cards.

I take it then you dont care for the TCG?

Step up to the table, I'd like hear your opinion.

 

Loyal-Guard,

First, let me comment on your points:

LIKES:

1. Easier to get started. I agree. The TCG is much easier than the CCG to learn, making it easier to start playing right away. I still think Young Jedi is even easier than the TCG, though.

It's not really because the starter decks were any better. It's really because of the complexity of the rules. You really couldn't make a SW:CCG starter deck any simpler than the Death Star II starters ... but I saw people struggling to learn the game even then.

2. Rookies vs. veterans. This is a double-edged sword. Lots of new players may buy the game and try it and have fun with it. But (in general) serious players -- who are willing to spend serious money on a game -- are turned off by the high degree of luck in the game introduced by the dice.

3. No "ultra-powerful" cards. Eh, I'm pretty skeptical of this one. Sure, the commons and uncommons in the TCG are good ... but the rares are still a whole lot better! That's the nature of a "trading/collectible" card game. The REALLY GOOD cards are rare.

DISLIKES:

1. No locations. Agreed. It added a depth to the game that the TCG is lacking.

2. Card design. Eh, I was never that crazy about the card design. Why were deploy and forfeit -- two numbers just as important as power and ability -- relegated to microscopic-size text in the lower left corner? Which one was deploy and which one was forfeit, anyway? (Oh, I know now ... but it did take a while to learn that!) Why must keywords be embedded in the lore? Why are some keywords bold and others are not? And why must I look in three places -- the card title, lore, or game text -- to see if a card has a particular "characteristic"?

In contrast, I think the TCG cards are much cleaner in their design. They leave more room for the pictures, a definite advantage. And the card backs are much cooler than the Decipher ones. The TCG card design isn't perfect (what do "S" and "P" stand for? if they weren't so obviously on different point scales, it would be confusing...) but I actually like it better.

In the CCG's defense, it is a much older game. Card design in general has come a long way since then. Look at all of the games Decipher has released since the CCG: Young Jedi, Jedi Knights, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek Second Edition ... even Austin Powers! And even in the CCG, an attempt was made to create more dynamic cards: Admiral's Orders.

Also in the CCG's defense, the guys who put together the TCG sure did make some poor choices for card images ... or else the quality of the work was poor. Cards like Anakin D ... what were they thinking??

3. Deck manipulation. I strongly agree. The elegance of the design of using the deck itself for resource management (your force pile), random element (destiny draws) and win condition (force pile) is brilliant. To play, all you need is a deck of cards; no dice to roll, no coin to flip, no damage counters, no twilight pool markers, nothing. No other CCG to my knowledge has done a better job of utilizing their decks.

4. Complex rules. Again, I agree. I will admit the SW:CCG rules were perhaps too complex, but what the rules brought to the game was a sense of role-playing, a sense of immersion in the storyline. That's missing from SW:TCG. Too bad.

Again, pointing at another Decipher game: LOTR TCG has struck a very good balance in terms of rules complexity. It immerses you somewhat in the story, but not so much that you are burdened (forgive the pun!) with complicated rules.


Whew! I didn't intend to write so much. I guess I'll leave any additional observations I have about the two games for later....

 

Hi all.

Thanks for the post Artie-Deco. For a sec there I thought no one cared.

You bring up a lot of good points, most I agree with and only a few I dont. Although even there I dont disagree in so much as they just made me think of other points of discussion on this topic.

1. About the dice thing. You know. I can understand that one too. Im far from a vetrean player. But I am a vetrean at being familer with games and their players, so I can understand how the dice thing would be destested (or distrusted) by hard core gamers who would spends lots of time building a killer deck only to get wiped out by a dice roll.

But really, the dice and their factor are only a secondary element to the game next to speed, which is a bit more important. Through the manipulation of speed, and through the deployment of cards with dice affecting abilites, the luck factor can be greatly reduced. Hell, a mathmatician could have field day calculating the way the odds drop off using just a few cards with shields and such. And frankly, the dice aspect adds just enough randomness to make it possible for rookie players to have a chance. Keep it mind that the dice dont make it possible for a weaker player to win just because of a weak roll. All that will do is open a window of oppertunity for the weaker (or losing) player to sneak through.

By the way, has anyone seen the article on the Wizards TCG site where the guy talks about accuracy and has that huge bar graph about the odds. That's game devotion!

2. About getting started. I agree with you that it's the rules of the CCG that make it harder to start, and maybe not the starter decks. Still...I have one of the original CCG Premier starter decks right here and after flipping through I saw the same thing I did when I first bought it...a deck full of interupts so specific in what they do, that they are useless to a new player who doesn't have the cards (or wont be playing someone who has the cards) needed to make them work. Granted, any game requiers a booster pack or two to get started properly, but still remember feeling kind of gypped with the CCG (or the starter decks at least).

3. The Powerful card thing. So far, the rare cards in the TCG are great! When I play some of those Dark side Mission and battle cards that let you do some squirlley things aginst the poor person I got addicted to the game, it's fun to watch her slump over in fustration.

And one thing I forgot to mention that I liked in this aspect about the TCG is the way that they make it eaiser to find cards with your favorite characters on them. I think the stacking option is an intresting element to game play because I does effect...speed and power...which effects...the dreaded dice.

What I like about the TCG is that if someone plays or stacks a cart to a whopping level of power, it's no reason to give up. Through skillfull play, the most powerful card is living on borrowed time. Therefore preventing a player from building their deck around a couple of killer cards.

Boy that anakin D is ugly isin't it? It's like he's standing in front of a glass door in a gaudy casino.

4. Card design. Yeah, I forgot that while playing the CCG, I was always asking what number meant what. And now that I think about it, isn't there a destiny factor to the CCG? That's random isin't it? Now granted that the destiny factor isn't nearly as pervasive an element as the dice in the TCG, but still...vetrean gamers should lighten up on the whole random thing. It's not like the whole game is up to a coin toss.

Ooops. got off my point there.

5. Backtracking about the game being eaiser to get started. It's intresting you mention the Young Jedi game. I was out of the gaming world when that game came out. When I tried to figure out what SW game to get into, it was a bit confusing with all these diffrent games floating out there. So, without changing the topic of this thread too much, how does the Young Jedi game compare to the TCG (or even the CCG, for that matter). It must not be too exciting since I dont hear anyone ever talk a

 

LG,

Don't sweat it too much that there's not that many responses here. Traffic on this board is very light as it is, and this particular topic has been discussed ever since the new game came out!

A few points:

Starter Decks. Yes, the TCG has better starter decks than CCG. CCG Premiere starters STINK. Completely random cards do NOT make good starter decks. Special Edition starter decks were okay, giving you 22 fixed cards (the other 38 random again) that at least guaranteed you'd have SOMETHING to play with in a standard game. Death Star II were the best starter decks for learning the game....

But here's the problem: no one will buy more than one of a starter deck if all the cards are fixed! How many copies of Admiral Ackbar do you need, anyway? You could buy multiple Premiere or Special Edition starter decks and still pull new cards out of them ... but the Death Star II starters were just the same old, same old....

Decipher finally got the starter deck concept right with LOTR: 60 fixed cards, and 3 random rares ... for the price of 3 booster packs (roughly). Perfect!

Dice. Yes, "destiny numbers" are a random element. But it's not as random as dice. Why? Because you're working with a fixed deck, which you built yourself. You determine the distribution of destiny numbers in your deck; the distribution of numbers on the dice is fixed. The odds of you drawing a particular destiny number vary depending on what cards you have in your hand and which are deployed on the table. I can increase the odds of drawing a high destiny number by recycling high destiny cards back in my deck and making sure I only discard and deploy low destiny numbers. So the player has more control over his destiny (pun intended!) in the CCG....

I'll talk about Young Jedi later.... (gotta keep 'em wanting more, right??)

 

I agree. Putting the level of randomness in the hands of the player is much better than a pure random method.

 

Young Jedi is even easier to learn and play than the TCG, but I have a lot of fun playing it. You can read a brief description of the game I wrote by clicking on the "CCG/TCG Board Guidelines and Game Descriptions" in the banner above, and of course by visiting Decipher's website (www.decipher.com).

How does it compare to the TCG? Well, I think the YJ card design is at least as good as the TCG. The YJ character cards devote almost all of the card space to the character image, which is good. (The bad part about that is that there is very little space for game text!) Unfortunately, it only has images from Episode I! It would have been nice to see classic trilogy and Episode II characters in a YJ format....

As I've said, it is easier to get started with Young Jedi than any of the other three SW CCGs/TCGs. The starter decks are very simple ... unfortunately they are too simple, and completely fixed. Demand for starter decks is almost non-existent because the cards in them are practically worthless.

You still have destiny draws instead of dice.

Unfortunately, you still have "power cards" that can tip the balance of the game. Perhaps not to the same degree as a "power card" in SW:CCG or SW:TCG, but they are there just the same.

You know, you said earlier that you like the fact that rookies can be almost instantly competitive with veterans in the SW:TCG, and I agree to an extent. But I think the real issue is money. The thing that always bugged me about SW:CCG, Magic, Pokemon, and LOTR is that the winners tend to be the ones who spend a lot of money on their cards. That's a broad generalization, of course, and there are plenty of exceptions to the rule -- some players spend very little and are highly successful, others spend much and lose consistently -- but as a generalization I still think it's true. It's part of the nature of a "collectible" or "trading" card game. The most powerful cards are the most collectible, the most expensive cards to get.

The SW:TCG gets around this by having a narrow power range in their cards -- the most powerful cards are not THAT much more powerful than the average cards -- and by having a completely random key element to battles (dice). Young Jedi gets around this somewhat in their deckbuilding rules.

Young Jedi has a 6x10 deckbuilding rule. Every card has a color dot on it, one of six colors. Your 60 card deck must have 10 cards of each color. This keeps you from loading your deck with all power cards. Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Mace Windu and all the other Jedi Masters are all the same dot color ... so you can never have more than 10 of them in your deck; maybe 5 Qui-Gons and 5 Obi-Wans, but never 10 of each.

(Now, I've oversimplified it somewhat. The 6x10 rule has been modified by "wild card" rules and a new 5-card limit rule ... but I've just realized I'm late for an appointment, and I can't explain all that now!!)

See ya later....

 

Artie, I agree with you completly about the money factor. I dont have the money to constantly buy pack after pack of cards, and the ammount of people I can trade with are just about zero. TCG allowed me to get a reasonably powerful deck going without having to ruin my bank account.

And again, I love how even the most powerful card can be dealt with given enough time. Although it isint so fun if it's one of my cards that gets axed.

Thanks for the Young Jedi explinations as well. In my area I still see a great deal of cards for it on the shelves, but I figured it was a dead game so why bother. I dont need a replay of my encounter with Dragon Dice.

Another SW game I've wondered about was the self contained one that Decipher put out based on Ep. I. I saw it at my local wal-mart for like three bucks. I considerd getting it since it is so cheap. Has anyone played that one? How does it work compared to the TCG or Young Jedi? Is it worth three dollars?

 

Decipher only made one Star Wars game completely based on Episode 1: Young Jedi.

 

Another SW game I've wondered about was the self contained one that Decipher put out based on Ep. I. I saw it at my local wal-mart for like three bucks. I considerd getting it since it is so cheap. Has anyone played that one? How does it work compared to the TCG or Young Jedi? Is it worth three dollars?

Has anyone played it? You have to ask?

For $3? Sure, it's worth it. It is STAR WARS isn't it?

It is a VERY simple "customizable" game. Not "collectible" or "trading" card game, but "customizable". It stands alone; you can't mix in cards from Young Jedi. It was obviously intended as an introduction to young players who've never played a collectible card game before.

You have light and dark cards, enough for 4 decks (2 of each side) at a time. You can mix and match cards based on a coloring scheme, giving you up to 4 different decks for each side.

You may only play it once and get bored with it, but hey, it's only $3!