Decipher, Inc.

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Decipher, Inc. started in 1983 with a jigsaw puzzle. Not just any puzzle: a contest puzzle that challenged buyers to crack four cryptograms printed on its pieces for a chance to win a prize. That was the hook. That was the whole idea. Warren Holland founded the company in Norfolk, Virginia, with a simple premise: make people think, make them compete, make them come back.

  What followed was not a straight line. It was a company that pivoted from contest puzzles to party games to collectible card games, chasing every wave in the gaming market. At its height, Decipher was producing two of the top five card games in the world. Then came the embezzlement. Then came the layoffs. Then came the press release, in December 2007, announcing the end of an era.

  How did a puzzle company become the steward of Star Trek and Star Wars on cardboard? What decisions drove those peaks? And what does it mean for a company to survive after losing everything it built?

• 2. Puzzles to Party Games

  ›

  The first Decipher puzzle contained four cryptograms. Buyers who solved them all could enter for a prize. It was a clever piece of marketing: the puzzle sold because the challenge was built into the product. The follow-up, Decipher II, saw all four embedded puzzles solved. The third entry in the series, Decipher III, remains unsolved to this day.

  Those puzzles established something important: Decipher understood how to build engagement into a product. That instinct carried forward into the How to Host a Murder line, a series of party games that would go on to become the company's longest-running product. The murder mystery format was a natural extension of the cryptogram spirit: gather people, give them a challenge, let them play detective.

  Decipher also acquired the license for Pente from Parker Brothers during this period, marketing the ancient strategy game and holding a steady position in the games market. Game designers Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh, both former Pente world champions, would later become central to the company's biggest leap.

• 3. The Card Game Gamble

  ›

  In November 1993, Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh approached Decipher with an idea: a collectible card game built around a media license. The concept was simple in outline and vast in potential. Decipher moved quickly. By December 1993, the company had secured the license from Paramount to produce a game based on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

  The game made its public debut at Gen Con in August 1994. By November of that year it was officially on shelves. The Star Trek CCG found an audience quickly, and Decipher pressed that momentum. In December 1995, after acquiring rights from Lucasfilm, the company released the Star Wars Customizable Card Game. Both titles climbed into the top five CCGs worldwide, with Star Wars regularly placing second behind only Magic: The Gathering.

  The Star Trek license had originally been planned for a three-year run. But in November 1996, Decipher announced it had renegotiated with Paramount, not just extending the agreement but expanding it to cover every live-action Star Trek property: The Original Series, Deep Space Nine, and all of the feature films. What had started as a single game was now an entire franchise in cardboard form.

• 4. Chasing the Younger Market

  ›

  By 1999, the landscape had shifted. Games like Pokemon were pulling younger players into card gaming in large numbers, and Decipher's two flagship titles were seen as too complex for that audience. The company's response was the Young Jedi Collectible Card Game, built entirely around images from The Phantom Menace. The original Star Wars CCG continued separately, using only imagery from the original trilogy.

  That same year, Decipher tried a different kind of crossover: a card game aimed at the party game crowd. They acquired the license for Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and built a collectible card game around it. The product failed. By that point Decipher was known as a card-gaming company, and the market received the Austin Powers game as a weak attempt at something the company wasn't built for. Production was put indefinitely on hold after the initial release.

  In 2001, Decipher launched the Jedi Knights Trading Card Game, a third Star Wars title with a distinctive feature: every card image was entirely computer-generated. That freedom let designers depict scenes and angles that never appeared in the films. The same year, Decipher acquired the card game license for the Lord of the Rings films being produced by New Line Cinema. That acquisition proved critical. Before the year ended, Decipher lost the Star Wars license entirely, shutting down all three of its Star Wars games at once.

• 5. Expansion and Embezzlement

  ›

  In 2002, Decipher moved into role-playing games for the first time, acquiring most of the gaming studio from Last Unicorn Games. Using a new system they developed called the CODA System, the company launched the Star Trek Roleplaying Game and The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game. The Lord of the Rings RPG won the 2002 Origins Award for Best Role-playing Game. Decipher also relaunched its Star Trek CCG as a new second edition, streamlining the rules to bring in new players while preserving the mechanics that had made the original successful.

  By 2003, Decipher was pursuing the younger market again, this time going after the audience that Yu-Gi-Oh! had captured. New games based on the .hack and Beyblade series followed. The Beyblade game was short-lived, but the .hack//Enemy Trading Card Game was well received and ran for several years. The .hack game won the 2003 Origins Award for Best Tradeable Card Game.

  Then came 2005. Both the .hack and Mega Man cartoons were losing momentum. The Wars card game, Decipher's first non-franchised title, failed to find an audience without the brand recognition of a media license. The RPG lines were shut down. And running beneath all of it was a problem the company had not yet publicly confronted: someone inside Decipher had been stealing from it for years. Rick Eddleman, Holland's brother-in-law and Decipher's VP of Finances since 1993, had been writing checks to himself and using company credit cards for personal expenses since the year 2000. In March 2009, it was reported that he had pleaded guilty to embezzling over $1.5 million. He faced twelve counts of embezzlement, a civil settlement of $8.9 million, and a maximum sentence of twelve years in prison. On the 27th of July 2009, he was sentenced to six years and five months. The losses contributed to the layoff of more than 90 employees.

• 6. Final Chapters and New Corners

  ›

  In 2007, with the Lord of the Rings license expiring, Decipher released the final expansion for that trading card game: Age's End. On the 12th of December 2007, the company issued a press release announcing the end of the Star Trek CCG line as well, naming the final expansion What You Leave Behind. Two of the company's defining products ended in the same holiday season.

  During those same holidays, Decipher replaced its website home page with a teaser: "a player revolution is coming in 2008." On the 30th of March 2008, the company began recruiting Founding Members for a new game called Fight Klub, a card game built around combat between film characters including Rambo, Mr. Blonde, and Chuck Norris. It was released in February 2009.

  Player communities had already begun filling the gaps. After Decipher lost the Star Wars license in 2001, employees and volunteers formed the Star Wars Customizable Card Game Players Committee. Decipher donated over one million dollars in product, promotional materials, and financial backing to support that organization. The Players Committee has created several new virtual card sets since 2002. A Continuing Committee formed for the Star Trek CCG in 2008. A Player's Council for the Lord of the Rings TCG was established in 2020.

  The Wars game, meanwhile, found an unexpected afterlife. Working with science fiction author Michael A. Stackpole and Chuck Kallenbach, Decipher had originally produced eBook-exclusive short stories tied to the game. A planned trilogy of novels set during the Battle of Phobos was only partially completed. In 2021, Decipher entered a new partnership with Arcbeatle Press, which republished and completed the trilogy under the collective title WARSONG, while also producing a spin-off series called Academy 27 and a crossover story titled And Today, You.