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Making Time to Argue About Time

by Deanna Troi, Blended

15th January 2025

Time Travel Pod Investigate Time Continuum

When Premiere came out, I was the queen of First Edition. Bev may have had more skills, but I had Jean-Luc, Will, and Worf all wrapped around my little finger. It was a simpler time back then, ignoring any Temporal Causality Loops, time travel was a simple one-way ticket into the future, emerging on a later turn. And in those days, a 2-turn delay from Temporal Rift, or a 5-turn delay from a Time Travel Pod all felt proportionate to the pace of the game.

Like I say. A simpler time.

Then that other Queen shows up, with her drones in tow, and we all have to travel back to 2063 and help Zefram Cochrane launch that damnably loud rocket ship. Him and his tequila gave me one hell of a hangover! But now time travel in the game was also changed, Time Locations were added, moving between Spaceline and Timeline locations became easier and such versions of time travel became much more standard.

But from then on, the game continued evolving. Faster and faster games. More personnel per turn. I evolved too - an extra skill of Navigation (And it's well earned! Successfully and safely crash landing a Galaxy class saucer section almost half a kilometer wide with only "light casualties" - which were mostly from the battle with the Sisters - is an impressive feat!) and a special skill to unstop my Away Team.

As speed and power increased, those 2-turn and 5-turn delays were proportionately longer, massively increasing the effect from those cards. Early into the Continuing Committee's era, those cards were nerfed or banned to prevent unbalanced strategies.

Now, here comes Premiere Remastered, swanning in with its fancy hi-res images! But it also gets an opportunity to fix what these cards do, restoring some of those effects but at a level appropriate to the modern game.

Temporal Rift

Let's start with considering Time Travel Pod.

Firstly, this now plays closer to other forms of time travel, providing a universal Time Location - no corresponding spaceline location is required!

Secondly, making an opponent's entire ship and crew disappear, even for just one of your opponent's turns like it now does, is an incredibly powerful effect. Like more powerful than a Cosmic String or a Quantum Filament. Such an effect would only be appropriate for an Artifact though, requiring you to complete a mission to earn it. Your opponent had better not be playing a "one ship" strategy, like a "They Will Be Coming" Borg deck, or usingU.S.S. Voyager!

As an experienced poker player though, here's my little strategy tip: as it plays immediately upon earning, you might be able to hold back on solving and earning that Artifact until the most strategically opportune time!

Now, you can still play it to move your own ship there at any time (maybe to avoid being assimilated by a marauding Borg cube, or avoid my mother coming to visit) or it can be discarded from play to solve Investigate Time Continuum if Data or Guinan aren't around.

That leaves Temporal Rift. Like Time Travel Pod, this also creates a universal Time Location. But making an opponent's ship disappear at Interrupt speed would be too good, like a free mountain of chocolate! So instead, this give you two other reasons to use it.

Firstly, if used to hide from an adversary, the countdown would previously have done you no good - as the first time you come back would be after your turn has just ended, leaving you a prime target for your opponent! But not so any more! Instead this counts down at the start of turn!

Secondly, an old school tip Data found in the LCARS data base (an old copy of a Brady Games Official Player's Guide he said?) was to use Temporal Rift on a menacing Borg Ship dilemma. Well now you can do exactly that - you can target a Self Controlling Dilemma. So are The Sheliak about to wipe out your Away Team? Buy yourself some extra time for an evacuation by playing a Temporal Rift and it vanishes for two turns!

Well, with my hangover kicking in, and all these temporal mechanics giving me a headache, maybe I can go back in time and not drink quite as much tequila?


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