Rules Update, June 2025

by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)

2nd June 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 housekeeping.

This Month's "Changes"

"-Related"

There were a number of Glossary entries that matched the Rulebook entry for "related" things (like "capturing-related" and "Empok Nor-related"), often verbatim. Since we try to avoid maintaining identical rules in two places, we converted the Glossary entries into Rulebook links.

Cards that "Seed Like" Dilemmas are (still) Dilemmas

For many years, there was a legal difference between cards that seed "like" dilemmas and cards that seed "as" dilemmas. This was very confusing, so, five years ago, we simplified this. (Read the full explanation in our August 2020 update.) We fixed all the relevant Glossary entries and added a new section to the Rulebook to explain the rule.

However, we did not realize that there was already a sidebar, elsewhere in the Rulebook, that parroted the Glossary's explanation for theold rule. Since we didn't know about this sidebar, we didn't delete it.

Surprisingly, it took five years for someone to notice. However, a member of the STCCG-GEMP team, working to implement the game's rules into the GEMP engine, noticed that the two sections of the Rulebook contradicted and sent us an inquiry. We finally removed the long-outdated sidebar this month.

This is a good example of why we try to avoid maintaining identical rules in multiple places (like the "relatedness" rules above). When we have multiple places to update, we tend to miss some, which makes the game more confusing for everyone.

No Rules Supplement forDramatis Personae

We're sure you're as excited as we are for the impending release of Dramatis Personae! The Rules Committee sometimes releases supplementary rules on the day a set releases.

Not this month! The Dramatis Personae design team allowed us to make the necessary changes last month (mainly, adding the new Xindi affiliation to the rules documents, making it officially legal for The Book), so the Rules Committee will not be sending out any more official updates until our next regular update!

(I cannot for the life of me remember whether July is a "blackout month" this year or not, where we avoid official updates to protect major tournaments. Our next update may be in July or September. August is definitely blacked out for Worlds.)

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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