MidnightLich wrote: ↑Thu Dec 30, 2021 10:07 pm
What do you think was the biggest success for 1E in 2021?
We crowned a new world champion.
Seriously, though, the state of the game right now seems to me to be literally the best it's ever been. Worlds featured a wide range of speed solvers, aggro, and midrange decks. I wish
hadn't been quite so prevalent, but there were a lot of colors represented -- and they mostly
played quite different, too. We've come a long, long way from the "Which
Deck Will Win Worlds?" meta of 2013. (In fairness,
2013's meta had a whole
three decks: Continuing Mission, Bajoran Resistance Cell, and Borg. Borg won Worlds.)
What do you think was the biggest failure for 1E in 2021?
Covid continued. That was a strong negative headwind for the community and especially for organized play. As I expressed to you privately, it makes me worry about the future -- when this all settles down, how many pre-pandemic playgroups will just be
gone? How will we recover? The Worlds meta in 2021 was more fun and diverse than it was in 2013... but it was also
quite a bit smaller. That scares me.
I guess that's not really a failure of the game, though, just a bad circumstance. So let's find one that is technically in our power:
I'm starting to come around to the idea that the (extremely difficult) task of replacing Lackey with a new piece of software needs to be a higher priority than it is. A long-distance friend of mine is trying to get me into Netrunner, and it turns out Netrunner (like so many other discontinued games) has a slick, rules-enforcing online play application. It makes me almost embarrassed to try introducing my friend to Trek, because Lackey sucks.
I don't know how to address our failure to fix this. It seems to me that we literally don't have the resources for it. The website redesign is an even higher priority, and it is occupying the full energies of the Programming Team. We may just have to hope that some angel materializes out of the ether and (like the one guy who built GEMP) just decides to gift us with an open-source Trek application.
What was the thing you wish we'd done in 2021?
Ban list reduction.
What was your favorite 2021 1E expansion?
I really want to say it was The Trial Never Ended or even OTSD-R, because Rules worked hard on those and (if I may toot our own horn) did a terrific job. Certainly one of Rules' big successes in 2021 was figuring out how to do remasters effectively (including TMP-R, which is coming in 2022 but we did nearly all the work in 2021). And I'm extremely happy with how the revised
Q-Flash came out: same mechanics you've loved since 1996, but spelled out
so much clearer.
But expansions are mainly about Design, not Rules, and the best 2021 1E expansion was, hands-down,
Dogs of War. We had no right to expect a set this good, and, the more I think about DoW, the more I'm impressed by it. The cards are fun. They're well-balanced. Each new "team" fits their "colors" really well, while simultaneously establishing themselves with their own distinctive mechanical flavor.
A classic complaint about 1E is that we have all these different colors and teams, but most of the decks play fundamentally the same way: stack free plays and draws, fly around, solve missions. You really can't say that about the teams in
DoW. Whether it's no-facilities Honor Cardassian saboteurs, a new Dominion team that sacrifices a lot of raw power in exchange for negating a key Dominion weakness (starting in the Gamma Quadrant), or the how-has-nobody-thought-of-this-before-and-how-does-it-fit-so-perfectly simplicity of Staging Ground, you
will build your
DoW decks differently, and you
will remember how much fun you had playing them.
On top of that -- because, yes, there's still more to praise--Dogs of War accomplished all this with elegant simplicity. The strategies with
DoW cards are deep and complex... but the cards are clear and simple. Special skills are simple and to the point, there are no phantom icons like the ones added by Continuing Mission, there's very very little "let's find a random word in lore!" keyword searching. Did you notice how few Special Downloads there are, and how none of them can "bug in" or "bug out" during a mission attempt?
Many of the dilemmas are clear successors to older dilemmas, using straightforward, one-punch effects to challenge opponents and push the meta in one direction or another. There are no multi-step, multi-effect dilemmas, no kill-walls, none of the tricks Design has increasingly relied on to make "sufficiently powerful" dilemmas -- and yet all these dilemmas (except the still-underrated
Terrorist Explosion) are seeing play, because they're good!
Yet the flavor shines through anyway. A major "Alpha Dominion needs to play nice with Cardies and Breen" mechanical theme is accomplished largely through some careful, deceptively simple nudges on nouns and a couple of verbs, some of which
aren't even that wordy. Staging Ground's simplified report-with-crew (which saves so many headaches!) is that rare mechanic that perfectly blends story and color in just a couple of easily-understood sentences.
I love this set. A zillion kudos to @Smiley , @KazonPADD , @HoodieDM, and @Dukat .
What was your least favorite 2021 1E expansion?
I don't want to yuck anybody's yum, but I thought
Second Star to the Right was boring, and missed a lot of the marks that Dogs of War met.
Now, part of that is because the Project Rogue team very deliberately took all the interesting cards out of
2S2R and moved them took the next set, in order to ease testing and get something released in 2021! So this should be graded on a curve! I've seen
Paradise Lost (should be working on it right now, in fact!), and it is tackling some big challenges. I fully expect to feel much more warmly toward Paradise Lost when it comes out.
But, even taking that into account, I think
2S2R falls short. Its spin on
doesn't seem meaningfully different from every other version of
-- it's just Another Fed Team with A Well-Crafted Skill Matrix and Some Play / Draw / Attribute engines. The main attraction seems to be These Guys Have Different Pictures. There's no coherent theme to them or mechanic built around them, nothing in common across their nouns except admiralness. The main attempt to give them something "different" is
Reserve Activation Clause, a card I don't mind, but also doesn't make me want to play them.
Ditto
. Their main mechanical distinguishing element (beyond "aha, but
our cards have
movie property logos!") seems to be "the game's easiest two-mission win" via
GIVE ME GENESIS!, which doesn't feel at all on-brand for Red to me.
Still, I have to admit that I haven't seen 2S2R in action outside playtesting yet, so it's entirely possible I'm selling these cards short. It's also possible Design had a theme in mind for each faction in 2S2R that I simply failed to grok.
Also, this is by no means a terrible set. It's a pretty good example of longstanding Design practices that I've been a part of as well. (You could make lots of these same criticisms of
The Cage, the last set I helped design.) It was just
S2SR's own bad luck to come out the same year as the superlative Dogs of War, allowing me to draw this contrast.
Also also, these are by no means bad designers. Indeed, two of them also worked (very hard! I saw them!) on Dogs! (The others have fine resumes as well.) Which just shows that game design is hard, and sometimes it doesn't all come together. Or maybe it did come together, and S2SR just isn't a set for me.
What was your favorite 2021 1E card?
Staging Ground.
What was your least favorite 2021 1E card?
Make Us Go. Remasters are supposed to make cards better and clearer, not the opposite. That's on me, and I apologize.