Rules Update, June

by James Heaney, First Edition Rules Master

1st June 2020

Happy June! Today is the first Monday of the month, which is the scheduled day for rules updates.

This was a short, quiet month. The Rules Committee did great work on a lot of things, but only a few rulings required immediate action. As always, you can see the full list of changes in the June 2020 Recent Rulings Document, but I'll go over the highlights with you now:

Monthly Rulings

I apologize for the lack of card links and card images this month. Local circumstances made it difficult for me to use this weekend for Rules stuff as efficiently as I had hoped.

Playing an Affiliation

For years, there have been two separate rules for "playing" an affiliation: playing an affiliation or faction (non-Borg) and playing Borg. Having two rules for the same basic thing rankled (especially when they sort of contradicted each other), so, this month, we finally figured out how to consolidate them. There are no functional changes, but we shuffled around where various rules lived, including the "Borg-affiliation decks may only use Borg-affiliation cards" rule and one of the rules defining infiltration.

This took ten months (partly due to other factors), and the fact that it has no impact on gameplay and looks like an easy change is a testament to the talent and finesse of this team.

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"Destroy"

Q: When my ship is destroyed, are the personnel on it, legally speaking, "killed"? (Or are they just "discarded"?)

A: They are killed. We've added some cross-references to make this more obvious.

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Dual-Icon Missions

Q: Is a dual-icon mission a planet mission for purposes of, for example, Full-Planet Scan?

A: Yes. And, before you ask, it is also a space mission for purposes of, for example, Space Boomer.

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Movement

The question we got on this was tricky: can Establish Tractor Lock stop Q of Borg from relocating to System J-25? The Glossary was clear that relocation is a form of movement (so Q should be stuck), but also clear that the word "move" is at times shorthand for "normal ship movement" (so it might not cover relocation, and Q can escape).

We tried really hard to figure out what Decipher meant by this ambiguous rule, and we think we got it in the end. When a card provides you with movement or options for movement (for example, Tranwarp Network Gateway), that's normal ship movement and requires staffing. But when a card checks for movement (for example, Magnetic North), it checks for any kind of movement. You can't protect a ship with Magnetic North, relocate it to a space location, and then claim that it's still immune to battle because you haven't "moved" it.

Long story short: Establish Tractor Lock DOES prevent Q of Borg's relocation, and we added a bit to the movement rule to make this clear.

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"You Have In Play"

Does this phrase, which appears on a bunch of cards, refer to control or to ownership? For example, if I own an uncontrolled Starship Defiant at Vintaak, then seed Long Live The Empire!, do I "have no ships in play"? Do I have the Starship Defiant in play because I own it, or do I not because I don't control it?

This was the most intense debate on the R.C. during this cycle, it took a couple months to resolve, and I started out on the wrong side of it. But thanks to the team's passion, we got to the correct answer in the end: "You have in play," like the persona rule it's most often used with, cares about ownership, not control. That uncontrolled Starship Defiant will block a Long Live The Empire! ship download, because it's in play and you own it. Several entries were updated to make this clear.

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Tricyanite Poisoning

We took last month's temp ruling about this card and gave it its own permanent entry, removing the temp ruling.

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General cleanup

We added some cross-references and deleted a sentence from the Rulebook about time travel that was simply incorrect.

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Unresolved Temporary Rulings

Our temp ruling about The Squire's Rules and how it interacts with Q Dilemmas seed with a card like Beware of Q remains in force this month: you can still do this. Our work to permanently resolve the matter continues.

Rules Soapbox: "Complexity"

Since there's no Big Rules News this month, I'd like to use this space to talk about something that we as a community often bring up in conversations about rules, but rarely discuss head-on.

When people talk about First Edition, they almost always use the word “complex”—sometimes with a grin, sometimes a groan. I think this is because 1E is complex in two different ways.

On the one hand, the game goes to extraordinary lengths to not just represent the world of Star Trek, but actually simulate it, giving players incredible freedom to explore, discover, and influence the universe. This is good complexity. This is why people play CCGs instead of, say, Go Fish... and nothing is better at it than First Edition.

On the other hand, First Edition's rules and gameplay are full of hidden clauses, exceptions, and loopholes; playing the game effectively means becoming something of a Scholar of the Glossary. This is bad complexity. Most human beings don't want to spent time learning, say, third-order exceptions to the targeting rule, or "magic words" that make dilemmas reseed. This is why some people play Go Fish instead of First Edition.

Suppose we're in a thrilling match, a cat-and-mouse game where your U.S.S. Defiant has managed to use cloaking and the Bajoran Wormhole to stay just ahead of my prowling Borg Cube. We're throwing battle prevention interrupts, anti-cloaking tech, range boosters, clever tactics, the works. You've solved Quest for the Sword and are using the Sword of Kahless to boost a small Klingon detachment enough to make personnel battle real risky... for both of us. There's now a The Nexus on the Gamma Quadrant spaceline, threatening to wipe us both off the board if we aren't careful. There's a million things going on, the slightest mistake will cost one of us the game, and we couldn't be having more fun. It feels like we're playing "Balance of Terror" meets "The Best of Both Worlds" in the middle of Deep Space Nine. This is everything that makes this game unlike any other, good complexity to the hilt.

Then, my Borg finally catch up to you and beam down with an Assimilate Species objective to destroy your Away Team. I show my leader (which, for Borg, is a red drone). You try to kill the battle with I'm A Doctor, Not A Doorstop, but I kill the interrupt instead with an Amanda Rogers. In a last, desperate lunge, you use Altovar (Emissary)'s special download of Lethean Telepathic Attack to disable my red drone, depriving the Away Team of a leader. I say you can't, because the battle has started. You say you can, because the download suspends play and can take place after I declare the start of battle but before it's actually initiated when responses are played. I say that's ridiculous and whip out the Glossary, where we read the entries on "suspends play" and "actions - step 1: initiation" out loud together and argue about the placement of certain prepositional phrases.

Which Star Trek episode does that resemble? Because I don't think "the one where they argue about sentence structure for ten minutes" is one I want to watch. It's a bad moment for both players.

Part of the Rules Committee's job is to resolve those bad moments by issuing a ruling and clearly communicating the ruling to everyone. But the other part of our job is to incrementally, carefully, and non-disruptively shape the rules of the game so that bad moments like that don't happen at all. When you're playing First Edition, the Rules Committee wants your attention on the spaceline, not on the Glossary. And so we are going to continue to target and trim away what I've called "bad complexity," while helping Design to add new "good complexity" as often as they can.

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Thanks for reading! Be sure to tell us on the forums what you think of everything we've done this month. Hopefully you're happy, but, if you're not, we want to hear that, too. Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!

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