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The History of Star Trek CCG: The Borg

Factoids

• The rules supplement announced a $10,000 first prize for the 2001 World Championships (scheduled for DecipherCon November 15-18), and Day 1 was planned to be Voyager-only environment. Ultimately, DecipherCon and the World Championships were cancelled following the September 11 terrorist attacks, so there never was a Voyager-only day for a World Championship.
• A dilemma based on the episode "Ex Post Facto" was considered during the set design, with an image from the memory engram "replay" implanted in Tom Paris's brain. The idea was dropped because the "replay" was a black-and-white image, and the designers wanted to limit the use of B&W images exclusively to the Captain Proton cards planned for Holodeck Adventures.
• The Borg expansion was an extended exercise in making up personnel names. First, Hirogen names were few and far between in the scripts (Turanj was one of only a couple that existed), so lead designer Evan Lorentz had to extrapolate from this extraordinarily limited semantic pool to create "Hirogen-sounding" names for all the rest.
• Next, only two of the "Think Tank" crew had script names – Kurros and Bevvox – so again Evan created names for the others that followed what appeared to be a "pattern" of a double consonant in the middle of a two syllable name. Sullin and Fennim were the results; and poor Bevvox never even made it onto a card, as there was no usable image.
• Finally, all the Borg drones were newly named (no reprints of First Contact drones) – and were still correctly alphabetized both by card title (designation) and identification! This was particularly tricky because images from specific episodes were grouped together for designations – for example, all drones designated "[X] of Twelve" were from the episdoe "Unimatrix Zero." Further complicating the naming was the fact that by this time, no identifications could be assigned that would fall alphabetically between Bio-Med and Complink, because no more numbered designations would fit into the sequence.

Notable Cards

Many players were intrigued by the U.S.S. Prometheus and its Multivector Assault Mode seen in "Message in a Bottle. Others anticipated the Romulan connection in the CCG, so hard to find in Voyager. Both were pleased when the ship made its appearance in The Borg as a dual-affiliation card (complete with two available border colorrs) and the ability to download Multivector Assault Mode during a battle.

The key card in a Borg expansion would of course have to be the Borg Queen herself. Not simply a Voyager-themed "reprint" of the First Contact Queen (shown at right for comparison), the new Borg Queen did retain her vital selectable skill, but replaced her download of A Change of Plans or a drone with a download of a [Borg Only] Event or Interrupt card. Although Alice Krige reprised her First Contact role in "Endgame," she had already been showcased in the First Contact set, so the image selected this time was of Susanna Thompson

Links

The Borg Expansion Page
Card list HTML | PDF
Spoiler list (PDF)
Rules supplement HTML | PDF