It is a Friday night. A room that proclaims itself to be S.021 sits in near darkness. It contains around thirty people sitting around a large TV screen. The screen is showing a DS9 episode featuring Lwaxanna Troi. As the episode draws to a close a well-dressed guy stands up and announces that everyone is welcome to come to the bar. Various conversations strike up regarding the merits of DS9 versus Next Generation, how crap that last episode was, whether DS9 should recycle next generation characters or not and other such conversations that strike up amongst Star Trek fans. One young man does not follow the others nor join in their banter. He doesn't really watch Star Trek but came to the showing for another reason. He goes up to the well-dressed guy who is called Mark and asks a question. As a result of which he is pointed to another guy who has darker hair and is probably slightly less geeky looking than the majority of people in the room. Their conversation proceeds thusly:
"I hear you play Star Trek TNG CCG here."
"Yes, our first session will be on Wednesday."
"Cool, where and when?"
The dark haired gamer, who is called Rik, proceeds to fill in the young man on a room number and time. The young man goes back to his corridor where he would spend a dull evening in a bar with his corridor mates because, well, that's what you do when you have been at university for only two weeks...
What memories do we hold for Star Trek CCG? For some of us it was a game, just like Chess, Monopoly or Sim City. A release from the stress of real life and something to do with a few mates to fill in a few hours. For others it was more serious, a game to master, a problem to solve, a set of rules within which you must out-think your opponent. An ever-changing challenge that you must stay on top of. For some it was even more serious than that. The Star Trek tournament structure providing an incentive to get better and better at the game. To stay on top of the metagame, to know what everyone else is playing and how to beat it. To care what your rating is and who is above you. To study individual cards looking for every possibility within that card. To want to win it all, your local tournament, your regional tournament and the World Championship itself.
For a select few however, Trek was all of those and at the same time none of those. Trek was a way of life.
Flashback: The M40 Motorway, England- June 1997
It has been a long day. Three players return from a tournament in London in the back of an old yet reliable Ford Fiesta. A young man who only eight months ago had played his first game of Star Trek sits in the back happy having just won his first tournament. Rik, who had introduced him to the game only eight months ago, sits in the front along with the driver, Martin. They had come second and fourth in the tournament respectively and spirits were high. They laugh as Martin, in typical fashion, drives round a roundabout three times before taking a road that was still probably wrong.
Eventually they arrive at their destination and the young man struts back to his halls where his corridor are having a party. Yes, this is a good day alright. What greets him however is not a great party in which he can toast his success but a dreary affair with the same tired old faces that he has not got on with for the last eight months. After making small talk with people he doesn't really like for a couple hours, he decides to retreat to his room. He takes his deck apart and sits down and tries to make a new one. Looking out the window he sees the party going on and realises that he has been living a fallacy for the last eight months. Why does he try to socialise with his corridor when there are other people with whom he gets on far better. With whom he shares an interest and who don't treat him like shit? That was the last time he went out with his corridor. At the end of term a few weeks later he socialised with his sports team and with his new found friends who played Star Trek CCG.
Trek was a way of life. What do we mean exactly when we say that? Not that we lived and breathed the game and spoke of nothing else because this was simply not the case. However, for five years between 1996 and 2001, Star Trek CCG slowly spread its influence until it became, not a game, but the backdrop to life. This sounds terribly sad doesn't it? How can a sad little card game become a backdrop to life? Well it's not so much the card game itself but the community that surrounds it. Sometimes what was important was not who won the tournament but who attended.
Flashback: Warwick University, Coventry, England - November 1998
The sight was not odd in itself. On a Friday night in a student bar, twenty people sitting in a circle playing primitive drinking games, the rules seeming to matter less than getting everyone involved and making everyone drink as much as possible. However this was not a Rugby or Football team, the slight physiques and dark clothing of the participants gave this away. At the head of the table one man declares that someone else is to down their pint much to the amusement of the rest of the table. At this point someone else declares that there should be a musical accompaniment to the occasion. This is certainly not unusual in drinking circles, but the song chosen by the group may have raised some questioning eyebrows amongst the sports teams occupying the bar. To the tune of the Bee Gee's "Tragedy", the drinking circle struck up the following song:
Computer Crash!Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe the group of Star Trek players in England were completely unique. Maybe in any other town I would have been just another geek who played cards and then went home. However first at Warwick and then in London, the people with whom I played Star Trek became not only fellow players and competitors but also good friends. Firstly as a group of people that shared a common interest but later just friends in their own right. I suppose at university it was the kind of thing that happens. You join a society, you socialise with people from the society and go on their socials on a Friday night etc. However many of the Star Trek players I met at Warwick, I am still friends with meaning they have outlasted all of my other university friends. The players I met playing Star Trek in London also became friends of mine, the game that brought us all together soon becoming an insignificant detail. As you have probably worked out, the person in all of the flashbacks has been me.
When it's all gone bent and you can't Q's Tent
Computer Crash!
Your chance is poor with Empok Nor
It's just not fair.
With no way to download you're having a 'mare!
Flashback: Old King's Head, London Bridge, London, England - November 1999
"Pairings for Round 5: Rik Thomas Vs Stuart Marsh. Ian Taylor Vs James Farmer."
I didn't bother listening to the rest of the pairings. Rik (playing my deck) was to take on Stuart, one of the best players in London while I would play James Farmer. I had no idea who James was and I was greeted by an older player, probably around twenty-four wearing a West Ham t-shirt. He instantly came over as a fun guy to be around. One of the first things he told me is that the reason he was wearing a football shirt was that he had told his girlfriend that he was going to a football match because she didn't like him playing CCGs. I chuckled at this and the mood continued to be jovial all the way through the game. As far as I remember we were both playing PNZ and I won 100-0 in the first turn. However as with most things I'll remember this as the day I met James, not the day I won with a PNZ deck.
In fact, it was strange what happened with the Star Trek players in London. What started off as a "tournament scene" soon became a tournament scene where some of the players went for a few drinks afterwards and eventually became a group of close friends who conveniently all played the same card game. That's not to say the game lost all importance. In fact we were all as keen as ever to come up with new decks and test them. It was as if both parts of the tournament scene enhanced each other. The after tournament social events made the tournaments more to look forward to and the tournaments gave a captive audience of people to come along to the bar and meant even total newcomers had a common interest with the more established members of the group and would easily fit in. In fact, new players joined the circle almost exclusively because they turned up to tournaments and got dragged along.
Flashback: Pimlico Station, London, England - February 2000
This was the bit of the tournament I liked best. Forget that I had won the tournament, that was gravy. Here I was in the early hours of the evening on the way to the bar with some friends. Technically he was one of the best players in Britain, I had twice won the UK regional the previous summer and put in reasonable performances at the worlds. However what meant the most was that from this point on in the evening that meant nothing. For the group of half a dozen players heading for Pages Bar, the only prerequisite for joining us is that you wanted to come out and be sociable. Sure we discussed decks and stuff but only because it was a common interest. Here in the cold London evening a bad Dilemma combo was worth as much as a good one and the skills that mattered were not Diplomacy, ENGINEER and Anthropology but conversation, drinking and pulling. Come the end of the evening some people would not even remember who won the tournament, their only link with the day's activity being a rucksack full of cards that they drunkenly carried on their backs.
So why do I talk about memories? What broke the Utopia? Well Star Trek was a journey and like all journeys it had a beginning and an end. I guess from different people's perspective the beginning and end were in different places. For me the beginning was that Friday night at Warwick University in 1996. The end is more difficult to define. If Decipher had suddenly decided to stop the game in the time I was playing I guess this would have been a more defined ending but as it was it was more a fading than an ending. Sometimes I thought the journey was ending when it wasn't and eventually, when the end did come, it was difficult to see.
Flashback: Liverpool Street Station, London, England - March 2001
I stood at Liverpool Street Station, my deck and the spoils from the day's tournament on my back. I gazed idly at the departure board; merely for something to do as I already knew what time the train arrived. The day had been a reasonable one on the whole. I had come second in the tournament and we had a few drinks afterwards, nothing major as I had American Football training the following day. However, I was slightly depressed due to a conversation I had with James ten minutes before when he jumped on his train. We were chatting about the change in prize support from boosters to foils and James had leaked that lots of people were upset on the Ambassadors list and there was a lot of talk of quitting. I hated people quitting the game as every person who left the game meant one less person to keep the wonderful game we had running. When Ambassadors started quitting though I knew that would be big trouble. Every Ambassador who left was potentially an entire region that would stop playing the game if there was nobody else to run tournaments.
My mind wandered to the possible ramifications of the conversation I had just had. I knew it was a long shot but suppose, just suppose that this was the beginning of the end for Star Trek. I start to think of what effect this would have on me. I would lose my biggest hobby sure, that would be huge. But what about on the broader scale? How much of the rest of my life would be affected? Most of my best friends I knew through the game. I spend many of my evenings on line talking to Trek players from elsewhere in the world or writing about the game for Ruling Britannia. I spent Saturdays at tournaments and often nights previously building decks for it. I guess in a strange way Trek also gave me a sense of self-worth. I was generally considered one of the best players in the world. I had never been one of the best in the world at anything before, nor was I likely to be again. I turned my stereo up and tried to think of something else as I got on the train.
So why did Trek die in the end? Well I'm pretty sure it's not because of the prize support changes, at least not entirely. Maybe it was that the rules got so complicated that new players could not get into the game. Maybe it was because too many broken cards like DQSS and Combo Scow were being allowed into the game making it one-dimensional. Maybe it had just had its time as the Star Trek franchise was losing popularity. Maybe Decipher killed it on purpose as it was no longer a good money-maker. Maybe the cancellation of DecipherCon 2001 made too many good players think it was a good time to quit. More likely it was a combination of all of the above plus more. The end for me came over the winter of 2001/2. Interest in London was waning a little anyway with complicated DQSS decks rendering everything else pretty much unplayable. When D-Con was cancelled I realised how much I depended on the World Championships to keep my interest alive. Not only the event itself but the testing beforehand and the aftermath when you come home filled with good ideas. Attending tournaments went from being exciting to being a chore and eventually I couldn't be bothered and neither, to be fair, could anyone else. I last entered a seed phase in anger in about February last year.
However, while the game had died, the spirit lived on. The crowd I used to be friends with in my Trek days still make up a lot of my friends now, minus a few people who have lost touch, plus a few others who have tagged on. It appeared that Trek was not important to our friendship at all or maybe it once was but was easily replaced. The Trek-related jokes we made back in the days are still around now. We still sing the old songs and we still have a "Lower Decks" in the bottom of our fridge. We still sometimes have long chats about tournaments or events passed and discuss old decks and fond memories. In a way we will always be Trek players because Trek is not something that we played, it's something that we were. I have since started playing Magic, which is a lot of fun but has not replaced Trek and I doubt it ever will. Some things are just irreplaceable.
Flashback: Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, USA - November 2003
I wandered through the Astronauts' Hall of Fame slowly trying to take in the details of these amazing individuals. Some, like Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, Michael Collins and John Glenn were familiar to me but most were just unfamiliar names alongside pictures. I approached the end of the display and one of the astronauts caught by eye. In their mission role it had the words "Mission Specialist".
"Ha ha ha, Mission Specialist."
I chuckled, pointing at the offending picture on the wall and looked over my shoulder. My girlfriend rolled her eyes in the way she normally does when I make a joke she does not understand and gets the feeling she isn't going to.
"Oh don't worry, you wouldn't understand."
And it was true she wouldn't. I met Becca quite a while after I stopped playing Trek and she knows nothing about the game. I suddenly felt a pang of loneliness. There was a long time when the person next to me when I made the joke would almost certainly have been Ringo, James, Colm or one of the many other Trek players who were normally my holiday companions. This was my first ever holiday with my girlfriend and it was great but there was something missing. A part of me wanted to be giggling with some of my friends, trotting around the Hall Of Fame looking for more "mission specialists" trying to guess what their one skill would be. Maybe even finding the holy grail of a "support personnel".
The feeling eventually passed but the thought remained. What I had now was also good. I still had my friends and now I had a relationship with someone I loved. I had grown up, I was no longer just a big kid who would go out on Saturday night, sing songs that made no sense to 99.9% of the population and be thrown out of the bar at closing time. I guess this was a good thing but for some reason it troubled me. I guess the Trek player inside me will never die. Trek is not just a game; it's an ideal, a stage of our lives, a way of life.
Millions of metaphorical Trek players still exist in the world. It's just a shame most of them never got to play Star Trek.
- Ian Taylor, November 2003