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A L S O__T O D A Y The 21st Challenge No. 17: By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau The e-mail lifeline -- summing up the year - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K What is "Multi-Level Marketing" and how did it die? Discuss the future of spam in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk ___________________ Search barnesandnoble.com for great technology book bargains ___________________ R E C E N T L Y Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Why we just might get fast Internet lines in our homes before we're all dead (01/14/99) The tortured soul of the Silicon Valley CEO By Janelle Brown Tech-business thrillers put Gates, Jobs on the couch (01/13/99) Ethics of the cross hairs By Andrew Leonard On your computer screen, which is worse -- blasting an alien or shooting a deer? (01/12/99) Joining the mod squad By Todd Levin A gray-market "mod chip" supercharges a Sony PlayStation -- but how does it make you feel? (01/11/99) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg So iMacs have fun new colors. What's so revolutionary about tinted plastic? (01/08/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log Prank takes down anti-impeachment site

CARD BARDS | PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - Ever since Europeans started playing them 600 years ago, card games have had one thing in common: All of them -- whether traditional (like poker, bridge and cribbage) or modern (like Uno, Mille Bornes and Pit) -- are played with a fixed deck of cards from which all players draw their hands. In 1993, the incredibly popular Magic: The Gathering introduced a new wrinkle. Magic was the first of a new genre: the collectible card game, or CCG. If you only know Magic in passing, you might think that its appeal comes merely from its translation of Tolkienian swords-and-sorcery elements into a card game. Not so: What makes Magic popular is something called deck-building. In Magic, which depicts a battle between two dueling wizards, each player has his own deck of cards. The cards in this deck are selected from among thousands, each representing magical creatures that wizards can summon and spells they can cast. Each card has its own unique ability, and the game is designed so that these abilities interact with each other in complex ways. Before playing, each player goes through his collection and builds a deck, choosing the creatures to be sent into battle, cards to boost their strengths and cards to shield their weak spots. As a game of Magic unfolds, what happens is less a test of how you play the game (though that is still important) than of how well you have designed your deck. After a few games, you go back and tune your deck, pulling out cards that aren't helping and adding cards that reinforce your strategy. This is a lot like the develop-and-test cycle of computer programming, and it's just as addictive. Magic is not only a fun card game with a huge base of players; it's also a game whose players keep buying cards. They collect them by the thousand, buying them as fast as Wizards of the Coast, Magic's publisher, can print them. Since the game's introduction, Wizards has printed and sold well over a billion Magic cards. This success galvanized the game industry. From 1993 to 1997, the gaming hobby was awash in new CCGs, as publishers introduced more than 60 of them. Each new game used deck-building and collectibility as a lure to get players to keep spending money month after month. Nearly all of these games hooked new players by piggybacking on well-known stories. The "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" CCG franchises, hugely profitable to this day, have players buying pack after pack of cards hoping to get a Jean-Luc Picard or a Han Solo. "Babylon 5," "The X-Files," "Highlander" and "Xena" all have licensed CCGs. There are (or will soon be) CCGs based on Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Clive Barker's "Imajica" and Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber." The designers at Five Rings Publishing Group (FRPG) created Legend of the Five Rings with a different goal in mind: Instead of using an existing story to sell a card game, they created a new story of their own and designed a card game to tell it. They believed that the hunger to find out what happens next, rather than the appeal of well-known characters, would keep people coming back to their game. They were right: Today L5R, as its players call it, is the third bestselling collectible card game on the market. On their way to this success, FRPG's designers discovered an entirely new way for stories to be told. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Samurais, geishas and ninjas -- every game of L5R is a new tale