Rules Update, May 2025

by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)

5th May 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 May 2025 Recent Rulings Document.

No substantive changes this month, just our usual task of endless housekeeping. (Our post-Bookend docket remains very full, but we didn't get most of it finished in this relatively short month.)

This Month's Changes

Countdowns are Nullified

There was a discrepancy in the rules between the dilemma rules (which stated that dilemmas with a countdown are nullified when countdown expires) and the countdown rules (which stated that cards with a countdown are merely discarded when countdown expires). This raised small ambiguities about whether a card discarded due to an expiring countdown had been "nullified," which matters for a small handful of cards (like Red Alert!). We clarified the rules to make clear what we've always publicly said: the expiration of a countdown is a nullification, for cards that care about that.

"Showing" Generally Defined

Hero of the Empire uses the word "showing" for affiliation icons, but the Glossary defined this term solely for point boxes. We've moved it into its own entry. A card "shows" its printed features (and only those features), ignoring all changes that may have occurred during gameplay.

Xindi

Added Xindi.

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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