Star of the Guardians

Star of the Guardians CCG is the card-game adaptation of Margaret Weis' space-opera novel series, the sci-fi cycle she wrote after her Dragonlance run with Tracy Hickman, and it carries her dense fall-of-an-empire lore into booster packs.

The game

Published in 1995 by Mag Force 7 (the same studio that did Wing Commander CCG and Babylon Project CCG), Star of the Guardians is a two-player space-combat duel where each player commands a faction ship group (Republic, Corasian, Ghost Legion) and resolves battles across Mission cards. The mechanic that distinguishes it is the Mind Seize system, which lets telepath characters override opponent plays at the cost of their own mental reserves.

The context

Mag Force 7 had a tight working relationship with novelist-designers and positioned the Star of the Guardians CCG as the crown of the 1995 book-licensing wave. Margaret Weis was directly involved in the card text and flavour, which makes this one of the few CCGs where the primary author of the source material wrote the actual cards.

The collector angle

The base set and the Corasian Expansion are the two English print runs. Mag Force 7 was a small publisher, so print counts were modest and distribution leaned on direct mail and Weis's novel-signing tour rather than mass hobby distribution. Margaret Weis signed a limited run of the Lady Maigrey promo card at 1995-1996 book tour stops, and those signed copies are the most-sought items. Sealed booster boxes are considerably harder to find than the card pool's size would suggest.