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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
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#566291
So let's say I'm running a new Q-Flash with a couple dozen cards in stock. Let's also say that my opponent hits a Q: Enter the Supernova and has a flash of, say 6 cards which all end up stacked on top of my Q-Flash. Next, they hit Q and fail.

Here's my question: I get to download 2 [Q] cards for my opponent to face. Can those cards come from those stacked on the top of my flash or can they *only* come from "inside" the flash and the ones on top are stuck there until I cycle out?

I know how my 2e brain would handle it, but I also know that I'm not playing 2e in this scenario...

Thanks!
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#566295
I think the closest precedent would be Storage Compartment Door... but I can't recall it ever coming up.

I'd lean to yes, given how side decks are kinda defined as a big Tuvix-type monstrosity of both deck and discard?
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
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#566298
Under the general rules for side decks (which used to include the Q-Continuum side deck), the answer to this seems unclear to me, because it was not super clear whether the face-up cards in the side deck were part of the "deck" or some kind of annex. This has surely been asked with respect to [DL] Tactics, but I don't know what the answer has been in the past.

Under the new rules for Q-Continuum side deck specifically, I think the answer is fairly clear: no. The cards atop the Q-Flash are not part of the Q-Continuum side deck; they are atop the Q-Continuum side deck awaiting reshuffling back into the deck. Until then, they're no more part of the side deck than your cards sitting atop Learning Curve.

...kinda too bad. Could be fun to recur a Q-card you just saw on the last Q-Flash!
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 - Gamma Quadrant
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#566371
BCSWowbagger wrote: Fri Nov 12, 2021 6:11 pm Under the general rules for side decks (which used to include the Q-Continuum side deck), the answer to this seems unclear to me, because it was not super clear whether the face-up cards in the side deck were part of the "deck" or some kind of annex. This has surely been asked with respect to [DL] Tactics, but I don't know what the answer has been in the past.

Under the new rules for Q-Continuum side deck specifically, I think the answer is fairly clear: no. The cards atop the Q-Flash are not part of the Q-Continuum side deck; they are atop the Q-Continuum side deck awaiting reshuffling back into the deck. Until then, they're no more part of the side deck than your cards sitting atop Learning Curve.

...kinda too bad. Could be fun to recur a Q-card you just saw on the last Q-Flash!
From the rulebook:

side deck
Side decks are optional customized decks of cards separate from, and in addition to, your normal game deck. Each side deck is shuffled and placed face down on the table, then activated or "opened" during the doorway seed phase by a Doorway card. This Doorway card is placed face up on top of the side deck and counts as one of your seed cards (the face-down cards in the side deck are not seed cards and do not count toward the 30/30 rule). The five types of side decks are the Q-Continuum, Q's Tent, Battle Bridge, Tribble side deck, and Dilemma side decks. You may use any or all of these side decks in the same game, but you may have only one side deck of each type.

Discarded cards from your Q-Continuum side deck, Battle Bridge side deck, and Tribble side deck do not go to your discard pile, but instead are discarded by placing them face up under the side deck. (When face-up cards are encountered in one of those side decks, shuffle the face-up cards and place them face down under the seeded doorway.)

They are placed face up "here" but the rulebook says they are placed face up beneath the deck. As "here" has no meaning for a side deck doorway, the rulebook controls bc there isn't any conflict and they are faceup in the side deck. When you go to download, it/they are in the deck to be found.
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
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#566384
Hoss-Drone wrote: Sun Nov 14, 2021 5:46 pm They are placed face up "here" but the rulebook says they are placed face up beneath the deck. As "here" has no meaning for a side deck doorway, the rulebook controls bc there isn't any conflict and they are faceup in the side deck. When you go to download, it/they are in the deck to be found.
Oh, that passage was supposed to be deleted last month. Curses. I did say in the article that it was a complicated overhaul and there was a good chance we'd / I'd missed a spot or two, but nevertheless a bummer to see it in reality.

I guess, then, feel free to enjoy this trick (assuming your local T.D. agrees with your interpretation) for the next *checks calendar* three weeks, until the next rules update, when this passage will go away and my earlier reply will be unambiguously correct.
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 - Gamma Quadrant
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#566386
BCSWowbagger wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 12:24 am
Hoss-Drone wrote: Sun Nov 14, 2021 5:46 pm They are placed face up "here" but the rulebook says they are placed face up beneath the deck. As "here" has no meaning for a side deck doorway, the rulebook controls bc there isn't any conflict and they are faceup in the side deck. When you go to download, it/they are in the deck to be found.
Oh, that passage was supposed to be deleted last month. Curses. I did say in the article that it was a complicated overhaul and there was a good chance we'd / I'd missed a spot or two, but nevertheless a bummer to see it in reality.

I guess, then, feel free to enjoy this trick (assuming your local T.D. agrees with your interpretation) for the next *checks calendar* three weeks, until the next rules update, when this passage will go away and my earlier reply will be unambiguously correct.
I take issue with this. Why carve out more exceptions and make things more complicated?!? The rulebook as it is right now makes the side decks all operate the same way and you're telling me you want to add complexity to do what? Curttail a few downloads out of a side deck that not everyone is going to use all the time? The entire point of downloading out of a side deck is to create strategy out of an otherwise random draw.

I do not look forward to having to explain YET ANOTHER seemingly arbitrary difference when i teach a new player the battle bridge vs the q-flash.

Booo. :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown:
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
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#566402
patrick wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 9:08 am Are there plans to give Battle Bridge Door the same treatment as Q-Flash?
Yes, and within the foreseeable future. Tribbles too.

(This, I trust, answers Kevin's inquiry as well. The goal is to remove complexity, not add it. That means cards should say what they do, without additional rules baggage. We have now accomplished that for the Q-Continuum; the others will come when the opportunity arises, which I hope means the window for this seemingly arbitrary difference will be brief. Neither I nor, to my knowledge, anyone else in Rules gives a single crap about this downloading from the discarded-face-up-side-deck-cards question one way or the other -- we have no interest in either curtailing or promoting it--only in making the Q-Flash side deck work as straightforwardly as possible, according to its own game text, so that we can easily extend the same rules to the other side-deck doorways when the time comes.)
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
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#566404
BCSWowbagger wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 2:06 pm
patrick wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 9:08 am Are there plans to give Battle Bridge Door the same treatment as Q-Flash?
Yes, and within the foreseeable future. Tribbles too.

(This, I trust, answers Kevin's inquiry as well. The goal is to remove complexity, not add it. That means cards should say what they do, without additional rules baggage. We have now accomplished that for the Q-Continuum; the others will come when the opportunity arises, which I hope means the window for this seemingly arbitrary difference will be brief. Neither I nor, to my knowledge, anyone else in Rules gives a single crap about this downloading from the discarded-face-up-side-deck-cards question one way or the other -- we have no interest in either curtailing or promoting it--only in making the Q-Flash side deck work as straightforwardly as possible, according to its own game text.)
So, I know 2e isn't 1e, but when you download dilemmas from your dilemma pile in 2e, you select any dilemma from either the face down or face up portion, then shuffle everything back together with no face up cards.

That's how I always understood it to work with Q-Flash, BBD, and SCD. Face down or face up, it's all one pile.

Now with NeuQ-Flash, the card indeed says what it does, but I'd submit that what it does is less dynamic and, frankly less "good" than the old version.

This is a substantive change, intentional or not, and I personally think that the new state is just worse than the previous state, even if it's easier to "understand"

Not putting that on Rules per se, as if this was intentional then it's a Design choice, but "face up on the bottom" made more intuitive sense to me even if it wasn't well explained on the card.

I'm all for rulebook and glossary economy, but let's make sure that the focus on that doesn't supersede making the best game we can.

:twocents:
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By Orbin (James Monsebroten)
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#566406
Armus wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 2:14 pm So, I know 2e isn't 1e, but when you download dilemmas from your dilemma pile in 2e, you select any dilemma from either the face down or face up portion, then shuffle everything back together with no face up cards.

That's how I always understood it to work with Q-Flash, BBD, and SCD. Face down or face up, it's all one pile.
Interestingly, my play group treated this the opposite way, so the new way of doing things matches the way we used to play them...

-James M
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
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#566407
Armus wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 2:14 pmThat's how I always understood it to work with Q-Flash, BBD, and SCD. Face down or face up, it's all one pile.
To my knowledge, it was never officially ruled one way or another. Personally, for me, it's never come up in a game; Tactics downloads are too rare in my neck of the woods, and I've literally never seen a Tribble download.

The (old) rules themselves were ambiguous, and intuitions were somewhat at cross-purposes -- it was perhaps intuitive that you would be able to download a card if it was in the side deck in any way, but then perhaps unintuitive that you would be able to download a card that was conceptually in a pseudo-discard pile. From the above posts, it sounds like different playgroups may have been playing this differently as a result -- not too surprising, since we find that happening fairly often even with black-letter rulebook law, but still a sign that this area of rules was unsettled.

So I don't think that what we have here is a substantive change, but rather the resolution of a previously-unrecognized ambiguity.

I suspect that, in practice, this issue will continue to come up only very rarely, but please do point it out to me here if/when it does! The First Edition Rules Manager welcomes complaints, especially when they affect games or new-player learning.

(I've also genuinely never heard that 2E rule about dilemma downloads! Very interesting!)
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#566408
BCSWowbagger wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 2:06 pm
patrick wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 9:08 am Are there plans to give Battle Bridge Door the same treatment as Q-Flash?
Yes, and within the foreseeable future. Tribbles too.

(This, I trust, answers Kevin's inquiry as well. The goal is to remove complexity, not add it. That means cards should say what they do, without additional rules baggage. We have now accomplished that for the Q-Continuum; the others will come when the opportunity arises, which I hope means the window for this seemingly arbitrary difference will be brief. Neither I nor, to my knowledge, anyone else in Rules gives a single crap about this downloading from the discarded-face-up-side-deck-cards question one way or the other -- we have no interest in either curtailing or promoting it--only in making the Q-Flash side deck work as straightforwardly as possible, according to its own game text, so that we can easily extend the same rules to the other side-deck doorways when the time comes.)
Only partially and not for the better. You are still introducing complexity and creating two classes of downloads. It was easy to teach "when you [DL] something, you can search anywhere that it could be" to a new player. Now I have to teach "except if it's not actually in a side deck at the time you download because these face up cards are not actually considered to be in the side deck while they are face up and sitting on that doorway".

You are also separating qflash, tribbles and BBD from the civil war tent that has face up cards underneath it that you will download from....

You are not making anything easier...you are just shifting what is harder so that you can slightly make the wording of the card more literal. BAD.

EDIT:. I just realized you are gonna have to also change the rulebook and glossary entries on "here". So again, you might be taking away a paragraph out of one section but you are taking about adding one more to two different other sections. Sounds like adding complexity when it's - 1 and +2.
Last edited by Hoss-Drone on Mon Nov 15, 2021 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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#566410
Hoss-Drone wrote: Mon Nov 15, 2021 3:26 pm You are also separating qflash, tribbles and BBD from the civil war tent that has face up cards underneath it that you will download from....
Q's Tent is already the odd duckling of side decks, because it's the one side deck that cards don't discard back to.
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 - Gamma Quadrant
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#566411
There's also the problem of on table. If I got a bbd or a flash on the table I know exactly what's going to happen in a live game - I'm gonna knock those cards right off the table with my elbow or my hand when I turn to reach for the pile....or fumble the whole thing setting the stack aside to get at underneath. One of my local players does it all the time.

There's so much here to not like that I'm shocked it's being considered.
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
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#566497
So having played with this new Q stuff last weekend, here's where I'm at with it:

[SD] On the whole, I'd call TTNE a success, maybe even a rousing success.

[SD] The New [Q] cards are strong. I got both the peekaboo and extra card play events to land multiple times and that information and extra resource can be very valuable.

[SD] The classic [Q] stuff is still good, and now with more shenanigans and more exposure, gets relatively better. There's enough good Q noise now to be playable.

[SD] Mandarin Bailiff is still low key one of the most consequential cards in the game. It's amazing how much the choice of whether or not to post bail can matter to the end result. Glad to see it back in action.

[SD] While I wasn't adversely impacted by it this time, the concerns about the top/bottom stack/ deck are valid. I could easily see not being able to download a key [Q] card because it's sitting on the doorway as something that becomes a total buzz kill. If there's one thing to "fix" it's this.

Take all of that for what it's worth.

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