Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It, is Missions

by Charlie Plaine, Assistant Vidiian Designer

17th July 2024

When you're adding a new affiliation to one of our games, one of the most important considerations is missions. Without new missions, Vidiians would be limited to "Any crew" missions and that's a very small card pool. And you don't want to add just a handful of missions, otherwise you limit your new affiliation's choices. Thus, while the team spent a lot of time on the core Vidiian mechanic, we also had to spend a lot of time on missions.

Looking Forward
Since we were making a lot of new missions, we realized we had an opportunity to honor a Decipher tradition. Second Edition launched the game with 6 affiliations... yet 9 different affiliations appeared on missions. Without a , , or card in sight, Second Edition previewed those affiliations years ahead of their debut. We realized that we had the opportunity to do the same thing for future Delta Quadrant affiliations. Reaching out to Tjark, we asked for confirmation that Hirogen and Kazon would be coming in the future and for permission to preview them. We argued that both of the other affiliations would need missions, and we could take pressure of future sets by adding some missions for them along with the Vidiians. Tjark approved, and we were off to the races. Thus, you'll be seeing not only icons on missions, but the and ones as well!

Lucas told me a great story about how the new Hirogen icon came to be:

So, Decipher made up the Hirogen icon from scratch. I like it, it's a good icon. However, when I was researching the Hirogen icon, I found that many, many extra-canon sources use an icon similar to what I ended up using. It turns out to at least have a lightly canonical source: it can be seen on some crates in one of the Hirogen Hologram episodes. It's pretty clearly not language, it's an emblem of some sort, though there's no indication it's specifically the emblem of the Hirogen affiliation. But, in the absence of any other on-screen emblem associated with the Hirogen, other fan groups have adopted it, and I decided to too.

Looking Backward
Our primary goal was to make Vidiian missions, knowing we could put Hirogen or Kazon on them if it fit. We did a lot of research into existing affiliations and tried to related them to the new affiliations, at least to an "on paper similarity" level. This was just to be a source of inspiration, but we did find a few missions that made since to use as a basis for new versions. For example, long-time players will recognize Grid 216 (Trade With Ba'neth Outpost) as a riff on Cardassian Outskirts (Kressari Rendezvous). Familiarity is a useful tool in game design to ground players; by creating something new that reminds a player of something old, you give them a touchstone from which to build.

We built a few missions based on existing missions, and Ilari (Oust Warlord) is another one. It's based on one of the most popular Strength missions of all time: Brute Force. Lower points and lower requirements, and with a more expansive bit of gametext, Ilari is primed to be a popular and powerful mission for years to come. We even kept the icon on the new mission to tie it back to the original.

But it would be irresponsible to make every mission a riff on something else. And even if we made brand new missions (which we did), it would still be irresponsible for everything to have gametext. We went out of our way to make sure that a good number of the new missions had no gametext. For example, consider Mikhal Outpost (Exchange Information): just 3 skills, a nice low attribute requirement, and a solid 30 points. It's a classically built mission for both Vidiians (now) and Kazon (later), plus your Delta Quadrant Ferengi and Kazon decks.

Conclusion
I'm really proud to have been part of the team to introduce the first new affiliation to Second Edition in almost 20 years. There are a lot of fun new Vidiian-affiliation cards to play with and build decks around in different ways. But missions are at the core of any deck, and getting to make some new missions was a true joy. We hope you enjoy playing with them as much as we did developing them.

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