[Ausgang]

The almost total absence of insight to the game.

[Mr.Sloan]

a play 2 draw 2 is IMO required for a starter deck to make fun. Maybe even play 3 draw 3 decks so that those can be used in online play. rules and starter-deck vidoes might be required to give player a hand. reading rules is far less fun then seeing 2 player playing and explaining the game to someone. maybe online ambassadors who take the time to teach the game to player switching from 1e. Vids + Ambs for each continent / time zone.

[Smiley]

The game isn't fun -- at least not the simplified/intro version of it.

I've heard the polar opposite of that statement from my new players. =)

[BCSWowbagger]

The game isn't fun -- at least not the simplified/intro version of it.

I've heard the polar opposite of that statement from my new players. =)

Really? I also struggle with new players to strike the balance between avoiding overwhelming complexity and being so simple the game is dull. (I find that, in general, playing starters is not only not fun; it is also not representative of the game. Thus people who enjoy starters often don't like Complete, and people who don't enjoy the starters never find out!)

Are you running starters, or some variant that blends starter simplicity with Complete depth?

[Smiley]

We have been trying different things but found that starters where the best thing to get players to be interested. The starters provided with TNG was deemed to complicated so we had to scale back from that. and needed to be removed due to the complexity and non sensical design they are considered with todays standards. After a couple of games, more Events and equipment could be added as well as some simpler Interrupts. The feedback was always that ship battle was hard and unfair and most wanted ways to avoid it if possible. Dilemmas was mostly too complicated so scaling them back to more easily parsed as well as lower power level was met with great success.

Complete card pool was just not interesting. They all wanted something smaller and more comprehensible. No more than 2000 cards was the feedback on how many they thought they would be able to juggle. More like 1500 really.

So to answer your last question. No, we are not running complete in any way as this is not what anyone really want's here. They like the game in the starters with possibilities to add some depth with Events, Interrupts, Incidents and Objectives but the rest was deemed complex enough.

[AllenGould]

The large number of complicated cards, especially seed cards as mentioned... and you can't always take the time to read cards you aren't familiar with, you just have to hope your opponent is playing them correctly.

If I was just starting now, I wouldn't want to bother with something so complicated (cards, rules, interactions). It's just the overwhelming combination of all of it.

That's the trouble I hit when trying to teach the kid. A game that starts with "here's the shelf of three-inch binders" is a pretty big speed bump.

[Nerdopolis Prime]

For avarage card gamers its the length of the game.

[boromirofborg]

For context, Magic - still the behemoth of card games:

their Basic rules are less then 18 pages.

The comprehensive rulebook is 242 pages, so 1E isn't *that* bad yet.

I think the difference to me is that I can sit down with my 9 year old and 2 starter decks of magic, explain the very basic rules in 5 minutes, and we play a simplified game that still is recognizable as the same game as tournament magic.

Complexity in and of itself isn't as big of a hurdle as people think (I believe.)

One of the reasons I would say that is the most popular format of Magic is Commander - a format that can easily be very complex AND lends itself to long, long games. (I've had games that lasted less then it took to shuffle, or games that took 3+ hours.)



The barrier in my opinion is that aside from the seed phase games can still be over quickly with no real interaction with the opponent OR the interaction is one sided and wipes you out.


There's no reset buttons like MTG (Wrath of God), and interactive scarifies are battles that leave you dead and unable to catch up.

I think the golden ages of DS9-Rules are looked back at fondly because there's was so many ways to interact. Capture, battles, the like.

Focus on making the core simple, interactive and fun.

[Nerdopolis Prime]

Agreed, MtG is learned very fast, a great bonus point.

Commander is rather considered a casual mode. Modern and Standard are really big in MtG. Being competitive is what many MtG players strive for. So giving your opponent no chance to interact is often key. See control decks or Vintage format.

We have no Wrath of God, but we could create Wrath of Q

Its hard to catch up in STCCG when you get battled off the table. While in MtG you play best of 3 within 50 minutes, we often struggle to get 1 game of 2E in the same time. So if you get massacred game 1 in MtG, you still have the chance to win the other 2 games. In STCCG, when you get board whiped, you can only try to stop your opponent from solving his missions. You are often too late to rebuild your crews/teams and you have only the one game. So in this perspective MtG offers hope. You can easily concede the first game, hoping the other 2 will not go south.

So the biggest disadvantage IMHO is that STCCG is sometimes more a board game rather than a fast paced card game. Unfortunately people want fast games and with that more (!!!) games during a tournament or in their hobby time.

[Nerdopolis Prime]

Btw. even on the Tabletop sector, fast paced skirmish games (Kill Team, Necromunda, Warmachine) find more and more customers than traditional games like Warhammer 40k, Flames of War, Kings of War or even some games in between, like for example Bolt Action.

[LORE]

a play 2 draw 2 is IMO required for a starter deck to make fun... rules and starter-deck vidoes might be required to give player a hand. reading rules is far less fun then seeing 2 player playing and explaining the game to someone.

Not sure if you saw the game Daniel and I played for demo day over the weekend, but it was exactly as described - we were running the Coming of Age starters that are standard p2 / d2 and we spent a ton of extra time explaining everything we were doing. After the game, we even showed how ship battle worked. Personnel battle was explained when he hit a Ferengi Ambush in-game.

[KazonPADD]

I must say, the demo games we played on Sunday were really good

[Smiley]

...we were running the Coming of Age starters that are standard p2 / d2 and we spent a ton of extra time explaining everything we were doing. After the game, we even showed how ship battle worked. Personnel battle was explained when he hit a Ferengi Ambush in-game.

Can these be seen anywhere? if so. Is there a timecode to watch for or is it its own video?

[JeBuS]

Real good job on creating those starter decks.

[willraiman]

As a non-1E player, can I offer my insights as a person who has spent a lot of time in his life trying to get people into 2E and SWCCG? I think these will be universally applicable.

For 2E: Just making that leap into the time commitment of a CCG. People think CCG, and they think about learning cards, building decks, sorting cards, showing up for tournaments...that's a ton of time where you could just be playing a board game that is ready out of the box. The trick here is convincing them that the play experience is rich enough that the time investment is worthwhile.

For SWCCG: The massive bolus of rules and cards you need to swallow to even be remotely competent. Towards the end of SWCCG's published life, I talked a friend into playing. Taught him the game, helped him make decks, played several games with him, and then he came out to a big tournament and got absolutely destroyed. It is hard to overestimate the value of experience in a game with lots of player agency, like 1E or SWCCG. You have to be able to expect what is coming in a given play state in order to plan properly.

I don't have a good solution for that second example, other than just slowly easing new players in with lots and lots of friendly games against a variety of decks types, maybe.