Party Like It’s 1996

Glory Days time, here. Back in the day, the mid-90’s day, my second job was at a comic book store. I had learned to read from Donald Duck comics digests, and when Star Wars came out (a life-altering event, for me), Marvel Comics started a Star Wars comic book. That introduced me to the rest of the Marvel Universe, and I was hooked. As an adult, working part time in the comic store was a great way to feed my habit.

A lot was going on in the comics and related fandom worlds at the time. A new thing called Magic, a game where you collected trading cards as playing pieces, was taking over the geek imagination. Although it seemed fascinating, there just wasn’t anything about it that drew me in enough to make the considerable investment in Magic cards.

Then came the Star Wars Collectible/Customizable Card Game.

For months, all my part time earnings went into packs and boxes of Star Wars cards. We played at the store, we played at each other’s houses… we played for hours at the local pizza place on Tuesday nights (thanks, Bertolo!). We played tournaments on Saturdays and at conventions.

What with being able to collect so many cards, and being in the center of a varied group of players, I got pretty good at the game. So good, in fact, I managed to win the tournament at Dragon*Con in 1996, the first year it was held. I still have the unopened box of Premiere I got for a prize.

But that wasn’t the best part of it. Dragon*Con was the first qualifier for the Star Wars CCG championship. Decipher, the company that created the game, flew me and 39 other qualifier winners from literally around the world to Vail, Colorado, where we holed up for the weekend and played cards. I ended up in the middle of the pack (I know it was two away from right at the middle, I was either 18th or 22nd, it’s lost in the fog of time, now), but the experience was amazing.

Decipher released more card sets, I kept playing. Somewhere along the line, Decipher sold out to Wizards of the Coast, the Magic makers. Between fewer players keeping up with the ever-expanding game and other happenings in my own life, I started playing less and less. Once the wife then kids arrived, the Star Wars cards were in boxes in the closet.

Not entirely unexpectedly, my own kids turned into Star Wars fans. When they were young, we watched the movies together, as they got older, we played the video games together.

One day, it became time to play Star Wars cards together.

So my kids got me to dig out my old cards and refresh my memory of Activate, Control, Deploy, Battle, Move, Draw. We had fun.

The limitation was built decks. I still had six or seven decks built from the day, and that’s what the kids and I have used. There’s just a huge amount of cards and playing styles, and with the kids just learning as they go, deck-building isn’t something they’ve shown an interest in, at least yet. To try and scratch that itch, I went back to some of my old comic haunts to see if there were any players left.

Not really, no. The market had moved on, and if you told people you were playing the Star Wars game now, it means something completely different. So online I went.

First stop was the Star Wars CCG Players Committee at https://www.starwarsccg.org, and pay dirt right away: there’s an Online Play link right in the middle of the page. That link led me to the GEMP website at http://tlbiesterfeld.servegame.com/gemp-swccg/, where you can build decks and even play online against folks around the world.

I haven’t even fully explored the GEMP site yet, much less started using all the tools. But this is the kind of thing the internet was literally built for: making the tedium of chasing 120 playing cards around a table into a click-and-drag operation, and bringing together people from far away over the same interests.

May the Force be with you.