Wasnt living in the past there, i was simply explaining what i would love to see. And just cuz many of us decipher vets like to talk about the game doesnt mean we arent lookin forward to something new or willing to try anything new. We are entitled to our opinions just the same as anyone else, i dont think thats clogging the forums at all. What i dont understand is why some ppl feel so threatened by the fact that many ppl r fans of the old game and like to discuss it, or dreams of it coming back lol. Its a forum, let ppl talk about decipher or wizards or whatever game they enjoyed. All of this actually helps ffg see what the fans liked about older stuff and what they didnt so they can make the better games the newer players (non vets) wanna see.

spalanzani said:

I totally understand all the Decipher Star Wars talk, as I was also a longtime player of that game. I don't think it's a "living in the past" type of thing as much as a "why create a new game when there is such a great game already sitting there out of print" thing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited for this new game and really just glad to have a Star Wars card game back in general.

But if I had a choice, I'd definitely vote to bring back the Decipher game re-imagined by FFG like they do. Like how they brought back Netrunner from the dead and modernized it with card limits and factions and stuff.

The Decipher game was, and still is, just really special to a lot of people.

Sorry, yagyu, I wasn't trying to respond directly to you, I just saw the word "Decipher" in the thread title and felt I had to vent! There does seem to be a lot of comments sprinkled throughout here and there that I suppose can be summed up as "well, it'll never beat the Decipher game" without even giving it a chance. Nobody has actually played the finished game yet, but already it is being written off by one group or another, admittedly mostly the co-op fans, but I just feel so strongly that no-one is willing to give anything a chance anymore. 'Everything can never live up to the greatness of Decipher, so why bother trying to produce a new game? Just buy the Decipher rights and give us what we've already had!' It's just such a narrow-minded view that I actually despair. 

Maybe the Decipher rights are so prohibitively expensive that it would bankrupt FFG to buy them? Maybe LFL has expressly forbidden FFG to buy / Decipher to sell (okay, that last isn't very plausible), the terms of the contract and licence dictating FFG to produce a new and innovative game. 

I must admit, if they did buy the rights, I would still buy the game because I would be intrigued - having never bought any Decipher card, it would at least be novel to me. But I wouldn't be happy, as I can already get some Decipher cards if I really want them (ebay lists 64 results for "star wars decipher" as of three minutes ago). It strikes me, essentially, that buying the rights to the Decipher game is a lazy, and easy route, which is precisely what other people are calling aspects of the game FFG are producing. 

Just give it a chance!

 The Decipher Star Wars ccg was pretty amazing to be honest. But this was mainly due to the fantastic rules and mechanics that Decipher invented. The use of the cards themselves as a resource was a fairly new idea, and the customisation of both light side and dark side decks was pretty infinite.

However, many of the cards were busted to hell, and forced the printing of multiple 'silver bullet' cards to control the metagame. In fairness to Decipher, they did this fairly well, and kept tournaments pretty fresh.

After the Star Wars ccg Decipher used the same 'mechanics' to create a new ccg called 'Wars'. This was sweet too, and played in an almost identical way to Star Wars, but it never really caught on.

I'm extremely excited to give FFG the benefit of the doubt in creating new mechanics for their game, and can't wait to play the game itself!

Will the mechanics be as good as Star Wars ccg? doubtful. And I think that's why many old vet players are wondering about the purchasing of the Decipher rights.

However, I don't think anyone is bashing the new Star Wars lcg yet? Perhaps we're all just a little bit too nostalgic? 

Osiris said:

I still say it was embezzlement slew the beast, but you argue instead that WARS never caught on to begin with. How would you then reconcile your additional argument that SWCCG's success is mainly owed to the strength of its play engine? Could it not be simply that people joined the game because it was Star Wars, and then stayed because the game itself was fun?

I would argue that the latter possibility is far more likely. Unfortunately for me, the biggest turn-off I experienced for SWCCG was how little the rules felt to myself like Star Wars, and that is again surfacing as a problem for a lot of people following this game, including myself. I'm beginning to worry that no ruleset will ever meet my expectations for this universe.

MarthWMaster said:

No matter how fun or un-fun a game engine is, it was certainly never going to catch on near as popular when you substitute known beloved Star Wars movie characters and items for 'generic guy with generic laser sword'.

The game engine was great, and a lot of people to this day still claim it as one of the best, but without the Star Wars license there was just no way it was going to be near as popular.

MarthWMaster said:

I take it you never set up a Force Drain in the Carbonite Chamber with Vader (with a lightsaber for the extra +1) and played "All Too Easy" on the Light Side player that came to stop you?  If you were running the "Dark Deal" Objective, that one play burns your opponent for 8 of his 60 Life Force.  You're totally re-enacting the occupation of Cloud City in that Objective,  especially if you play "Cloud City Occupation".

I really don't want to sound like I'm being glib, but were you playing the game wrong?

cleardave said:

This is the kind of thing that I LOVED about SWCCG. They allowed you to recreate situations in Star Wars with the chance of a different outcome. It totally nailed the feel of the movies. You COULD easily make a generic deck that spammed non-unique characters, but really the most fun was when you created a scenario like Jedi Training or making the Second Death Star Operational and then having the opportunity as a Rebel to blow it out of the sky. The reason that no other game has touched this feeling is because they just put Star Wars pictures on games that could have been anything. Seriously, WotC could have been a World War II game.

cleardave said:

You actually do sound quite glib, purely by virtue of saying you don't want to, only to propose I was "doing it wrong." But since this is the internet I don't really take what anyone says seriously anyway.

You are right in saying it was great at recreating situations from the movies. I suppose I was simply not that interested in reenacting scenes I knew by heart, and more so in creating all new ones, which this game was only average at doing. Moreover, I just felt that the game's engine, while solid, was too heavily focused on battle tactics, and for this reason I actually felt that WARS, ironically, felt more like how Star Wars game should be. So if FFG were to bring this game back, I would prefer if it were a reimagining in the philosophy of Android: Netrunner. My only concern at this point would be whether or not such a game would be superfluous, since they've already chosen to build a PvP Star Wars game around a new ruleset.

MarthWMaster said:

Yeah, whenever you preface a statement with "I don't mean to be rude/insensitive/racist but…" you can't help come off that way, but honestly, I didn't mean anything by it.  I just don't see how you could get into SWCCG and not have some fun Star Wars-y moments.

This is the whole thing with a theme-heavy game based on an existing license.  A Star Wars game based around the original movies needs to feel that way, so the game needs to find a way to recreate situations and ideas from the movies.

Thus, you can do a whole deck around occupying Cloud City, forcing the Light Side into your trap.  "Bring Him Before Me" was another good one, where you have to capture Luke and turn him to the Dark Side, thus winning the game.

There were other things you could do that weren't expressly in the movies, like ISB Operations, the Occupation objectives, etc as well, so you could go that way too.  They even made a Black Sun objective, and a comparable Light Side objective with non-Rebel smugglers.

The best times I had were when you had a fun "what if" scenario, like feeding Obi-Wan to the Rancor.

That does sound like a lot of fun, and I'll admit that there have been times where I've very much craved to see them adopt the WARS engine, given the unlikelihood of Decipher doing anything with it in the future.

I will also say that I'm surprised by the fact that they didn't go with a setup that would have your heroes traveling to different worlds to accomplish your objectives. That just makes the most sense to me, and gives starships and characters a specific role in the game, that does not require them to be fighting each other directly.

MarthWMaster said:

Your point about the starship/character interaction touches on what I would probably look at as the one big flaw in the SWCCG; interactivity.

If you have a deck that is almost entirely focused on ground or space, and your opponent happens to have the opposite going, it almost turns into a solitaire experience where the two decks are in a race to out-drain the other in order to win.  It can get a little boring, but at least it'll be over quickly.

If there's no such obstacle in SWLCG, then you're always going to have to meet your opponent head on.

Even so, ships and characters do different things, and accomplish very different types of tasks in Star Wars. This should be reflected in the game somehow. I think that the pod system could be one way of forcing strongly encouraging players to run each in a deck. I can't really say how one would make both useful in their diverse capacities, without rewriting the game's design from the ground up, at which point I would again lean towards the attractive choice of reimagining the SWCCG. (Edit: Sorry about the background color. I wanted to include strikethrough text, and the forum again proves its uselessness in cooperating with me.)

MarthWMaster said:

Who doesn't like a good strike-through gag? Anyhow, at a glance, from the cards we've seen, you can count on having different types of effects on each character; attacking characters, attacking objectives, or placing focus tokens on other cards.

I think this way, at a glance, the Light Side will have to include a lot of cards that damage Objectives in order to get to their victory conditions.  While the Dark Side doesn't have to attack Objectives, it could still be in their interest if the effect is powerful enough, but they may want to worry more about stopping the Light Side cards with attacks or focus tokens.

However you want to look at it, until we see the concrete rulebook and more card images, it's hard to really say how awkward and abstract the starship vs character battles may go.  It looks like they've at least preserved the flavour of what the card "represents", so Palpatine can drop focus tokens, Coruscant Defense Fleet has a ton of combat damage to deal out, etc.

 Funny the topic of starfighters should come up again. This is something I was thinking about on the bus today. It would require some changes to the game, but what if they included starships but they couldn't directly battle. I mean they couldn't damage or be damaged by characters. Instead, starships would act as some sort of buff or resource generator, or something new and unique altogether. It would be neat if they could do something to give starships a unique place in the new game without A) having the two-battlefield problem of SW:CCG, and B) having rancors destroy frigates (and stuff like that).

More on the topic of this thread, what I've read in the past two days has made me a lot less hostile toward a SW:CCG remake. That game could have been so fun if I were not a pre-teen who didn't have any money when the game came out. I never really got many cards past Premier, and didn't even understand the concept of rares at the time. FFG's fixed distribution would be great for the SW:CCG so that rare-hunting was eliminated. I think the theme of the SW:CCG would get me much more excited than the abstract game we saw at this past GenCon.

Though, to be honest, the 2011 GenCon game trumps them all.