The Darkness Drops Again

by Matt Kirk, Second Edition Creative Manager

1st June 2017

Phase II gave Romulan players a more streamlined way of striking from the shadows, reflecting the Romulans' modus operandi throughout the Star Trek mythos. Romulus, Patient Stronghold was meant to encourage committing personnel and ships to disrupt an opponent's mission attempts. And while this deck has been largely reliant on Imperial Entanglements to guarantee an opposing ship at each mission, Zero Hour slips in a couple ways to revitalize the strategy and give Romulan lurkers even more punch.

Harried and Harassed is the perfect dilemma to help set up this strategy without needing to pre-position forces at an opponent's mission. For a cost of only 2, H&H will bring your warbird in for the kill, enabling your Infiltration cards and otherwise unwieldy dilemmas like Once More Unto the Breach, and even incentivizing a player for getting creative with more obscure cards like Shadow Operation and The Tides of Fortune. However, it is vulnerable to an opponent's Reyga and/or Donatra since it has no listed skills, so you'll want to include some ways to filter out those folks beforehand.

Effective Deterrent complements the new dilemma well, allowing your interference team to rejoin your fleet after dealing with your opponent. As a core event with cost 2, Vreenak, Scornful Senator can let you play the Deterrent for free. Also, note the lack of cultural enforcement - no three Romulan personnel needed to play! This can be set up early in a P&P/GUYS strategy, and adds to your core event count for the maxi-big dilemmas like Tsiolkovsky Infection and Sylvia. And if you needed something to do with captives...

Hidden Strings does all the work of Condition Captive, and then some! Another core event to go with P&P/GUYS, Hidden Strings not only lets you convert captives into new Romulan agents, but also makes them Assassins, enabling all sorts of shenanigans. For example: win an Orchestrated Attack engagement, send your new Assassin back to his or her old crew, kill another of their personnel with an Assassination Plot, then pluck your agent back out of your opponent's hand with Brainwashing for more assassinations! The Order ability has no 'once each turn' clause, so as long as you have a D'deridex full of unstopped Romulans, feel free to convert all the captives you can in the same turn, then drop The Perfect Tool on the next turn and enjoy your extra counters.

With a few new ways to sneak in some incidental interference, the Romulans look poised to take their opponents by surprise this summer. Get your copies of Rescue Captives ready, or you might end up seeing a lot of familiar faces during your Romulan opponent's mission attempts...

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