THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES

The Amazing Morphing Icon
By Evan Lorentz

When Dr. McCoy, the first card to be previewed from The Trouble With Tribbles expansion set, appeared on decipher.com, it sparked a huge amount of discussion and even more questions. What would other cards from the original series be like? What was the new rarity and card number icon all about? Why was his "Starship Enterprise" icon on the wrong side?

There's quite a story behind that last question.

In 1998, Decipher's license with Paramount for Star Trek did not include the original television series or the first seven films, which include material related to the original series. However, all the original main characters (except Lt. Sulu) appeared briefly in the Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", so plans were made to someday include them in an expansion set.

Captain Kirk would be the first offered, in the form of a preview card in The Dominion expansion. The Product Development team gave him a special "Starship Enterprise" icon, which they planned to use as a staffing requirement for the original Constitution-class Starship Enterprise when it appeared.

In late 1999, the first wrinkle in this plan appeared -- a welcome wrinkle, but a wrinkle nevertheless. Decipher secured a new five-year contract with Paramount for the Star Trek license, this time one that included the classic Star Trek series and all of the films.

Design work began on The Trouble With Tribbles, the first expansion under the new license. High on the list of priorities for the set was to figure out how the original series material would interact with a game environment based on The Next Generation series and its contemporaries. The Alternate Universe icon could serve as an explanation for how the 23rd century was mixing with the 24th, but it was also used to mark personnel from alternate realities, dreams and hallucinations, and several other time periods. The designers needed a way to be able to identify the original series material as a separate group.

So they created a "23" icon. A simple gold 23 in a square box was mocked up as a place-holder for what the art department would design later. It went on the right side of all cards from the original series, below the expansion icon. It stayed there for many weeks, through several iterations of the cards.

Even early on, though, there was at least one big concern about the icon. What to do about Captain Kirk? He had already been previewed, without a 23 icon. Would we errata the card in reprinting or leave it alone? Would we put it on the Tribbles version, and treat them as two different cards?

As playtesting drew near a close and PD began to nitpick the finer details, the 23 icon came under greater scrutiny. Did they really want to create a subset of the Alternate Universe icon? After all, every card that ever had a 23 would also get an AU icon. Worse still, how would cards from the first six Star Trek movies be marked? They were all set 23rd century, but PD didn't mean for them to be grouped with the cards from the television series. And even though everyone knew the art department would replace that mocked-up icon with something else, no one could get past seeing a distracting "23" on all those cards.

It was decided to do away with the 23 icon. One of the suggestions for replacing it was to rename the "Starship Enterprise" icon on Captain Kirk, and use it to mark 23rd century personnel. The proposal was mocked-up on a few Trouble With Tribbles cards, and initially rejected. Fanning a hand of cards and seeing a symbol widely associated with the Federation on Romulan, Klingon, and Non-Aligned cards didn't sit well with some people.

Before the idea went away, however, another approach was offered. What about moving the icon from the left side of the card to the right? It would still be easy to reference, but wouldn't be on the left edge when fanning a hand of cards, sitting under a contrasting affiliation icon. This also provided an answer for how to arrange the many icons on personnel like Arne Darvin. Add to that the fact that no errata would need to be issued for the Captain Kirk preview (a moved icon could hardly qualify), and we had a winner. The Starship Enterprise icon became the Original Series icon.

Although we doubt many people will be scratching out the icon on the left side of their Captain Kirk preview cards and drawing it in on the right.....

Evan Lorentz
"Mot the Barber" (mot@decipher.com)