Rules Update, February 2022

by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)

7th February 2022

Happy February! Today is the first Monday of the month,a day for a regularly scheduled rules update!

If you just want to know about the functional changes, I've highlighted them in bold blue font.

The Big News: Look At Your Discard Pile. (No, Really!)

Last June, we asked you what rule you hated. You gave a lot of good and interesting answers (and I took notes on all of them!), but one rule stood out above the rest as the Most Hated Rule of 2021: "You may not look through cards in any player's discard pile unless a card allows you to." A lot of community members wanted that rule to die in a fire.

Now, we don't change rulesjust because a few people on the TrekCC forums ask us to. But forum discussions can lead us to take a second look at rules we haven't paid much attention to lately. That's what happened here. We did a little research.

When theStar Trek CCG was launched, your discard pile was face down, just like your draw deck. There's a pretty standard convention in most card games,Trek included: face down cards are secret. Face up cards are public. So, when someone asked Tom Braunlich in February 1995, "Can I look through the cards in my discard pile?" Braunlich looked at this face down discard pile and quite naturally answered, "No, you cannot look through cards in any player's discard pile unless a card allows you to." They're face down! Obviously they're supposed to be secret!

In December 1996, Decipher flipped the discard pile. From now on, discard piles would be face up. However, while they changed the discard pile, they did not change Braunlich's prior ruling about whether you could look through it. This may have been due to a desire not to reverse rulings that "worked" during a period of growing rules instability. We don't really know.

What we do know is that this odd situation persisted to this day. Decipher had a pile of face up, exposed cards on the table, and nevertheless nobody was allowed to look at them... except sometimes. (Yeah I'm lookin' at you, Fal-tor-Pan.) This violates the reasonable expectations of players that they're allowed to look at face up cards. To put it charitably, it is... unclear how widely this odd rule is actually enforced here in 2022. There was evidence the community hated it.

So today's big rule change:face up cards are public information. You can look at your discard piles now.

Closely related, we are also today reversing a mid-2010s ruling regarding Q's Tent: Civil War.

Q's Tent: Civil War includes 13 face up cards. Many players reasonably believed that those cards were public information. At the start of the game, you'd sit down at the table, plop down your Civil War Tent, and your opponent would get to quickly look through your Civil War Tent to see which Referee cards you had. That was Design's intention for Q's Tent: Civil War, it was the intention of the card's creator, and it was the explicit desire of then-Director Charlie Plaine. However, the Rules Committee at the time (who were being harassed by a young rules lawyer on the public boards) reluctantly ruled the opposite: Q's Tent: Civil War cards are in a side deck, therefore they are secret, therefore nobody can look at the cards, not even the face up ones.

However, in light of today's rule change, this ruling no longer makes sense. Face up cards are public information. That means anyone gets to look through your discard pile. And it means anyone gets to look through the face up cards in your Q's Tent: Civil War.

As a side effect of this change, we've removed a rule that said you have to announce after the doorway phase that you are using a Mission II and give your opponent an opportunity to cut your shuffled mission pile.You no longer need to specifically announce that you are using a Mission II. The Mission II is considered face-down while in your mission pile.You should always offer your opponent an opportunity to cut your shuffled mission pile regardless.That's just basic card courtesy.

What Isn't Covered In Today's Rule Change

Many people in that June 2021 thread asked us to make it possible for a player to look throughall the cards in her own Q's Tent, including the face down cards, at any time. Looking through face down cards in your Tent has always been unambiguously illegal. (We have heard tell that many people do it anyway.) We are sympathetic to the idea, and we aren't keen on keeping rules in the rulebook if nobody has any interest in enforcing them. But we weren't able to write a clean rule to fix the problem, so we are leaving it unchanged.

If you want to look through the face down cards in your Q's Tents, that's going to require errata to Q's Tent. Let us know in the discussion thread if that's something you'd like us to look into. For now, you still cannot look through the face down cards in your Q's Tent, unless a card allows or requires you to do so.

By the same token, there was some discussion in the June 2021 thread about making face down cards in other side decks (like the Battle Bridge side deck) public information, or at least information accessible to the player. After discussion, we think that's a bad idea, so we aren't doing it. There'd be way too many ways to manipulate upcoming battles or mission attempts if you could just peek at what's on top of a Q Flash. So face down cards in side decks are still secret information.

The June 2021 thread also led to some public discussion ofTrek's rules about hiding crews and away teams from your opponent. It has been argued that the "crew visibility" rules are more trouble than they are worth, and can be sidestepped by a determined opponent anyway. That's an interesting discussion, but it's a discussion for another day. We aren't changing those rules at this time. Your crews and Away Teams are still secret information. Treat them as face down cards.

We are aware that some players and playgroups play with face up crews and/or Away Teams (either in certain contexts or all the time). Legally speaking, those cards are face down and secret information. Practically speaking, we don't care how you manage your table, as long as both players are aware of the rules. The Glossary and Rulebook both continue to include strong language stating that crews and Away Teams are secret information, so we don't think there will be any confusion about this.

Monthly Rulings

There are no further monthly rulings this month.

Rules Soapbox: Why It All Takes So Dang Long

You may be thinking to yourself, "Man. The community asked for this change 8 months ago. What took so long? You changed like nine total words." This seems like as good a time as any for me to walk you through the timeline of a rule change.

May 2021:We asked the community "What Rule Can Die In A Fire?"

June 2021: The community answered: this discard pile visibility nonsense! I tabulated the results.

July/Aug/Sep 2021: We were swamped with other projects that were more urgent or already in progress, and couldn't start a new one.

October 2021:We started internal discussion of this discard pile thing. We also looked at the Q's Tent issue and the side decks question to see whether there was anything we could do about that. We researched the issue thoroughly, inspecting every single case in cards or rules where the words "face up" or "face down" were used. It's too easy to miss something and get bit in the butt if you don't do this. After a few weeks of discussion and research, we settled on this general approach.

November 2021: We drafted rules text for this change. At first, all seemed well! But then we ran into trouble: the way the new rule text dealt with two-sided cards was both incomplete and had bad side effects. (You would get to automatically know where a Mission II was in an opponent's mission pile, at all times, even after shuffling and cutting. Same for two-sided cards in the deck.) Worse, the peremptory phrasing we had included in our draft raised concerns with Design that we were closing off future design space. Back to the drawing board!

December 2021: We thought we were going to get the change out this month, but I had two funerals shortly after Christmas and I caught covid. I was simply unable to do the necessary work, and barely managed to eke out a perfunctory "No Rules Update" article after the New Year.

January 2022: We thought about a few different ways to deal with two-sided cards that wouldn't create the issues that derailed us in November. We batted around some complicated ideas, we read the Organized Play Guide and the CC's current card sleeving policy, we talked a bit about what other cards games do, and finally stumbled on the simple solution we ended up using. Re-drafted, got approcal, done!

Late January 2022:After I internally posted our draft RRD, a couple of people outside the R.C. asked some pretty reasonable questions about it... questions that the document itself didn't give clear answers to. Meanwhile, the R.C. noticed that I'd included the wrong text in the draft document. I'd almost published the bad version from November! Normally, if anything's wrong with a draft RRD, the item is punted to the next month for further discussion and cleanup. But these turned out to be simple enough to address, and a flurry of last-minute corrections got us to a finished document just in time.

So, yeah, this was a simple change. But writing it, coming to a consensus about it, smoothing out all the bugs, and getting the text in shape took some doing!

Now, I'm not laying this just so you'll appreciate your wonderful anonymous Rules Committee members more. (Well... okay, a little bit that.) I also think explaining our process might be interesting to some of you. (I love process!) Above all, I'm trying to show why the Rules Committee so rarely steps into daily Rules Questions threads -- even the ones that end in some degree of ambiguity and a request for an official ruling. We do tend to write those down. But, even when there's clear community support for something (like there was here), it just takes gobs of time to make even small changes or clarifications to the game's rules. So, in general, you are better off asking your T.D..

Special Thanks

Big ups to Jarrod Cafaro (Takket) this month. He has once again updated the Dilemma Resolution Guide, an invaluable player resource, with all the latest dilemmas. The Rules Committee hasn't been able to keep the DRG fully up-to-date since Kathy McCracken left, but Takket has been showing us how it's done.

See You Space Cowboy...

Thanks for reading! As always, please let us know if you see any errors, typos, or obsolete text in the rules documents. Chief Programmer Markus Eberlein PM's me at least one every month, and I am very grateful to him for it.

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 you're not, we want to hear that, too. Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!

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