Babylon 5 CCG

published in Sumo 44, 1998

Just by way of background, I am a long-time boardgamer (1830, Republic of Rome, El Grande - you know the type) who, after a year or two of scoffing at CCGs, overcame the initial trepidation to get hooked on Middle Earth. While I have occasionally enjoyed Magic and L5R in a passing kind of a way, ICE's use of a big card set to convey the flavor, feel, and infinite possibilities of a fantasy environment while producing a CCG that is, at its core, a fine game that could be played with a limited card set really won me over. I really feel that CCGs are ideally suited to the concept of doing role-playing style interaction with fantasy environments. Since that time I have been eagerly experimenting with other CCGs in the hopes of finding other games that captured that spirit - with mixed results. Star Wars and Dune, perhaps the two most popular science fiction universes that come to mind, suffered severely in their CCG manifestations though the game mechanics were basically sound. Star Trek: TNG implemented it's universe in a realistic-feeling manner but failed to deliver as an actual game. All of these have had problems varying from mild to severe with distribution; in some, all the familiar (and very powerful) characters are rare while no-name fillers nobody has head of are common; in others, there are rare power-cards which big-spending players can use to break the game. While L5R is reputed to be a solid game, I must say I had a hard time stomaching it's obvious similarity to Magic and was daunted by the expense of following a story told through something like 5 expansions. In my opinion, Middle Earth still stands as the only CCG to truly deliver on the genre's potential to deliver a really diverse fantasy environment in a game format, and do so in a way no traditional game format can hope to match.

And so we come, in a roundabout way, to the newest attempt to bring epic fantasy to the gaming table - the Babylon 5 CCG. While I think the B5 CCG is not going to supplant MECCG as the CCG of choice in my circles, from my still-limited exposure it is certainly a worthy game. It is true to it's heritage, attractive, fun to play, and - unusual for a CCG these days - original. As an added bonus, it is reasonably playable from a single starter and those same starters will give you a solid core of cards to build decks around and most all of the familiar names and places that make the TV show so much fun to watch. Playing Earth, you can be using Sinclair, Ivonova, Franklin, Garibaldi, Lyta, and most of rest of the crowd (sans Bester and Marcus, sadly - theyre rare) right out of the box.

Each player takes the part of one of the 4 ambassadors of the younger races on B5 - Delenn, G'Kar, Mollari, and (since were at the beginning of the first season here) Sinclair (again, Sheridan is available to replace him during the game, but he is also rare). Each ambassador begins with a pool of 4 influence; influence is what you use to perform a lot of game functions. You can increase your influence by winning conflicts of various types. At the beginning of every turn, each player will have a chance to initiate a single conflict (although event cards may allow more or less than one) which may be with another specific player, between two specific players, amongst all the players, or several other minor variations. Winning these conflicts may, among a wide range of other effects, increase your influence. Normally, you may win the game with a standard victory by having 20+ power with more than any other player. Influence translates directly into power, and certain Agendas (more on these later) allow you to translate other things into power. For example, the Narn agenda Revenge allows them to score the current Narn-Centauri tension level as power. Since this starts at 4 and could be as much as 5, this is a good chunk of power - a quarter of your requirement. Additionally, some game conditions (such as the onset of the Shadow War) will prevent a standard victory and a player or players will have to win a major victory, which can only be achieved through fulfilling the requirements of a Major Agenda or having 10(!) more power than and other player - a Herculean task to be sure. Since running out of cards in this game is fatal fairly rapidly, there is a very real time restriction, and winning a major victory is quite a task.

The most significant contributors to victory are each factions agendas. Each faction can have only one agenda in play at a time, and they tend to fall into a number of categories. Agendas can provide bonuses to your Ambassador's skill levels, making him more effective at winning conflicts; they can allow you to initiate conflicts by applying influence (normally conflicts may only be initiated by playing an appropriate card); or they may allow you to translate some faction resource (such as fleets, characters, and so on) or tension level into game-winning power. Agendas can be discarded and replaced, so just as important as the agenda your opponent has in play is the hidden agenda he may be holding in his hand, which can create a sudden increase in power. Agendas can also be Major agendas, which can allow you to win the game if you meet their conditions.

After conflicts are played, the game is played in rounds, with each player having the opportunity to take one single action in turn until all players pass. You will apply your influence (which is renewed to its current level each turn) to perform many of these actions - bringing new characters and units (fleets, groups, outposts, and planets) into your faction, playing various enhancements on units, supporting conflicts, healing damaged characters, repairing damaged units, and drawing cards, as well as performing various actions given by card effects. There are two additional actions worthy of special note: bringing characters into your inner circle and building up your influence. As long as you have less than 10 total influence, you may apply three of them to gain one more. This is an easy and convenient way to build up your faction, and prevents any faction from being too badly hosed, as they can easily enter rebuild mode for a turn or two. Your faction's inner circle is your core personnel. All units and characters (except your starting ambassador) must initially be deployed as supporting characters, but characters may be promoted to the inner circle by paying their deployment cost again, plus one for every current member of the inner circle. Many actions (such as bringing in additional characters and units, building influence, and bringing in new Agendas) require you to use one of your inner circle characters, so increasing the size of your inner circle, while expensive, can dramatically increase your flexibility. Additionally, inner circle characters are far less susceptible to elimination than the supporting cast, who once they stick their necks out are shockingly vulnerable to being knocked off.

Conflict resolution is pretty simple, and happens after everyone has passed during the action round. Each person or fleet in the game is rated in 4 ability areas - Intrigue, Diplomacy, Psi, and Leadership (for characters) or Military (for units like fleets or outposts). Characters may rotate (yet another copyright-skirting synonym for tap) as an action to either support or oppose conflicts; each conflict will explicitly state which ability it requires. At the end of the turn, the total abilities supporting the conflict are compared with those opposing it, and determine whether the conflict is won or lost (or in multi-way conflicts, the total for each side is summed up and who won and who lost and to what degree determined). The text of the conflict card is then implemented; while a conflict may be technically won, many conflicts require a certain margin of victory to gain their full benefits.

This is where another new concept kicks in - aftermath cards. Any participant in a conflict is subject to the play of aftermath cards. Again, these cards state exactly who they can be played on - a participant in a losing military conflict, for example. These provide a whole range of effects for both the winners and losers, including increased abilities, severe penalties, and marks. Each character in the game can have some set of the various marks: destiny, strife, Shadow, and Vorlon - the last two of which are mutually exclusive. Except for Strife, which makes combat more deadly, none of these marks have direct game effects, but can affect and be affected by other cards. All aftermath cards are free to play if their playabilty conditions have been met, so they provide a very important and valuable way to strengthen you faction (or weaken your opponents) that does not cost influence.

The final important thing to note is the difference between conflict and combat. Conflicts, as described above, do not actually invoke combat directly. If all sides decided to merely support the conflict - even a military conflict - the results will be determined by the conflict card itself, as well as any played aftermath cards. However, if you would normally be eligible to support or oppose a conflict, you may instead attack one of the current participants (a character or fleet who has rotated to support it). The combat is then resolved by having both participants simultaneously apply their appropriate skill (which is defined to be the skill the target used to support the conflict, even if that is not the skill the conflict requires) as damage to each other, increased by two if they bear a mark of strife. Each point of damage is marked and reduces all of the character's skills by one. When a character or unit has no skill left, he or she is eliminated if a supporting character or unit, or disabled and turned upside down if an inner circle character. Disabled characters can be healed by rotating for an action.

Some other interesting things of note:

- Like L5R, Dune, and a couple others, card play in B5 is discrete, that is to say, each player in turn has a chance to take an action or play an event card during his or her turn. There are no timing issues and none of those horrendously anti-intuitive stacks or queues of events. However, unlike Dune, there is no combat sequence; there is just everyone taking an action phase in turn. Additionally, playing an event card is an action - so you can play your Decisive Tactics in your turn to increase a character's Leadership rating, but since that's an action, you have to wait until your next turn to actually launch attack. This means that both players can always exactly calculate how much damage any potential attack will do at that particular instant - there is no chance to modify an attack for either the attacker or defender once declared. On the plus side, there are a lot of good event cards that make conflict interesting, allowing you to enhance abilities, redirect your resources at the last minute, and concentrate or disperse your forces. This is good, and nicely sidesteps Dune's quagmire of reams of specific cards that perform identical functions but only for one each of the 4 different rite types. It is also much easier in B5 to commute the skills you have to different types of conflicts. For example, the Level the Playing Field card, which everyone gets 3 of in every starter, allows your characters to apply their best skill to a conflict rather than the one required. So, although superficially similar, the conflict/combat system is a lot more flexible than Dune's, and for me works much better - the only glitch being the instantaneous nature of damage-dealing and the predictable nature of the outcome. I have mixed feelings on the combat resolution. On the one hand, so much can happen during an action round, and people are usually sitting on so many cards, that once a battle starts it is often very hard to predict how it will turn out. On the other hand, the predictable nature of the individual combat events strikes me as not quite right. Many CCGs use this deterministic method of calculating damage; however, I have played a steady diet of wargames for many years, where a basic axiom is that once a battle starts, the outcome is anything but completely predictable. Indeed, in grand strategic games like Empires in Arms, battle is always a risky proposition because of its random nature. Perhaps here the CCG simply mirrors the show, in which battles are often fought but never dwelled upon in any great detail. Nevertheless, I find this method of dishing out damage unsatisfying and somehow it disturbs me that a random element is absent from combat in many CCGs - and combat becomes an exercise in the stronger player grinding out the weaker player. Especially in diplomatic games like B5, which emphasize diplomacy and intrigue over combat, battle really needs to have a bit of random bite so players with an edge cannot enter direct combat with such confidence.

- Players get to select their initial 4-card hand, which must include their ambassador. This is very important, as it allows you a little more flexibility to plan rather than being at the whim of your deck distribution. 3 cards isn't a great deal, but it is a lot more than you usually get and lets you get started with a key character or agenda and a combination-card. The choice of which 4 cards to begin with is a critical strategy point, and a very good thing. There are a lot of Agendas which a variety of decks can be built around, and the starting hand really helps to let you develop plans.

- At the end of the turn, you get a default draw of one card, and can apply additional influence to draw more. This is an interesting compromise between Magic's one-card draw, in which the efficiency of individual cards is paramount, and the MECCG's hand-filling mechanic, which tends to lean towards more balanced spectrum of cards. Where B5 deck construction will land on this scale I cannot yet tell, but the flexibility of being able to draw lots of cards if you can't use your current ones is certainly a good thing. Additionally, players are never forced to discard and there is no hand size limit, so players are often sitting on a lot of cards.

- The tension levels between all the various races is monitored through the game; these tensions will rise and fall as the result of conflicts and events. When the tensions max out at 5, the races can go to war and fleets can start randomly whacking each other regardless of the availability of conflicts or a good reason. Each race must also track their own internal unrest, which can be exploited by fairly nasty event cards if it gets high enough. Additionally, the influence of Babylon 5 is tracked, and if it ever hits 20 with one player ahead in influence and normally able to claim victory (i.e., not restricted to having to win a major victory), that player wins. Likewise, the influence of the Shadows and the Vorlons are also tracked, and once they get high enough the Shadow War begins and life generally gets tough on our heroes - to win you must win a major victory. Each of these three influence levels can be manipulated and used by the players - for example, a player courting the Shadows can use the influence advantage the Shadows have over the Vorlons as strength to support conflicts or whack their neighbors outposts. Finally, Babylon 5s influence is also tracked, and if it ever gets to 20, peace is considered to break out and whoever is ahead in power wins. Babylon 5s influence can be used to support conflicts which shut down military conflicts and lower tensions.

- Finally, each player is given one vote on the Babylon 5 council. There are a number of events which call for a B5 vote, and if passed, will have various effects such as censuring a players fleets or characters or boosting a players influence. This is not very common, but it does add an interesting political aspect. I have yet to see anybody really exploit this aspect of the game, but I have no doubt it will be popular in some circles.

What's good: The characters, agendas, conflicts, aftermaths, and tension and influence levels all work together to provide a good simulation of the B5 universe in a way we havent seen before. With 4 players, the interactions of different agendas (stereotypically, the Centauri courting the Shadows, the Narn pursuing an aggressive military strategy, and the Earth player trying to get everyone to stop shooting each other while everyone tries to figure out what the heck the Minbari are doing) can be quite interesting, to say the least. While each player will usually have one agenda in play early to boost their capabilities, it is unlikely to be their true agenda, which will be revealed only later. The art, being all stills from the TV show, provides a very good playing surface (although some of the stills aren't great - I was disappointed by the Lyta Alexander card). The interaction of the players with the Shadows and the Vorlons is well done, with characters able to sell their souls and risk the Shadow war for a taste of some serious power. In the 4-player format, the diplomacy and intrigue is very compelling if you go for that sort of thing - competing with the Shadows, Vorlons, and Babylon 5 has shades of Republic of Rome. The aftermath cards are a very nice rule, and are a key component to playing the game well. It is surprising to me that so many CCGs - virtually every one except Middle Earth - require paying a cost in some key basic key resource, be it Mana, Gold, Solari, Force, or Conspiracy Points to deploy anything that isn't free. B5 still has this heritage, but the combination of the Aftermath cards, a lot of free events, and the practical advantages of winning many conflicts free it from being a slave to influence. Which is good.

Another area in which B5 scores is in the way it distinguishes the various conflict options in a way that feels right and yet is fairly transparent. Diplomacy is the cheapest of the abilities, with virtually everyone having a good chunk of it and characters with hefty diplomacy ratings being fairly available and not that expensive. Intrigue is harder to come by, and more expensive - while the Centauri have a little intrigue on everyone, and all the other races have some specialist with a fairly large intrigue, in general intrigue is expensive and hard to come by. Finally, Military is the most expensive and least versatile of all - fleets are very expensive and have no other abilities. This makes each of the conflict types feel different - Diplomacy is cheap, and the conflicts are easy to come by and an easy way to build up your power, but are hard to win because anyone can oppose them. Intrigue conflicts are easier to win, because if you focus on them other players are unlikely to be able to seriously oppose you, and they tend to have strong, direct game effects - but it is very hard to increase your influence and power with intrigue alone. Military has some powerful conflicts which allow only you and your target to participate, and as such provide perhaps the easiest way to increase your influence and power, but on the other hand is inordinately expensive and susceptible to attrition, since fleets cannot be promoted to the inner circle and thus are always vulnerable to loss. It is also quite vulnerable to being shut down by Babylon 5. Psi is a special case - it is very cheap, but all the characters which have it are also almost completely specialized in it, with only two or three conflicts that allow you to apply your Psi directly - none of which increase your power. On the other hand, they can be very annoying.

What's not quite so good: While I really like the system for playing and resolving conflicts, and the variety and effect of the event cards is also quite good, the combat itself is a bit weak - too deterministic for my tastes. The game may be a bit long - 3 or so hours. This really isnt bad for a political, high-player-interaction game, but it can seem to drag in spots if players are all hanging back to wait for others to initiate conflicts. Because of this, I think some sort of rule where a conflict or conflicts might (or might not) randomly pop up every turn might be a boon.

While there are cards for a big cross-section of the B5 universe, some of the more epic plot points are omitted - the whole bit with Babylon 4 being the most obvious, but there is also no White Star or White Star Fleet (although the White Star and her sisters are featured prominently on several cards). I was personally chagrined that there are no cards for Brother Theo and his monks. Still, the whole plot with the Centauri, the Narn, and the Shadows can be played out in great detail, and anyone who is anyone (and a few people who arent) are in there. I'm sure future expansions will bring us all the missing elements, but I grow a little weary of licensed games with major plot items missing. Im not complaining too much about the coverage - there is a lot in there - but there is some big stuff missing too.

I dont think B5 is really all that hot as a two-player game. With two players it appears to me to be, in the end, a deck-building game; that is to say, once players have a moderate-sized collection of cards, are familiar with the card set, and have played a number of games, the winner is more likely to be the person who built a better deck and whose deck design competes better with the opposing deck, rather than the person who played a better-executed game. The gameplay really starts to shine much more with 3 players, or preferably 4. At this point, conflicts become much more complex, the interactions of multiple decks more interesting and unpredictable, and your deal-making skills become more important. Additionally, multi-player games have an inherent check against the power curve problem, since you can always get together and whack the leader. This makes plotting and scheming more important (and, in my opinion, interesting) since the game is more likely to be won by a well-executed surgical strike rather than by simply grinding your opponents down as is more the case with 2 players. In the end, I think I would have to say that B5 is without question a 4-player game.

The next item is sort of a nit-pick, but a detail nonetheless. While the Human deck is great - we get all the stars of the show that we know and love, pictures of the cool Human starships and whatnot - the other races do somewhat less well. While the aliens often take center stage on the show and we all know Londo, Veer, G'kar, Na'Toth, Delenn, and Lennier, the supporting cast from these races suffers somewhat. While the Centauri court gets some pretty good coverage in the last season and a half, a lot of the other alien characters get a who was that, exactly? kind of reaction - especially if you are less fanatic than I and haven't watched every episode. Perhaps this mainly serves to reinforce the mastery of Tolkien, whose characters are just wonderful. I mean, who would have accepted the MECCG without Galadriel, Elrond, Glorifindel, Balin, or Beorn? Everyone who read these books remembers these characters and has an image of them, yet in reality they are bit players with only very small parts. Galadriel herself is hardly around long enough to hand out a few trinkets, turn down Frodo's offer of the One Ring, and reveal Nenya to him, and yet she and her character is indelibly ingrained in the minds of everyone who has read the book. Babylon 5's supporting cast suffers by comparison, and as a consequence the supporting characters in your faction are not as real as they might be. Still, there are plenty of good characters from the first season. Watching those first season episodes now in America, as they are rerun on cable, and using the characters - all of whom are very well-represented in the game - brings back fond memories.

What might be good or bad: Unlike many CCGs, you can't just bring a deck along and expect to play it - in any given game, only one player can play each of the factions. So, obviously if all three players bring Human decks, the best you can do is three solitaire games. This is more of a problem with limited sets since players may have bought duplicate starters. On the one hand, I am glad Precedence went this way rather than doing something cheesy like allowing 4 G'Kars on the table; you run into the horrendous problems Dune has, with some players at a big disadvantage because they have duplicated most of their neighbors deck while other players have no competition for their resources. On the other hand, to get 4-player games going each player is going to have to buy and build multiple decks to avoid duplication. Not a serious problem in my mind, but something to be aware of when organizing games. There is also no reason that this problem can't be mitigated somewhat (and even played by 5 or 6 players) by allowing players to use other big characters - Lord Refa or General Hague, or even Bester - as faction leaders; in fact, I am told there is such a variant circulating on the net. However, I would have to be convinced that the resource-duplication problem has been solved.

What's bad: well, it's a CCG. The packaging, on the scale of CCG's, is pretty good - the four standard 60-card starter decks each have 50 fixed cards and are quite playable (although not compelling, and they tend to be short on conflicts, which can drag the game out quite a bit as players simply run out of ways to gain influence), boosters have a 1:2:5 distribution for about two bucks retail (US), so the cost-per-rare is not unreasonable and there are fewer reams of useless commons - although it is still somewhat more expensive and wasteful than the recent Middle-Earth expansions. Booster boxes are smaller and less expensive, and should theoretically make the game cheaper if you want to buy more cards. All this is good, and will make the game noticeably cheaper for the player than the games still sticking to the old $3/15-card/1-rare packs - and there was much rejoicing. It still doesn't go far enough, though, and in the end it's only a matter of mitigating the evil. Like every single other CCG, it's still just too expensive. Also, although I have not had any problems personally, there have been a few scattered complaints on the Internet about starters and boosters missing rare cards (Precedence says that these have since been solved). Also on the down side, the card stock isn't very durable. On the plus side, it does appear that B5 has largely avoided the gaping pit of overly powerful rare cards that Dune and Star Wars plunged in to (head-first, I might add). The rare cards seem fairly well-balanced - there seem to be no cards that you must have to be competitive, a la Darth Vader or Commander Data. Anyway, the bottom line is that although the starter-only game gets a bit dull, you can play the game quite happily with a very good selection of cards on two starters ($18) and a box of boosters ($45). Compared to other CCGs this is about as good as it gets. Compared to Euphrat & Tigris, El Grande, or perhaps more appropriately Republic of Rome, it fares less well - even comparing with the extravagant prices we Americans must often pay for European imports. Still, the game does offer interesting play, and the price, while high, is not extravagant as it is in the case of many CCGs.

To summarize, I like a lot of things about the game - the tensions, conflicts, influence of the Shadows, Vorlons, and Babylon 5, and aftermaths are all well done, and help to make you feel like you are playing in the Babylon 5 universe. The game is somewhat complex but not overly so, and the people who would be turned off by the Byzantine (although fascinating) politics of Republic of Rome can be scheming away fairly rapidly on Babylon 5. The card distribution is very good, with lots of interesting effects and a good selection of cards while few are overly powerful. The game itself plays well and quickly, is interactive, and is original. I think if it were not for the cost I would certainly give the game a solid recommendation. As it is, I think B5 fans will enjoy the game a lot; the starter-only game isn't that expensive, is reasonably good (although, as always, the more cards you own the better the game will be), and should give you a good feel for whether you will like the game or not.

2001 Addenda: Now, an Unlimited Edition and many expansions later, we can write a final judgement on the Babylon 5 CCG. I think it's fair to say that none of the CCGs of the late 90s showed as much promise, and then fell as fast and as hard, as Babylon 5 did. Severely degenerate strategies involving Vorlon marks (ones that suppressed all conflicts) were discovered early, and never corrected. Precedence went the Decipher route of simply issuing counter cards after counter cards to supposedly "defuse" overly powerful decks, which never worked. The existance of poorly worded or ambiguous cards was simply denied. To heap insult upon injury, a large number of extremely rare, hard-to-find, and fundamentally game-altering promotional cards were issued (including Lyta Empowered, at right) which were a nightmare for the casual player.

In the end, once a certain threshold was crossed, the game simply became frustrating rather than fun, and the connection to the theme that made the game so promising after early plays was largely lost. Precedence simply showed themselves incapable of managing such a complex game and unsympathetic to the more casual gamer (i.e., those who don't collect sets) upon whom the ultimate success of these things - as games, at least - clearly depends. This, coupled with the fact that the graphics and stills were never even in the same zip code as Decipher and thus limited the game's appeal as a collectible, doomed it either way.

In retrospect, the critical game-related error (ignoring questions of support and players vs. collectors) was probably in the game and card design of the Shadow and Vorlon marks. They simply gave players far too much control over these enigmatic and eldar races, and as such put the players in the positoin of being masters of the universe rather than as the pawns of their machinations. This led irreversably down the road of power-cards and the loss of the subtelty so important to the successful CCG.

The final chapter in the long and rather drawn-out saga of the B5CCG (going through the Premier, Unlimited, Great War, Wheel of Fire, Psi Corp, and Crusade expansions, and possibly more of which I am not aware) was, of course, the loss of Precedence' Babylon 5 license recently in conjuction with The Sci-Fi Channel's attempt to revive the franchise with a new series next year. Despite the potential that the B5CCG first showed, this is a move whose time was too long in coming.