Vidiians

by Lucas Thompson, Designer

12th July 2024

Back in 2017 (over seven years ago), I pitched a new affiliation to the rest of the Second Edition design team. I wanted to turn the normal game tempo on its head; generally, as you play a game of Second Edition, you get more powerful. As you draw into more of your powerful cards and combinations, your ability to advance your goals increases. What if there were a faction that didn't play that way? What if you started out powerful, and your strength decays over the course of the game? That kind of mechanic coudn't work with an existing affiliation; players would just combine those new, powerful early-game cards with existing win-more mechanics that all existing affiliations have access to, and just win faster.

Thematically, the natural combination with this mechanic are the Vidiians. Once they were peaceful artists and scientists, before they became afflicted by the Phage. That unstoppable illness makes them decay over time, forcing them to get increasingly aggressive and desperate. Eventually, they would become horrifying monsters, stealing organs from other species and grafting them into their grotesque bodies.

The pitch went well! People liked it, but it took years of me gradually tweaking my pitch before Tjark decided it would lead to the first new Second Edition affiliation made by the Continuing Committee. Of course, that's not the end of the story; that was over three years ago. Working with Charlie Plaine and Richard New, Vidiians went through many iterations before they even got to playtesting. I took an early, pre-playtesting version of Vidiians that used an Organ Counter mechanic to PAX 2022 and played my first game with Tony Cox at the convention.

That Organ Counter mechanic didn't even make it to playtesting, but the theme of the affiliation has remained steady throughout: Vidiians are strong in the early game, and weak in the late game. That gradually developed into being good at attempting missions in the early game, and good at aggression in the late game. That turns another game element upside-down: most aggressive decks in Second Edition seek to lock down the opponent in the early game, before turning to solving once they've developed a significant lead. TOS battle decks try to blow up your ship at your first mission, Borg assimilators assimilate early (and then use those personnel to blow up dilemmas), and Maquis hand-denial decks stop the opponent from recovering from an early hit from a killing dilemma pile.

The result is that Vidiian cards are going to look very powerful at first glance. They have cost-reduction built-in to their Headquarters mission and their battle cards can capture up to three (four versus decks that complete four missions to win) personnel in one shot! What we found during playtesting (and I can comfortably say that this is the most-tested expansion I have ever worked on) is that fighting against the normal game tempo necessitated this power level. Capturing three personnel at once is a lot, but when that only happens when your opponent has already completed two missions it becomes significantly less impactful. I'm incredibly grateful to all of our playtesters who have worked very hard to try to thread the needle of powerful-but-not-overpowered.

I am very excited to share these cards with the Trek community. I have been living with them in my head for seven long years, and it is amazing to see them become a reality. There are a lot of cards in this expansion. Here's what you'll see as the cards are revealed over the next two weeks:

• Fifty-eight new cards. Giving players choices when building decks for Vidiians was a high priority. Part of the fun of a whole new affiliation is trying to crack the code, and we did not want that to be easy. Fun yes, easy no.
• Fourteen new Vidiian-attemptable missions, which supplement the ones already in the game. Though Vidiians cannot use Terrasphere 8, they'll still have a variety of paths to get to 100 points.
• Nine Vidiian-specific verbs (events and interrupts). Most of these cards encourage interaction in some way, but you'll also see some classic new-affiliation cards.
• Twenty-three Vidiian-affiliation personnel. Not all of these personnel have gametext (six are ability-free). It was important to get the flavor of the Vidiian affiliation into these cards, but it's equally important not to overload players with gametext.
• Four Vidiian-affiliation ships. Vidiians may not have named any of their ships in the show, but they still used them to cause some trouble.
• Six dilemmas, only one of which is specific to Vidiians. I suspect that, even if you never play Vidiians, you may enjoy using some of these new dilemmas.
• One equipment. There's not going to be a big surprise here.
• ... and five regular-template missions from Timeless to round us out to sixty-three cards!

Will your solving strategy shoot for higher-point missions and burn those points on your later missions? Will you focus more on harvesting organs, maybe using Call to Arms for points? Will you focus on completing your missions as quickly as possible, only resorting to battle out of desperation? We saw a lot of different deck types in playtesting, but I'm sure the community will still surprise me. However, no matter how you build them, you'll need to contend with their desperate (and losing!) battle with the Phage. Happy deckbuilding!

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