Hoss-Drone wrote: ↑Wed Jul 20, 2022 10:09 am
Oh look, more yes vs no problems.....
I would argue that the rule on point boxes isn't specifically being overridden by card text and so the point box rule still applies. Otherwise why have the point box at all?
To James example:. I would say the card has never left the table. It was played and then went to the point box area.
This highlights my other problem I said in the other thread - "specific vs more general" can often be the eye of the beholder and is not really helpful in many situations.
To be clear: I think the
current rule is fairly clear, and we all (so far, at least) seem to agree with it. Cards trump rules, Q-Flash's specifics therefore trump the general bonus point rule (and the "only", in italics, should put all doubts to rest). Meanwhile, the bonus point rule was recently rewritten to explicitly allow some cards to "divert" point-box cards from the bonus point area, which Q-Flash appears to do, so clearly the rules support and even expect this. Finally, the
Gift of the Tormenter Glossary entry suggests how these cards should be read:
This card's specific statement that it is placed in a discard pile (even though it is a card) overrides the gametext that cards are placed face-up beneath Q-Flash.
This implies that Gift of the Tormenter (a card with a point box) would normally be placed beneath Q-Flash, if not for its unusual extra-specific diversion text.
So, under current rules with current cards, I think we're all in agreement: Mandarin Bailiff recycles into your Q-Continuum side deck. Correct? (It would go to your bonus point area if brought into play by some other means, such as
Beware of Q, so the point box is not wholly irrelevant.)
The questions that hoss-drone raises are pretty interesting, but (if I understand them correctly), they pertain only to the
old, pre-errata rules, which were decidedly less clear. Fortunately, there is no need for the Rules Committee to rule on old rules; we only support current rules. (Traditional-format players must make their own rulings on tough questions.) Still, it's an interesting question, so let's explore it a bit further.
Before the errata, players had to make a judgment: is the Q-Continuum "it goes back into the side deck" rule more specific than the bonus point area's "it goes to the bonus point area" rule? Players had to make this judgment because, instead of a card vs. a rule, this was a case of a rule vs. a rule. As hoss-drone says, specificity is a tricky concept to pin down, and the old rules were less helpful than the current rules.
The old bonus point rules said that they triggered when a card "resolves scoring," not when it "leaves play" (as it says today). Meanwhile, the old Q-Continuum rules said that they triggered when a card "is discarded or otherwise leaves the table" and not when it "leaves play". Did these old different wordings imply that they operated at different timings? Hoss also suggests that "leaves the table" is different from "leaving play," which is a colorable argument (why would Decipher use such a weird phrasing otherwise), except that it implies that your discard pile should not be on the table. (Did we play this wrong all those years? Were discard piles supposed to be under the table at our feet all along? Nah, I think we can dismiss this as just bad wording; Decipher likely meant "leave play," and that's what Q-Flash now accurately says.)
The old bonus point rules also make no mention of exceptions, which makes it very hard to determine under what circumstances it can be trumped (if any). This is precisely what caused the trouble with
ships (which have point boxes) and Federation Flagship: Recovered: the argument a while back was that the bonus point rule meant the Borg ships went to the bonus point area
before Federation Flagship could save them. The counter-argument was that card trumps rule, but relying on the Golden Rule can be an ugly crutch -- and not always one with an obvious answer anyway. And so the rule was revised to explicitly carve out exceptions to the bonus point area rule.
However, I still think the weight of evidence supports the idea that
icon cards with bonus point boxes returned to your Q-Flash, even under the old rules. The tipping-point argument for me is, again, the Gift of the Tormenter ruling, which read at the time:
Because it specifies that it is placed in a
discard pile, this card overrides the rule to
replace it face up beneath your Q-Continuum
side deck.
Again, GotT has a bonus point box, yet this Decipher ruling doesn't say that its text overrides the rule to put it in your bonus point area; it says the text overrides the rule to put it face-up beneath your Q-Continuum. So Decipher assumed that
cards with bonus point boxes were generally going under your Q-Continuum,
not to your points area, even under the older rules, pre-Q-Flash errata, when the answer was much much less clear.
Thus, the Q-Flash errata clarified the existing behavior, which was confusing, and many players seem not to have realized what the rule was -- but the Q-Flash errata did not introduce a change.
P.S. A follow-up question someone might ask: It's true that Mandarin Bailiff's bonus point box could be relevant if Bailiff is seeded with Beware of Q. But
Lemon-Aid can't do that, and the existence of Gift of the Tormentor ensures that
will
never be able to seed beneath missions without a Q-Flash the way
dilemmas can. So what gives? Why would Decipher put a point box on those cards instead of just saying "score points"?
The answer is deceptively simple: At the time Q-Continuum was developed, Decipher considered the bonus point "area" optional, a kind of annex to the discard pile (which could not yet be Regenerated, only Toff'd/Res-Q'd), that existed solely for player convenience. The Premiere Rulebook offers the idea lightly, very nearly in the tone of a suggestion. (The only reference is in the section on encountering dilemmas: "Set aside all bonus point cards you've scored as a reminder." In context, this seems to cover only dilemmas, not cards like
Particle Fountain.) It was later cards, and our own intense scrutiny of the rules as players, that caused the bonus point area to harden into an actual zone with well-defined, mandatory rules. And it wasn't actually until the CC era, with the errata to Kevin and Amanda to give them point boxes, that we really started to
lean on the bonus point area to remove certain cards from the discard pile.
So the expectation at the time the Q cards came out, then, was that it wouldn't even occur to anybody that the bonus point suggestion should override the clear rule that
icon cards return to your Q-Flash. Point boxes were used, I presume, because point boxes are pretty, and clear, and because cards in the game that scored points (at the time) nearly always had point boxes. The conflict came later, as the bonus point rule took on more teeth. (QC is the set where you start to see cracks in that foundation, with
Timicin and
Subsection Q omitting the point box -- something that I believe only
Interrogation had done previously, and even then only for lack of space.)
During the discussion over Fed Flag: Recovered, Rules discussed making the bonus point area fully optional (hearkening back to Decipher's early attitude toward it), but research showed that doing this would affect too many cards nowadays, so we opted to simply make it clear in the rules that the bonus point rule is overridden by explicit gametext.
There you go! More than you could possibly have wanted to know about this bit of rules, but I hope adequate to answer all questions anyone has about current
or former rules for Q-icon cards with bonus point boxes.