Happy August! Today is the first Monday of the month, which is the scheduled day for rules updates.
There are no functional changes this month.
The Recent Rulings Document is also pretty slim, so I'll go over that quick, then use the extra space at the end of the column to tell you about some of the other things we're working on.
Here's what's covered in this month's Recent Rulings Document.
Card exchanges from sources other than your hand
Credit where it's due: Enabran (Martin F. of Austria) asked us several months ago how Macias's exchange worked. The exchanging cards Glossary entry only discussed exchanging cards from your hand. He was right! The rules simply didn't account for the existence of cards like Macias and Borum.
We tweaked the exchanging cards rule slightly to account for these cards. They work the way everyone has always played them; it's just that the rules actually cover them now.
Glossary to Rulebook: battle
There are five Glossary entries related to battle: battle, battle - ship, battle - personnel, battle - attack restrictions, and battle - ship - multiple targets. As of February 2021 (before the current wave of Glossary-to-Rulebook pushes), these entries combined accounted for 3.2% of the Glossary.
They were also completely duplicative with the Rulebook chapter on Battle, so they weren't necessary and have now been deleted. While we were working on it, we added some polish to the Battle chapter of the Rulebook (which hadn't been substantially touched since very early in the very first draft of the New Rulebook, in 2012 or 2013).
In the discussion thread attached to this article, I may post some statistics about how the Glossary has changed since the Glossary-to-Rulebook project got underway.
Thanks to everyone who responded to my Friday Question about action and timing rules. The discussion was great and went in some directions that I personally found very surprising. For anyone who missed it: the Rules Committee is working on the first major overhaul to actions and timing rules in 20+ years and I was looking for some feedback. The thread is still open for comment, and we read everything.
It has been brought to our attention that there is a potential conflict in previous rulings. On the one hand, the Rules Committee and various tournament directors have informally ruled (more than once) that you can download an incompatible ship with Reunite Legends by simply playing the ship undocked at the same location as the outpost, because that counts as "present." This ruling supports a fairly popular (not to mention clever) trick where players download ships (usually the U.S.S. Enterprise-A) into the Delta Quadrant to commit Shenanigans. We like seeing that cleverness in the community.
On the other hand, it was recently observed that there is an obscure rule in the Glossary docking rules which states, "When a space facility allows a ship to report there, the ship must report docked." (The Rulebook's version of this rule is even more blunt: "When a ship is reported to a facility in space, it reports docked.") It is not immediately obvious how this rule fits with our prior rulings on Reunite Legends. Is there a conflict? If so, how is it best resolved? Why does this rule exist in the first place? The Rules Committee is looking into it as part of a cluster of closely related problems involving Staging Ground, Son'a Observatory, Station docking rules, targeting, and presence in space. We are not ready to resolve anything at this time, and we are not reversing our prior rulings today (even informal ones), but we will ultimately adopt the simplest and most intuitive set of rules we can for all this stuff.
I mention it here because I want to give all Reunite Legends users fair warning that there is a possibility that this fun trick will stop working in the future. (I've also been made aware that Project Rogue, the first set of Motion Pictures Block, is closely scrutinizing Reunite Legends for their own independent Design-based reasons, but that's an entirely separate inquiry.)
We spent a lot of time and energy this month getting Project Quarantine ready for what Design hopes (fingers crossed) will be its final round of playtesting. You may be familiar with Project Quarantine from the recent Blue Crash threads, or from the last Project Status Update. It was a TON of work; kudos to all the Rules Committee members who hung in there as our internal debate over the word "experience" stretched into its sixth week. The set is shaping up to be a big win for simplifying the game's rules while maintaining the game's complexity. When Quarantine reaches the community, a lot of old rules are going to be reprinted on cards rather than hidden in obscure Glossary entries and ancient rules supplements.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to tell us on the forums what you think of everything we've done this month. Hopefully you're happy, but, if you're not, we want to hear that, too. Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!
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