Revisiting the Star Wars CCG, Death Star vs Trench Run 

I wouldn’t mind seeing more of these!

I played this in middle school and none of my friends did, so I somehow managed to convince my dad to play with me. I made us Attack Run and Commence Primary Ignition decks, and our games usually went exactly the way yours did-ten minutes between turns consulting the glossary, doing math equations, and trying to picture the bizarre scenarios we ended up with. Thinking back on this now, he probably deserved a Father of the Year award for making it all the way through even one game. He did love quoting Red Leader. "Almost...there!"

This is the best game of all time. However, the rules can get really complex and games can take 1 hour plus (so it's hard to get new people into it). I only play original trilogy cards from this game. I feel like Star Wars Destiny is like a zoomed in version of one battle at one location in this game (which is what appealed to me a about Destiny, it's short and to the point). I will forever play this game (swccg). My plan is to keep several balanced themed decks on hand. I also want to make a cube. I freaking love this game. Each game plays out like a narrative so it's so fun to picture what shenanigans are happening. Also, you can get into this game for super cheap nowadays. There's also a free online version.

This was my first CCG. Loved this game.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I needed this video. I was working at a small collectibles and gaming store back from '95 - '97, and this brought back massive memories. Should have been a great job, but low pay and bad bosses etc... I had a full 1st printing black border set of the base game, and the first few expansions. Fell off mid-Cloud City as I left for a better job, plus they started doing convention exclusive cards that meant a 100% collection was suddenly only a 99% collection unless you paid $$$ to get those impossible to find exclusives. Once the "gotta have them all" mentality is broken by external events like that, it's easy to walk away from the whole thing. Sadly I lost access to all my old stuff a hundred house moves and an emigration ago. A shame, as my Darth Vader card was signed by Dave Prowse. That might still be out there somewhere. At the time, I was left in charge of the Star Wars and Star Trek CCGs in the shop I worked at, as I was the resident addict. I basically set the prices for those cards for the entire south-west of the UK back in the day as I had it all sussed out and other stores selling singles copied my lead. Kind of a crappy period in my life for a bunch of reasons, but through the softened veil of hindsight there were certainly some nice memories in there and this video was a long warm bath of long-overdue satisfaction with this game. There was an internet presence for this game, back in the day. Decipher had these really fun visual chatrooms. As in, the entire chatroom screen looked like the Lars' moisture farm, or the cantina, or the trash compacter, and you were represented by a little avatar that existed in these rooms and could move between them. Chatting would make the words come up like a speech bubble. Some of us, starved of opponents, would go there to chat about Star Wars in these weird, themed visual chatrooms, and twice I got to play the game against a stranger somewhere else on the internet there. You had to have access to all the cards (and I had a full set) so you could lay out the entire cards for both players. One of the two people I was playing was clearly cheating, just pulling the exact card they needed each time. Which made me sad, because c'mon dude I don't mind losing I just want to play the game and have fun along the way. I'm so glad to see there are videos like this to show a full game played through, and I will be devouring the other SW CCG streams I see you have. Waited 25 years to see a full game laid out like this. Do please play 1st edition Star Trek CCG too, the 2nd edition was entirely different in feel. Just watched that new video of yours on it. The 1st edition was to Star Trek, what this was to Star Wars. A classic Federation vs Klingons matchup would be marvellous.

please MORE SWCCG...do Cloud City next please..thanks for your effort!

Great video, guys! It was nice to see these decks duke it out. Would love to see the same thing with Hoth decks and Endor/Death Star II decks, more preconstructed than the box cracking versions.

Zach, Get a haircut. Go back and look at the Learning Netrunner Revised Core Box videos. You look like a young lion. With long hair, you look like a drummer of an off-beat, Christian alternative band that shows up to events in a 1980's Chevy van.

Hmmm... Tastes like nostalgia... It really was a game where you need to know all the cards in your deck. I'd love it if you played some more of Star Wars CCG... I had an imperial hoth deck but never had the cards needed to make it work. Star Trek CCG would also be cool to watch.

20 seconds into the video and all I can think about is having this game 20 years ago and not knowing how to play. I wish I had it today but I'm super stoked to watch this now!!!

Thank you for this stream. As with many others, Star Wars was the next game me and my little crew at Dragon's Den, in Yonkers, N.Y. devoured. We played a metric shite-ton of this. Only Magic saw more playtime (with some others meeting varied levels of success, such as Ultimate Combat, Star Trek, Blood Wars, Vampire, Wyvern, Shadowfist etc. etc. etc.) I vividly recall selling a pretty decent Magic deck of 60 cards to store for enough credit to pick up a booster box AND a single of Vader. Man, we crushed this game. Awesome job, guys!

The 5 dislikes on this video are the same people that dislike cute puppy videos.

The guy on the right looks like sir Francis bacon. Also thanks for showing this game, I had bought a box of these cards as a kid, tried to read the rule book, then just sat in my room and cried.

This is fascinating seeing it actually played. I got the intro set as a 10 year old and my brain almost melted from trying to figure out the rules.

I cut my gaming teeth on SWCCG. It will always have a special place in my heart.

Good Attack Run Deck: Use Heading For the Medical Frigate to pull Strike Planning as a starting effect. Strike Planning pulls Mon Mothma. Mon Mothma pulls Rebel Techs. Techs cumulatively add 1 to Attack Run (2 if Major Palo Torshen in war room). Use Massassi Base ops to pull Yavin 4: Massassi Headquaters and Yavin 4: Briefing Room. Control Headquarters to add 2 to Attack Run, control briefing room with a leader to add another. Finally, get Red 5 in the Trench and Colonel Feyn Gospic on Yavin 4 to add 2 more. +11 to Attack Run before destinies drawn, pilot's ability, and Yavin 4 sites are added......."simple", lol.

@1:11:20 🤣! By the end, I got lost in the Math lesson, but SUPER fun thematically. EDIT: I agree with the lose of surprise in Card Games nowadays. In Magic the Gathering, the new sets and the meta are solved on the Digital Client (Arena) with the "Early Access" events for Content Creators (most know what they are doing). This means that cards aren't even available and people already have an idea of what to play and what is overpowered! There was an occasion where everybody knew a specific card was going to be banned, because it was too much.. Wizards didn't test it or didn't care, or such cards are now part of their strategy. The Banning came, but some time later.. as banning a card that isn't out is not a good look. Question is.. can this be solved? How do you re-introduce "unseen cards" in the Internet era? Units that are X cards from hand or status and effects that are gained before it hits the table (a Frankenstein Monster)? Digital-only Card Games where Cards are made on the fly, losing the magic of tabletop? Would make for a fun Podcast topic.. and maybe someone will solve it in the comments.

Gents, I am thrilled that you did this on stream. So many great memories of playing this thing back in the late 90s! I have to say, though, the amount of rules violations makes watching this absolutely maddening!

This game had the same impact on me when it came out. I think I was nine or ten when i started playing and my friends and I did not understand the rules very well. We played a basic version of the game where we deployed characters, vehicles and ships and just battled without using attrition. We didn’t understand keywords or special rules at all. But saying all that, those times were some of my best childhood memories with my friends and made me into a lifelong Star Wars fan.

This game was awesome..So many Easter Eggs on the cards (in the borders and pictures!)

The rules of Star Wars CCG precisely quantify the Natural Laws that govern the Star Wars Universe.

If you are interested in the Star Trek CCG by Decipher, it is still being produced by a fan organization called The Continuing Committee at www.trekcc.org. All of the cards are printable so you don't have to buy any physical cards unless you want to.

Next time you should play the Lord of the Rings TCG by Decipher.

RU-vid is like watch this and I'm like, oh neat an old upload, then I saw it was 3 hours ago and I now pledge myself to your teachings! I've played this game since 1995/1996!

This is going to be fun

Was fun watching parts on stream, now finally watching the whole video. Looking at the numbers, you know this needs more coverage right? ;)

I'm so glad to see all the interest this video has generated! I have made a video with 2 beginner balanced Battle of Hoth decks. Enjoy and provide feedback please! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-usToj0lOqzw.html

Love how 9 months later it's so complicated Stephen and Zach had to ask chat for help

True story: I still have my Star Wars CCG collection.

Amazing! I hope you reissue this great game, sales assured. the best game yet of star wars!!👏🏻👏🏻

Love the video guys. One rules snafu I didn't see corrected was at the 1:27:50 mark when the Dark Side player plays Twilek Adviser to play any Effect from the Reserve Deck. Imperial Command is an Interrupt, not and Effect. Also, be careful moving that Death Star before you put the Superlaser on it. :)

My favourite video from you guys in a while :) It's insane that the narrative of this game has the same quality of rewatchable feeling as an actual Star Wars film. RU-vid needs more matches to watch. Would love to see you play decks with cards made by the community in the future, too!

I love this game. The rules are insane sometimes.

Still have my x2 decks Hoth Rebel base and Hunt down destroy the Jedi I have all my cards and I still just cant seem to part with them, I played competitively and found the game mechanic far more enjoyable then even mtg.

That "flavor text" matters to the game. The little box under a character's name might have a key word like "leader" or "spy", and that impacts the game. When you play this game a lot you learn to read the WHOLE card very carefully.

I remember getting into the most heated arguments about the rules to this game! My brother and I would play this and ALWAYS play the same sides. Through random boosters, one side became so much more powerful than the other and we'd always start the game having fun before ending the game cursing the other's existence. Still have all of the cards though :-)

Most underrated TCG. The economic and random generation systems needs to be added in other games.

This was my first competitive game. Last year I taught my wife to play. After the first game she realized that most the game text made thematic sense and thus easier to grok. SWCCG is the simplest complex game ever.

What?! This was posted this week?! I was here looking at Arkham Horror and Marvel Champions and stumbled across the game that started this whole crazy obsession! Great to see this again. Tempted to dig my cards out.

I recently had to put all my cards in a skip because a burst water pipe wreaked them. I was heart broken even though I haven't played it in over 15 years. 😢

I think something that gets often overlooked about the popularity of Star Wars CCG is that if you were a kid that was interested in Magic: The Gathering, but had parents that were kinda religious, you got this. I grew up in the South and that was the way like 75% of players at tournaments got into the game. Parents saw it as the exact same thing as Magic, but without all the bits they considered crossing into occult territory.

Watched up until the first trench run, remainder on the to watch list. This is the X-wing/Armada/Legion crossover game I'd like to see. Never played this originally, I was always a miniatures gamer/wargames boardgame player until I got into LoTR LCG. Give me a streamlined version, keeping the high level mechanics, but cleaning up card text and I'd go for it. I really like the pilot/ship combo as a mechanic and the semi Conquest planet system. So fighters need pilots, ships need Admirals and ground troops need generals, give me a game with that, that lasts as long as one of the movies and they've sold me a copy. I know they had Rebellion, but that game never appealed to me. Now let FFG raid the 3 mentioned game for assets and artwork. :-)

I still have all my cards.

The Activate/Draw and recycle mechanic is my favorite *ever*. It's so naturalistic and it evens up the Card Draw advantage a player can have that tend to dominate games like these.

Thanks for the nostalgia. It was definitely easier learning the game as each new set came out with new features. Played and loved Star Trek and Star Wars from Decipher. Still have both collections. I remember being so disappointed when the LOTR card game didn’t follow the same mechanic, with the streamlining a relaunch could have provided.

I miss this game so much. I still have most of my cards but have been slowly selling off some of my more expensive singles to fund other hobbies since the game has pretty much died in my area.

This is like the real life version of YuGiOh the show, where you could do things like partially damage a floating castle to get it to crush your enemy’s other creatures.

Still love this game, even though I had to sell all my cards because bills. Still love enough to see the errors too! -Biggs didn’t have an astromech, so he couldn’t move to the Death Star -Light Side had more power at that Death Star fight because of Special Mods, and I think they also had another destiny draw Also, you think that’s a math equation? Go check out the Brainiac card. It literally has four variables and a square root in it!

Man..was just talking about this game and found your channel, love this video! Though it did give me some horror flashbacks arguing about what attrition meant, that intro set rulebook was not very good :P

This is the only ccg I would play again.

WOOOOOW! Game of my childhood! The best I've ever played!

Loved this game. I used every penny i could get to buy more cards.

Great video! Can we get some deck lists?

OMG the way Steven is slamming those cards, bending them, shuffling, etc. is driving me nuts lol. Maybe Zach doesn't care.

One of the best thing about the card images is they displayed shots of the movies you didn't normally focus on while watching them. Add to that the flavor text, or even just finding out the names and details of characters and objects, as well as expanded universe tie-ins, all this really enriches the Star Wars universe.

Just discovered this game. Feel like they do a tremendous job breaking it down and explaining it step by step but I still have no idea what's going on lmao. What a unique game, not sure I've ever seen a system like it. It still has a pretty active online community of hella cool people, looking fwd to giving the game a go.

This video was great!! But I have to admit I got a silly amount of anxiety when the used pile was all turned face up. 😂

This game can work wonderfully in a thematic way but, unlike most CCGs, it requires both players to agree on a good match-up. A deck with the One in a Million Objective card obviously requires your opponent to be playing a Death Star deck. There is also a dark side deck where you start with Emperor Palpatine, you make your opponent start with a Luke and then Luke gets captured instead of being forfeit in battles and you actually need to move the captured Luke to Palpatine's room and there you do a like long destiny bidding (may take some turns but accumulate) that eventually makes Luke fall the dark side and that alone wins the game. So yeah, you need to play against someone using Luke or else the Objective does nothing. There is even a Death Star deck that is built around building the death star cannon and blowing up planets that (because of the objective card) causes big force losses. It would be a great match-up against that Death Star Run deck. Thank you so much for broadcasting that game, it was a nice throw back at good times! Cheers!

I normally don't like CCGs, but if someone came out with a streamlined version of this game I would play it in a heartbeat. They really just need to add more keywords to cut down on the mountain of text on cards and I think it would be good to go.

I played this game when I was 15/16 and I don’t remember why I stopped, but I was probably getting into other teen related things. It was cool cracking open up a hoth box with my little brother. dagobah was super disappointing.

Anyone wants to buy a collection with many UR, epp, ep1, complete sets of premiere, anh, hoth, dag, cc?

I assume the "181" in "DS 181-3" refers to the Imperial 181st TIE Fighter wing, commanded by Soontir Fel.

You could always pay three to force drain at Tatooine. You never did. You don’t have to control both a battleground system and battleground site. If you do control you don’t have to pay the three. Missed a lot of force loss not paying to drain.

Had a lot of these cards back in the day but never played it. Always seemed to complicated for my 10 yr old brain.

In the Leia vs Vader battle, didn't they really have immunity to attrition so small?

I played the hell out of this game but my last memory of it is not very pleasant. My friend and I bought a Deathstar II booster box and split the packs. No Luke, no Vader, no Executor, no Home One.

I’m glad to have seen this game in action! I bought some of the cards back in middle school, but I only had some boosters, so I could never actually figure out how the game worked.

I would love to see you play Hoth decks! Please?

1:11:15 After Executor deploys and is about to wreck stuff... "Hey hold on" thank for the laugh guys

I'd love you all to give the Babylon 5 Card game a shot. It's wonderfully flavorful, and super political.

I think I got it the 90 ccgs the intent was to confuse the player into wanting more. So 20% of the mechanics make perfect sense and 80%. Don't lol

This was my main game (instead of M:TG) and I love it. One thing we don't really see here is how top-tier players counted cards in their deck. They would memorize the position of revealed cards that went back into the used pile and knew exactly when the draw what they wanted and when to draw the destiny they wanted. It was a devastating skill to develop. Forcing a player to shuffle their deck helped, but was actually less effective as the game wore on. The epitome of player skill in action, at the time.

FYI this game is still played and sets are still released Check out the swccg players committee You can even play online for free

Yavin lV the planet is a system, not a sector. Sectors are generally asteroid fields or clouds Oh you finally caught that

I have around 3000 cards. My problem is nobody I know plays.

Thanks for this great playthrough video! Can you point me towards a list of all cards that were deployed at the start?

I collected this game from the time Premiere released up until the Tatooine expansion. During all those years I probably actually played a total of 5 games at most just because the rules weren't something a middle school kid could keep up with through the ever changing expansions. I always had trouble trying to explain them and the games took too long to really get through during lunch at school. Still, I collected about 4 thick binders worth of cards just because I loved Star Wars and all the pictures, info, and little tidbits on them.

Oh great, now I gotta dig out my collection and play the game again!

Can you add the deck lists to the summary please?

50:50 "I forgot a lot of that move" when reminiscing about force awakens!

Love this game, thanks for let me see this game again, also how to come back to play?

2:16:25 I wouldn't call it a miss. It just impacted on the surface.

One quick rules question, guys. Where is the rule that allows you to deploy pilots from Reserve with a starship?? I don't remember that rule, and I looked through my rulebook and never found it. Thanks in advance!

Would it be better to use Leia W/ blaster rifle as opposed to Leia, Rebel Princess?

Elyhek looks like an unamused Paul McCartney

The attack run card is straight-up icy cauldron !!!

More of this Game!!!!!!!

Would you mind posting your DS/LS decklists? I'd like to try taking these for a spin on GEMP :)

This game was so much more fun before these cards that let you start with half your deck on the table. Got way too complicated to follow and figure out.

Leia can't cancel drains at the Yavin lV system, that's not a site

First, thanks for making me feel super old. I was in college when this came out in 1995 and bit down HARD when it released and throughout its life...though I missed out on the very last set...can't remember what it was called, but heavily prequel themed. Second, while Decipher Star Wars was indeed an involved game, this video is actually starting high in the learning curve of the game. When the game came out there weren't any objectives or starting effect cards. So a big part of the early confusion and reading in this video would not have happened until much later into the expansion life of the game. I'm definitely VERY much a theme player in games and love the ability to build decks that interact more with each other. I still have BOXES and BINDERS of Decipher Star Wars cards as well as a big collection of the Decipher Wars game. It should be noted that Wars has an amazing setting and backstory that I wish could have been delved into more. We did get a couple of short story bock collections and the cards are rife with flavor. Actually, when I first heard about the basics of "The Expanse" tv series, I was able to make many comparisons to the Wars setting. The main, non-alien factions in Wars are Earthers (united Earth government), Gongen (independent Mars colony), and Mavericks (rogues and "belters" if you will, with main bases in the asteroid belt). Anyway, some great settings.

Weird CCG trivia: In the surrealist conspiracy CCG On the Edge there was a card that let you play any kind of card with some rules that translated the numbers on that card into the numbers that were useful in On the Edge, going from top to bottom. Because unlike most card games the Star Wars CCG has the copyright date next to the image instead of at the bottom of the card, if you picked the right card you could get something into play that had attack and defense values of 1995 or so where they normally topped out at around 10. But then On the Edge also had the card Rain of Walrus that gave each card in the game a 50-50 chance of being discarded so even if you managed to get this ridiculously overpowered thing into play that would trample everything it came up against it could still get knocked out by having a walrus fall on it.

Disney needs to sanction the reprints of these cards!!!

I'm here because you mentioned it on your Marvel Monday from 6/1. I came up with Star Wars CCG from 95 till it's death, and still love it to death! The game is still alive too, with a players committee that still makes vcards and has championships. would love more of these videos!

Sorry I keep commenting on this but I made it to the end of the video. You all brought up an interesting point about the game that to me highlights one of the biggest flaws of the game. If you wanted to play a game that included something, like blowing up the Death Star, you had to include it in your deck. Which thematically, it makes little sense to have the Death Star in a Light Side deck. Also, games could be very cut throat but they could also get very asymmetrical. It was not uncommon to play a game in which players didn't really have a way to interact with their opponent in a meaningful way. So the game was just two people kind of doing their own thing with very little interaction.

Me and my friend learn this game when we were 10 and 11 in 1996 in Poland. This game was never translated to Polish, and there was no internet back then (in my town). So if two kids from poland were able to learn all the rules You guys have no excuse ;)

Nice, SYCFA vs MBO, very classical! I really love SWCCG, best Card game ever!

He actually blew up the Death Star on the "one in a million" death run... I love games where you can get alternate winning conditions and they are not an easy thing to do. And it's not like this was the only thing he has to do. Making his opponent lose 24 force total had to be added with other godo decisions that made him drain more force (or win battles) until that point. Cool game ^_^

Zach used Twi’lek Advisor to get an interrupt out of his reserve deck when you are only allowed to get an effect.

About not being able to watch decklists online. There was DeckTech (.net?) though. Spent HOURS on that website :D