Rules Update, June 2023

by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)

5th June 2023

Cooks and Colonels, Happy Summer! Today is the first Monday of the month, a day for a regularly scheduled rules update. This month's substantive changes are in bold blue text. There are several changes to Warp Speed that you should be aware of, but only one substantive change to the general game rules.

The Big News: Warp Speed v1.1

As the Star Trek CCG became more complex, Decipher sought a way to play the game quickly and simply, in 30 minutes or less. Their solution was Warp Speed!, where each player has only three missions and 10 seed cards, including an optional starting ship or personnel.

It worked! I've played a couple of tournaments where every player received one Voyager Warp Speed starter pack each round (plus nothing else). Not one single game played by anyone in any of those tournaments ever lasted more than 20 minutes. Even with the richer card pool and slightly altered rules of the Warp Speed Cube Draft (and its Bavarian Variant), games rarely hit that 30 minute deadline. Last year, Chicago attempted the first-ever sanctioned Warp Speed Constructed event in the modern era -- and did it for a regional! These events have all been, relatively speaking, pretty popular. Warp Speed really is the essence of First Edition, but without the overhead of a full 75-minute+ test match.

However, there have been a few Warp Speed challenges, which led us today to publish Warp Speed version 1.1, the first official update to Warp Speed since Decipher launched Second Edition.

First and foremost, the old Warp Speed rule sheet (1.0) was from early 2001. Decipher made several further rulings about Warp Speed between 2001 and 2003 (including how to play Borg in Warp Speed), and those rulings were essentially "lost" because they weren't on our rules sheet. Warp Speed 1.1 includes these Decipher rulings.

Second, the Chicago group exposed some rules problems with the way Warp Speed handled certain icons. (For example, since Warp Speed 1.0 instructed players to "ignore" and icons completely, could Revised Tuvok download any personnel or no personnel?) Warp Speed 1.1 tweaks this rule slightly: , , and quadrant icons are now treated as "unloaded" icons. Cards in Warp Speed still have the icons, but the icons don't actually mean anything (unless another card requires them).

Third, Warp Speed was based on Open rules, but shared a lot of DNA with Modern. Warp Speed's batch seeding rule was an older, less refined version of Modern's batch seeding rule. Also, Warp Speed included a special rule for dealing with a specific problematic card (Red Alert!) that Modern simply banned. Warp Speed 1.1 now incorporates the Modern rules, including the Modern batch seeding rule and the Modern ban list. Accordingly, we've removed the special rule for Red Alert!, since that card is currently banned anyway.

Fourth, Warp Speed Constructed uses only cards with the Voyager property logo. Years of benign neglect mean the card pool today is much larger than it was when Decipher left it... but also that some of those cards proved a little unbalanced when Chicago tried playing Warp Speed Constructed. Therefore, for Warp Speed Constructed play only, Warp Speed 1.1 includes an optional additional ban list, as recommended to the Rules Committee by the Chicago group. Those cards are Medical Crisis and Full Complement of Shuttles. Because this is an optional ban list, tournament directors are free to ignore, add to, or otherwise modify for their events at their discretion. Warp Speed Constructed very much remains an experimental format, and we don't want to tie anyone's hands in how to make an event the most fun it can be.

Fifth, and most significantly, Warp Speed's "rainbow" rules make all affiliations in Warp Speed compatible, then removes all their attack restrictions. The Rules Committee received strong feedback that Warp Speed's "rainbow" rules didn't work for constructed play. However, the "rainbow" rules are essential for Warp Speed sealed play, since a single Voyager starter + a couple boosters are not likely to include enough cards for a viable monocolor deck. We are keeping the "rainbow" rules... for sealed play only. Starting today, in Warp Speed Constructed, different affiliations are not compatible without a treaty (and have their usual attack restrictions).

Sixth, and most prettily, there was a graphic on the old Warp Speed rule sheet that showed how the spaceline would be laid out. It looked bad. It was a low-resolution copy of a scan that looked like it had been done in 256 colors. We asked the Art Team to recreate the Warp Speed spaceline graphic for the new edition, and they did, and it looks great. Our thanks to Johnny Holeva and his brilliant squad!

These changes, while important, are not the end of the road for Warp Speed.

We still think there is a lot of value in having a way to get the full Star Trek CCG First Edition experience in 30 minutes. Warp Speed can be a lot of fun. The problem is that Warp Speed's card pool is so shallow; there just aren't that many cards with Voyager property logos. We hope to eventually figure out how to make Warp Speed Constructed viable with the Complete card pool... and I have a secret ambition to figure out how to make Warp Speed Constructed Multiplayer work as well. We hope many of you play Warp Speed in the coming year (especially Constructed) so that we can gather data and figure out how to make those next moves.

Monthly Rulings: (Modern) Housekeeping

Let's see what's inside this month's Recent Rulings Document.

Modern Housekeeping

When we changed the name of OTF to "Modern" last month, we also removed the OTF Rules Sheet from the front page, because (we said) it had become redundant clutter. Several of you pointed out that, actually, there were a couple places in the Rulebook where the Modern rules from that rules sheet were not fully reflected. For example, on the OTF Rules Sheet, it said that a dilemma removed from the game could be retrieved by any card that allowed you to retrieve a dilemma from your discard pile (this rule seems to only exist for Q's Planet, but exist it does). The actual Rulebook had no mention of this rule. Likewise, the Rulebook didn't include the full Modern restrictions on Borg mission theft.

That's pretty bad! The Rulebook should include all the rules! It shouldn't have taken a format name change for us to notice that it didn't! So, this month, we went through each rule on the OTF Rule Sheet, verified that it was correctly explained in the Rulebook, and cleaned up any discrepancies or other problems we found. That's the majority of this month's RRD.

There was one change along the way: previously, the rule was that Borg cannot "scout, or target for scouting" an opponent's unstealable mission. To more closely match the rule for other affiliations, this has been changed: now, cannot "scout" or "complete scouting" of an unstealable mission. Since most Borg-Only Objectives give permission to scout a mission (without expressly allowing you to complete scouting of such a mission), these work like Espionage cards: using an appropriate may scout an opponent's unstealable mission (facing dilemmas and so forth), but they can never complete it (and thus never score it, or earn Artifacts from it).

(I issued a temporary "bluetext" ruling about this on the forums a couple weeks ago, when someone noticed the issue. The underlying issue is now resolved, so the bluetext is hereby cancelled.)

Oh, one more thing: there've been a couple requests made for the restoration of the OTF Rules Sheet as a separate sheet. In response to those requests, I've updated the sheet to say "Modern" and fixed the various links and bugs that were troubling it. You can get it here. The one thing left to decide is where to put it on the website going forward. It used to live on the front page, so maybe it should return there... but the front page is so cluttered with resources already, and this rule sheet is redundant, so it feels to me like there must be a better place for it to live long-term. (If you have any suggestions or opinions, sound off in the forum thread attached to this article.)

Regular Housekeeping

We revised the Persistence of Memory entry in the Glossary to comport with the new Horga'hn errata.

We removed The Trois from the list of exceptions under species, since their recent clarifying errata fixed their species.

We added definitions of seeding, both face-up on the table and face-down beneath a mission. The Decipher rulebooks defined these, so thanks to Takket for diligently asking where it was in the current rulebook.

The Rulebook section on Tribbles was missing the rule that you can only play one Tribble card on each Tribble group per turn. That's now fixed.

In 2020, we added a paragraph to the Glossary explaining that permission to attempt a mission includes permission to solve the mission unless another card or rule expressly prevents solving the mission. At some point after, we deleted it, but it was actually pretty useful, so we've restored it to the Rulebook.

See You... Out There

Thanks for reading! As always, please let us know if you see any errors, typos, or obsolete text in the rules documents.

And be sure to tell us on the forums what you think of everything we've done this month. Hopefully you're happy, but, if not, we want to hear that, too. (This month in particular, please contact me immediately if you see "OTF" or "Official Tournament Format" anywhere it shouldn't be, or if the change breaks any of your webpages or, heaven forfend, your achievements.) Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!

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