Star Wars: Customizable Card Game - Retrospective Review

We're going to take you back.  Waaaaay back to a time when customizable card games ruled the Earth.  The Commodore and Roo pick up a box of Star Wars CCG Premiere from Ebay and hijinx ensue.  Watch as they give their thoughts on this game after playing it for the first time in a decade and try to decipher the encyclopedia of rules that tripped them up so many times around the high school lunch table.

And once you've seen the review, be sure to watch the companion video of us playing game that refreshed our memories - a "Let's Play" of Star Wars CCG from the Clan of the Gray Wolf.

Comrade Beric's picture
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And the named cards, oh gawd the named cards...

I liked the game overall, but it always bugged me that they'd planned out so many tiny intricate parts to it, interdependent on another, and often included an interdependency that relied on your opponent.  I mean, there were many (many many) cards that referenced other cards, by name, particularly opposing ones.  Such as interrupt cards that would specifically counter one or named cards your opponent might play.

The problem with this approach is that each player's card deck was very limited in size and each expansion was built so that you would have an entire deck built around it.  In Dagobah, you built an entire Light Side deck around the purpose of training Jedi, but a large percentage of the cards from that expansion were meant to specifically counter other cards from that expansion.  But what if the Dark Side deck had nothing to do with Dagobah?  If the Dark Side, say, went about playing exclusively in space, or dealing with Hoth, or messing around on Tatooine, then all of those cards to counter Dark Side Dagobah plays are worthless.  This was okay back when all there was was Premier because there were only so many things your opponent could have a deck for, but with every new expansion, there was at least one more thing to build a deck around, often more.  So planning any cards at all to counter your opponent was basically just worthless guessing.  This meant that about 30% of every expansion was worthless and became increasingly more worthless with every new card printed.  Had they made the counters more general as opposed to specific, then it might have been more worthwhile, but why would anyone put a card in their deck whose only real purpose was to counter a rapidly decreasing percentage of their opponent's options?

 

Overbearing specificity wasn't their only problem, but it was the biggest one in my opinion.  It made for great storytelling, but it made the gameplay unrelated and the deck building exceedingly wasteful.

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