Catching up on Mark Rosewater's "Drive to Work", and listened to the podcast regarding Wizard's ill-fated Star Wars CCG. On the plus side, it's really fascinating learning how they ended up making the design decisions they chose (dice, battlefields, etc) and how working with Lucasarts was. Great insights into design decisions and worth listening for that.
However, I have to say as someone who was active in the industry at the time, he skips out on a lot of the drama and unpleasantness of that era. In the podcast, he says that "Hasbro had the rights for the toys, so asked us to make a card game". Which is flatly untrue - Decipher already had the rights at the time for the card game, which they had been making for years. At the time Decipher's Star Wars game was second place to MTG in the adult CCG market. Wizards went to Lucasarts and promised them far higher returns if they gave them the contract, and so Lucasarts killed Decipher's game and handed the rights to Wizards. Copies of the presentation they gave were available on the web at the time, so it's hardly a big secret.
Secondly, he doesn't cover what a catastrophic failure the game was. The inclusion of dice as a mechanic didn't work at all, the print quality of the cards was noticeably worse than Decipher's, and it was a huge loss leader for them that ended up being killed three years after launch even despite the fact it was launching in the middle of the massive hype of the prequel films.
Thirdly, it's interesting hear him talk about "solved problems" as if they invented the solution. E.g. Unique characters - they wanted people to be able to use the big characters from the show, but couldn't have them all at mythic rare quality, so they came up with the idea of having different versions of the character at different rarities and letting you use extra copies of the character as a boost. Which sounds great, only other cards games had been using that same mechanic for years by this point.
It's a really interesting cast, and would definitely recommend listening to it, just be aware it's a very, very one sided view (even more so than usual from Mark).
