The Errata Team is always at work on cards in need of their attention. Once again, it's time for some of this work to reach the public. As always, these errata take effect immediately.
Brain Drain was on the original OTF Ban List, because of a few power problems. One issue was that it would be used in multiples to achieve total lockout of a particular skill. For instance, a player might stock many wall dilemmas which require Computer Skill, and then use Brain Drain every turn to deprive their opponent of all of their Computer Skill during their turns. This is now solved by limiting the card to once every turn. (Every turn? Yes, so that you might use it defensively against an opponent's offensive skill, such as Cyrus Redblock or Barash.) Another problem was that the card amounted to a de facto game-wide Long-Range Scan: in order for you to choose your target, all of the opponent's personnel could be revealed (or at least, names and locations). A small change to the targeting text takes care of that. Now you must first choose a crew or Away Team to play it on, without knowing the cards that are contained in it, or in any other crew or Away Team. (In this respect, it now works like Disruptor Overload, or The Phage.) Then you get to find out titles of the cards in *that* crew/Away Team. And you choose, by name, which of those people gets hit. Finally, while we were adjusting the card text anyway, we cleaned up the wording of the second function to be clearer and to conform to modern terminology.
A loophole in the wording of Release This Pain allowed for it to boost the points of The Discovery of Sha Ka Ree without the targeted personnel being involved in the solve, or even at the same location. We've rewritten it now to tie the targeted personnel to Sybok in the same way that the printed personnel in his cycle are tied to him: by (virtually) mentioning him in their lore. In turn, this boosts the mission points according to the text on the mission itself.
Rishon Uxbridge was fine for a long time. Like many early cards, the phrasing it used was more colloquial, of a sort that nowadays is often found amusing (when not confusing). Then came the Shades of Gray expansion, and a card called Rishon. The interaction between Rishon, Kevin Uxbridge, and Rishon Uxbridge was discovered late in Shades of Gray development, but the design team thought it was cute enough to leave it in place. In the exceedingly unlikely event that all three cards are in play at once, Kevin the interrupt could discard the personnel card of his re-created wife. We're now taking this opportunity to eliminate that silly interaction, modernizing the wording of Rishon Uxbridge to match how its original gameplay would be written today.
Bajoran Resistance Cell has long been criticized for its power, with draws, free reports, and the ability to report almost anywhere. It was a huge tool for the Bajorans, but also one that could be splashed into decks for several other affiliations, either with or without a treaty. It made it hard for Design to give new things ... and when they did, they had to be specifically written to not stack with BRC. We've made just a small change here, to restrict the reports to the Bajor Region. No Delta Quadrant, no Time Locations. Those Resistance fighters are all over their home system, but not the galaxy.
When it was originally released, Halkan Council had a simple job of specifying which cards were native to its timeline. That requirement was the and [M] icons. Unlike Sherman's Peak, there was no mention of . It didn't need it. At that time, all cards were from the episode "Mirror, Mirror", and so of course they were [1E-AU] . Now we have Crossover: An Invitation. It adds to your Alpha Quadrant personnel while they report. And so you can report Lt. Dax, among others, as . Bam, she's bizarrely native to Halkan Council for that report. We're now adding as a requirement for nativity, to close that loophole.
Operate Wormhole Relays has been an innocuously "empty" card for a long time. It originally protected against attacks with Wormhole, but Wormhole is no longer playable as an attack. It also protected downloads of the Bajoran Wormhole, which is now rather immune to being disrupted by download-blockers like Computer Crash by virtue of usually being downloaded in the seed phase (often by The First Stable Wormhole). And so OWR did nothing anymore, and was hardly used. Now we have new text for it, courtesy of the Design Team. The Errata Team usually works to keep cards as similar as possible to their original ideas, but Design makes "brand new cards" all the time. This one just has an old title. Let me turn it over to Dan for his story:
I played in a tournament. Someone fetched OWR and played it on the table for no benefit. Then they ref cycled it to get another Objective in their discard pile for DNA Security Scan.
So I thought, we can do better. We have a card that does nothing because of our work on Wormhole. Sure there will be other ways to cycle objectives into the discard pile, but we ought to be able to do something better with OWR.
The first thing was to remove the Ref Icon. The second thing was to provide another way of using the fixed wormholes we have in the game (to match the story on the card a bit). The initial design note on OWR in UP says, "Don't tell anyone, but I'd want this to be errata to Operate Wormhole Relays..." so that was the plan from the very beginning. I have to apologize to the story team as they spent a lot of time trying to find a new story, but I didn't want to influence the testers. There were also other cards and errata in the package to enable easier interquadrant travel, but in the end we got everything down to this single card.
The final wording provides a way of taking a single Ferengi Shuttle or Federation Runabout through the wormholes without stopping. Only one small ship. And a few required skills. One of the playtest names I put on this thing was Einstein-Rosen Bridge, another name for a wormhole. The skills required are the skills on Albert Einstein.
As with all Errata releases (though I think I forgot to mention it last time), big thanks go to the entire Errata Team, who proposed and debated these and other suggestions for card text. And also to the members of Rules, Playtesting, and Art who helped guide these cards to release.
Discuss this article in this thread.
Back to Archive index