Rules Update, April 2025

by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)

7th April 2025

Hello, Star Trek players! Today is the first Monday of the month, which is the regularly scheduled day for rules updates.

If you just want to read the updates raw, here's the document:the April 2025 Recent Rulings Document.

This month's changes are pretty light. However, we are issuing some major reminders this month, and you will definitely want to take a look at them. Some of them may break your decks!

This Month's Changes

This month, we focused on releasing a couple of rulings previously promised.

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Oof!

The new wording of Oof! has a small ambiguity in it, which can matter in certain cases. In the first function, the wording can be read as "each copy... they have [which has been] removed from this game" (which is what we intended) but some players read it as, "each copy... opponent has removed from this game." This second interpretation is a bit pernicious, since it would require you to track who specifically removed each copy of Amanda, Kevin, and/or Q2 from the game, an extra layer of tracking that nobody needs. Since both interpretations are completely plausible as a matter of grammar and context, we felt it appropriate to issue a ruling clarifying that we meant the first one. You do NOT have to track WHO removed each copy of Amanda/Kevin/Q2 from the game. The Glossary now says so, and, as usual when we discover an ambiguity, we will consider Oof! in the future for a clarifying correction to fix the gametext.

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Respond to Distress Call

An argument was made last year on the forums that this card's "double requirements" bonus could be met by sending any combination of 4 Honor + Treachery (instead of Honor x4 OR Treachery x4). As the forum thread established (through a considerable amount of math), this is a plausible interpretation. Another plausible interpretation, however, is that, since the mission can only be solved in the first place by (MEDICAL + ENGINEER + Honor x2) OR (MEDICAL + ENGINEER + Treachery x2), having "double requirements" means having either Honor x4 or Treachery x4, no mixing-and-matching. The Rules Committee today confirms our temporary ruling that the second interpretation is the correct way to read this card. (This resolution also avoids certain confusing side effects for Establish Trade Route.) Once again, since the ambiguity seems real, we will consider the card a candidate for future clarifying correction.

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Probes Look At All (and Only!) Printed Icons

Q: Is a Kai Winn affected by Comfort Women a good probe for Promenade Shops (because she's )?

A: No. The probing rules have been revised to consider only printed icons. This seems to have always been implicit in the way probing was discussed and ruled on, but, as some smart players pointed out, it wasn't actually in the rulebook. Now it is.

Important Rules Reminders

"At Any Time" Means "Unless Another Action Is In Progress"

Fal-Tor-Pan reads (in part): "At any time, if top card of your discard pile is a Vulcan personnel, you may place it here." A deck circulated briefly last year which used Smooth As An Android's Bottom to discard Vulcans to the discard pile, then immediately moved them to Fal-Tor-Pan. This was not legal.

Prior to its errata, Smooth As An Android's bottom would place multiple Vulcans on top of your discard pile as part of its resolution. As the final step in its resolution, however, Smooth itself is discarded. Smooth was then the top card of the discard pile. Since the Vulcans were no longer atop the discard pile, Fal-Tor-Pan couldn't touch them. (This is why Vulcan players who get their ships destroyed are always careful to put the ship card and equipment cards into the discard pile BEFORE the personnel aboard!) The only way the trick could work was if Fal-Tor-Pan could save your Vulcans while Smooth was still resolving.

Fal-Tor-Pan says "at any time." In ordinary English, "at any time" might be understood as literally any time, regardless of timing. However, as Rulebook 6.5.1 clarifies: "Even a card that plays (or activates) 'at any time' may not interrupt another action in progress, unless it suspends play or is a valid response to that action." Fal-Tor-Pan does not suspend play and does not mention Smooth As An Android's Bottom, so it is not a direct response to Smooth being played. Therefore, you cannot use Fal-Tor-Pan to interrupt the Smooth action while Smooth is still in progress. You can activate Fal-Tor-Pan right after Smooth is discarded... but, of course, by then, it's too late. Think of "at any time" as working at the same "speed" as a normal [Int] Interrupt like Awaken: you can play it in all phases of any player's turn, but not in the middle of some other action.

This issue was resolved for Fal-Tor-Pan + Smooth, because Smooth recently received errata. However, we foresaw the possibility that you clever players might try to recreate the Fal-Tor-Pan + Smooth deck using Mutation instead of Smooth. This occasioned a gentle reminder to the community: this does not work under the rules! Don't do it, or your poor Vulcans'katras may be lost forever!

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Exchanged Cards Are Not "Played" (But Do "Enter Play")

Holoprogram: The Voyager Encounter allows you to exchange certain Voyager personnel for similar Alternate Universe Voyager personnel in your hand. This is really neat. But does your deck have permission to do it? We surveyed existing decks and found that many decks seem to be using The Voyager Encounter in a way that doesn't follow the rules.

To put any Alternate Universe card into the game, you need a card that gives you permission to do that. Some cards, like Dyson Sphere Door, grant permission to "seed" Alternate Universe cards. However, exchanging is not seeding, so this doesn't work for The Voyager Encounter. Other cards grant permission to "play" Alternate Universe cards. However, exchanging is not a card play, so this doesn't work for The Voyager Encounter, either. Many cards, like Temporal Vortex, grant permission to "seed and play" Alternate Universe cards... but, since we've already established that exchanging is neither seeding nor playing, that doesn't help, either.

The only legal way to bring an Alternate Universe card into the game through an exchange like The Voyager Encounter (or a regular persona exchange) is with a card that expressly allows you to "exchange" your Alternate Universe cards, or, alternatively, a card that broadly allows your Alternate Universe cards to "enter play." Exchanging is a form of entering play, so that broad wording covers exchanges.

In the current game, there are no Alternate Universe-enabler cards that specifically mention "exchanges," and only one card (Alternate Universe Door) that expressly allows Alternate Universe cards to "enter play."

Therefore, it is not legal to use the exchange function on The Voyager Encounter (or any persona swap) without an open Alternate Universe Door in play. Space-Time Portal, Temporal Micro-Wormhole, Temporal Conduit, and other similar cards will not do the trick. Only the original Alternate Universe Door will do.

Rules is still discussing whether this is too subtle a distinction to be sustainable in the current game. Meanwhile, Balance and Design are discussing whether it kneecaps The Voyager Encounter too heavily (and whether Voyager Encounter players might benefit from a bespoke doorway that supports their special use-case). However, as things stand today, this is the clear rule of the game, and we are not altering it. If you want to exchange Alternate Universe cards (whether through The Voyager Encounter or persona swaps), you must have an open Alternate Universe Door to enable it.

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Gaps in Normal Space and "Flying By"

According to the Rulebook, flying from one spaceline location to another works like this:

• Step 1: Announce your ship, starting location, and final destination.
• Step 2: Calculate the amount of RANGE that move will use.
• Step 3: The ship moves directly from the starting location to its final destination. It "flies by" (or "warps past") the locations between, but without stopping at them. It is never present at those middle locations.

However, in practice, many players do not actually move their ships like this at the table. Many players move their ships one mission at a time. First they move to the adjacent mission, then they move to the next adjacent location, and so on down the spaceline, stopping at each individual location. For the most part, this is fine! Most cards don't care whether you "warp past" a location or not, players still get to their final destinations safe and sound, and it often seems easier to count the RANGE up one mission at a time, rather than all at once.

However, Gaps In Normal Space throws a spanner into those works. For a player who is moving a ship "by the rulebook," it's pretty easy to avoid most Gaps In Normal Space: you start on one side of the Gaps, you announce that you are moving from your current location to the mission on the other side, you calculate the needed RANGE, and boom! You "warp past" the Gaps. However, for players who move one mission at a time, and who don't understand "warping past," Gaps can be a big problem, because there seems to be no way to get across without having your ship move into the gap along the way!

Just remember that, as long as you have the RANGE to reach the location across the gaps, you can "jump to warp" and fly right past the Gaps without moving to them, stopping at them, or otherwise triggering them. We hope that helps everyone avoid any difficulty with Gaps, but will continue to explain this rule when we see players struggling with it!

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. Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!

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