We had the chance to sit down with one of the Senior Game Designers for Star Wars Unlimited, Tyler Parrott, and ask him some questions! Tyler is in the unique position of touching many parts of the process, from game design, to playtesting, to marketing, and even art on the cards! We hope you find the information he was willing to share with us as interesting as we did.

Hello Tyler, can you start by telling us a little about yourself?  What’s your card game history?  What is your previous game design experience?

I’ve been a designer at FFG for a little over 6 years now. In that time, I’ve worked on primarily Legend of the Five Rings and Star Wars: Unlimited, but I was a creative contributor to Star Wars: Destiny (Characters & Art) and helped do design for Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (Ered Mithrin) and for KeyForge (Adventures). Prior to working at FFG, I playtested Star Wars: The Card Game and the Lord of the Rings LCG as a volunteer, and prior to that I played the Star Wars LCG as a high-level competitor and dabbled in almost all of the LCGs. I’ve also played Magic: the Gathering for over 20 years, so my experience with card games is long and storied.

What most excites you about Star Wars Unlimited?

How simple the game is to learn. It still blows my mind on a regular basis that I can sit down with someone who’s never played the game—sometimes who has never even played card games at all—and after a single 30-minute game they understand all of the necessary game mechanics. That level of accessibility is almost unheard of in card game circles, and I’m really excited to see what additional audiences we can reach with it.

What is your favorite card that you have designed? (If not revealed, can we get the Set # Card # for later reference?)

Grand Admiral Thrawn is my favorite design in Set 1—I had a clear vision for how I wanted Thrawn to feel both for the person playing the deck and for the person playing against him. I love that we’ve exactly achieved that goal; he’s very fun and powerful but in a way that’s subtle and unpredictable. Outside of Set 1, my favorite design is Set 3 card #249, which is named after a favorite TV episode and provides a fun and unique deckbuilding challenge in draft.

What does an average week of working on Star Wars Unlimited look like for you? 

My job is broken into about four arenas: design, playtesting, art coordination, and marketing. They’re not all even—I spend significantly more time on design and art—but any given week I’ll be more involved in one arena than another based on schedule needs.

Design work is what you’d expect: designing cards, giving design or creative feedback to other designers, etc. Playtesting is also what you’d expect: we run two playtests a week during office hours which I try to attend, and we run two after-hours playtests which I occasionally make one of. There’s a lot that we need to playtest, and a lot of deliberation to do afterwards!

One of my biggest responsibilities is being “creative lead,” which mostly means being the bridge between design and art. I oversee all the art briefs we submit to our art directors (and I write a healthy amount of them) and collect all of the references that artists need to make sure characters and ships and environments all look correct. One of my favorite parts of the job is when I get to see final art come in and see how the artist interpreted the words that I gave them!

Marketing is mostly due to my passion for engaging with the fans and being on streams—I try to spend a little time each day keeping up with social media, and I’m consistently in contact with the marketing team as they schedule event appearances or livestreams. They’ve even let me participate in planning preview seasons, which I take great joy in!

How did designing draft in Star Wars Unlimited go? Were there multiple iterations?

The biggest question for draft was how to handle leaders. The game couldn’t support a generic “oops, I didn’t draft a leader” placeholder, which meant we needed to guarantee that everyone ended up with at least one leader to make draft function. At first, we just had people keep the three leaders they opened in their three packs at the start of the draft, but feedback was fast and clear that players wanted to have more than 0% agency in which leaders they would be drafting around—thus the leader draft before the booster draft.

What is your favorite part about drafting Star Wars Unlimited?

The fact that it asks me to optimize cards that I otherwise wouldn’t play. There are so many simple and fun designs that just don’t get to see play when you’re asked to compete with the best of the best, and I take great joy in making subpar systems work, which is what draft does so well. Maybe I wouldn’t build a deck with Occupier Siege Tank in Premier, but now that it’s in my deck how can I make it over-perform expectations?

Is Draft or Sealed a format you hope shows up in Competitive Tournaments in the future?

I certainly hope to see draft and sealed at high-level tournaments one day. But that will depend on how logistically feasible it is, given the goals the OP team has for the game.

It’s no secret that you’re big on drafting MtG, do you expect to build a cube for yourself of Star Wars Unlimited in the future? Any recommendations for future cube builders?

I don’t intend to make an Unlimited cube, mostly because all of my interest in designing Unlimited draft environments goes directly into making the booster sets themselves! As for advice, it’s hard to say with so few cards in the system—a cube really comes into its own once there’s a large card pool to curate from. My main piece of advice for the future is that you will need a majority of single-color cards in your draft pool if you want the draft portion to be fun, so don’t expect a cube to be a typical “strongest cards from the game’s lifespan” design—those tend to have multiple aspects and therefore are harder to draft. I suspect single-aspect uncommons are going to be very important to cube building in the future.

I think we’ve linked your Unique rules stream explanation at least 100 times, so we must ask the question… how many sets until we get to play the 8 Vader deck?

It won’t exist before 2027, and will be probably even later than that. (There will be 8 Vaders before you can build the “8 Vader Deck,” but also there’s a lot of characters in Star Wars to draw from so it’s not imminent.)

Where do you find the balance of empowering the thematic fan favorite characters to be at the top of the meta vs. minor obscure characters of the Star Wars Universe?

The question of “mainstream vs obscure” is not a question of balance, but of representation. Mainstream characters will appear more often, and with more variety of designs, than obscure ones. Additionally, we try to have a healthy balance of rarity, so that mainstream characters get to appear more often in draft while the more obscure characters appear more rarely. It’s important to us that the game be balanced as a game, which means that we can’t give mainstream characters special preference. After all, if we intentionally push a character to be strong because of who they are, we run an astronomically higher risk of that character being broken and requiring a ban.

The fear of a mainstream character being weak is much less of a concern when there’s so many different versions of them (such that one is inevitably going to be strong), and we don’t want to be gatekeepers telling fans which characters are important and which ones aren’t by making obscure characters weak—even if relatively few people know who Del Meeko is, the fans of Del Meeko still deserve to have their favorite character be strong and desirable.

Parity of power between rarities is important to most players. How do you balance that with the desire to give iconic characters the star treatment? On the surface, there appears to be a pretty big gap between a Legendary like Darth Vader and one like Avenger.

It sounds to me like ya’ll are undervaluing the Avenger! We try to avoid balancing characters based on who they are (see my previous answer), so naturally some will end up stronger or weaker than others. It’s also contextual—if a very powerful card lacks the support to maximize it, it won’t be perceived as strong whereas a relatively weaker card that has a strong synergy with the rest of the card pool will be ubiquitous.

Editor’s note – It was Jayson(ImpossibleGerman) that undervalued Avenger 🙂

Units and unit combat is a clear focus of the game, and it looks like most decks in SWU are required to care about the units they field. How does this element of the game impact how you design removal cards? Is it a design intention that winning the board usually means you win the game?

The goal for combat in our game is that the decision of what or who to attack is interesting and dynamic. We don’t want this game to devolve into races—that whoever can put 30 damage on the enemy base first wins, and units never fight—and we also don’t want the game to be a control grind-fest where attacking the base is pointless until you’ve established total dominance in one or both arenas.

In theory, one player should always be attacking the base and the other player should always be controlling the board (based on who would win the hypothetical race), but the hope is that certain unit abilities, or contextual situations like damaged units that can easily be finished off, encourage players to change their evaluations such that the aggro deck spends an attack finishing off a unit, or the control deck decides a unit is unimportant and sends their attack towards the base to shorten the game. And if “who’s the beatdown” can change throughout the course of a game, that makes it so much more tense and exciting!

What have you noticed in testing about archetypes in SWU and how they relate to other games? What effect does the game’s intense focus on units and sequencing have on traditional perceptions of words like “Aggro” and “Control”?

We definitely want (and intend) for a variety of strategies to be viable. Aggro still looks like aggro (attacking the base at all costs usually wins the game) and control still looks like control (defeat every enemy unit until they run out of resources), but the mirrors at least get to be dynamic because one aggro player will lose the race and one control player will run out of cards first, and trying to deduce whether you’re the attacker or the defender is important and challenging.

The third category of “midrange,” that exists between the two poles, is the third pillar of the triangle, but it’s much more nebulous since it basically only means “slower than aggro but faster than control.” The game mechanics naturally reward the extremes of the spectrum (hyper aggro and hyper control), so we have to be more intentional about supporting midrange strategies.

Danny mentioned in our last interview that the plan is for mill to not be a primary strategy at the high-competitive level. How do you balance designing Cunning around all of the Exhaust and bounce effects to avoid it approaching the same Negative Play Experience commonly associated with mill?

Peoples’ dislike of mill and control come from two unrelated places. The discomfort with mill is because it attempts to win in a way that doesn’t play according to the same objectives, and thus tries to be as non-interactive as possible (which generally means less fun). The discomfort from control is because players don’t like having their cards messed with. The latter is where exhaust (a control tool) lives—and you’re correct that it can produce negative play experiences if it exists at too high volume. It’s a necessary element of the metagame, but we do need to be careful not to make it too ubiquitous. The same could be said of “defeat” abilities like Takedown or Force Choke, which we also need to keep an eye on.

Since you noted in a previous interview (Shoutout to our friends at SWUHolocron) that you are in charge of the “creative stuff on the cards, art, and names,” what is your favorite art commissioned for set 1?

Overwhelming Barrage, of course! The high-contrast composition of the star destroyer over the eclipse, and of the circular framing of the ships being destroyed around the central destroyer, all read as very clear and iconic and powerful to me. My other favorite is the Leia Organa leader art, but that’s because the anime art style and action-y pose really speak to me.

What has been your favorite clever title thus far?

It’s not my favorite title in Set 1 (that belongs to “For A Cause I Believe In”), but probably the one I feel the cleverest about is Agent Kallus (Seeking the Rebels). It’s a pun because the art features Agent Kallus during a scene from Season 3, when he’s an inside agent. From the Imperials’ point of view, he’s “Seeking the Rebels” because he’s seeking them down to capture or defeat them. From the Rebels’ point of view, he’s seeking them so he can offer assistance. And mechanically he works very well both with and against the Spectres, since they’re all unique!

We’re all used to FFG games reusing the same Star Wars art at this point, what went into the decision for SWU to have completely new art?

We wanted our game to have a certain tone that our previous art style just wouldn’t support. We also initiated the previous art style well before animated Star Wars became what it is now, and with the explosion of animated Star Wars content it became clear that a lot of our visuals would be significantly better if we weren’t trying to “realize” scenes or characters that were originally stylized by animation.

I personally much prefer the lighter, more animated/comic style of the game compared to what’s come before. And at least a small part of the decision was an acknowledgement of the poor reputation we’ve built over the cancellation of so many games in the past (including and especially Star Wars: Destiny). Having a new visual style that didn’t use what came before (hopefully) helps us communicate that this is a new team, making a new game, with bold ambitions and the support to make them happen.

The Showcase arts have been closely guarded up to this point, which one is your favorite that we can look forward to seeing in March?

My personal favorite Showcase leader is Cassian Andor. You’ll know him when you see him!

What is your favorite thing about working at Fantasy Flight Games?

We have an incredible design team, and the collaborative culture with other departments is really strong. Obviously it’s fun to get to design games, but the collaboration makes the creative work so much better.

If you had to spend a week locked in a basement with only tabletop games and 1 other person involved in Star Wars Unlimited, who would it be and why?

Brutal question, making me choose between my teammates! I’ve been working a lot with (Rules Admiral) Ryan lately, and it’s been going really well, so I think we’d get along great and make it through a full week.

One of our favorite things you do is little snippets of designer insights on twitter. Can you close us out with one you’d love to share on this platform not limited to 280 characters?

Not yet, but I have a full thread written for a card that’ll get spoiled soon! It’s another thematic design that I went “deep on the research,” you might say, to inform the design, even though it breaks what players will expect from a card with its title.

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Big thanks to Tyler for answering all our questions and giving us a timeline for our favorite meme deck! You can check out his Twitter account where he posts Designer Insights into the game from time to time. Thanks for reading!