An anatomy of the development of the Q-Flash

Here was my big moment. I was about to do what so many Star Trek CCG fans had only dreamed of. I was going to playtest an expansion for the game -- Q-Continuum. I had already playtested A New Hope for Star Wars, but that set had been more straightforward and had less of an impact on the Star Wars playing field as a whole. Q-Continuum had a lot greater billing to live up to.

I was introduced to the two major game elements of the set, the side decks produced by the doorways Q's Tent and Q-Flash. Remarkably, Q's Tent has remained virtually unchanged from that playtest. Q-Flash, on the other hand, required a lot more work. The original wording on the Q-Flash card went something like this:

Place one atop Q-Continuum side deck during the seed phase. Q-Continuum is now open and in play. OR Seed under any mission like a dilemma. Any crew or Away Team encountering this Q-Flash must experience one card from opponent's Q-Continuum. OR Stock in deck to play on a crew or Away Team which experiences one card from your Q-Continuum.

That's right, one card. The Q-Icon cards themselves varied widely in power. A card similar to Amanda's Parents, a minor impediment to Amanda Rogers, was on the weak side. Another card enhanced Away Team battles. On the other hand, one card, "Q Toast" (the image now seen as "Lemon-Aid"), scattered the entire crew or Away Team across every planet location randomly! This struck my opponent in one game, forcing him to spend the rest of the game scrambling to catch up.

The cost of this mechanism was also too high for the benefits. A card like Amanda's Parents was weak if it took up a whole dilemma slot. Most people would rather put a dilemma in that slot. Also, the Q-Continuum deck itself was random, meaning that even if you had a card you wanted your opponent to come up with, there was no guarantee he would ever hit it. However, from that playtest, two rules were laid down about how the Q-Continuum should work:

1) It should be random. The Q-Continuum is meant to represent the workings of Q, flashing in, turning people into dogs, and leaving just as quick. You never knew what to expect from Q, and this mechanism should represent that.

2) Q could not repeat himself. Again, Q is always doing something different, never trying the same trick twice. You can probably see by now how this point was incorporated into the final version of the Q-Continuum.

3) It should be useful. Nobody wants to play with a mechanism that doesn't help them win.

The problem with Rule #1 was that if the design were too random, you ran into the usefulness problem; how many players would play with a completely random mechanism that had just as good a chance of benefiting the player as hindering his opponent (many of the original Q-Icon cards had a global effect on play). Rule #2 painted us into the corner of effectively making each Q-Icon card unique. Why would you play with more than one copy of a card that would have no effect if it were duplicated? And Rule #3 was the toughest of all. In short, that rule said that the Q-Flash had to work.

Back to the Drawing Board

When you see the finished product, it's easy to link the beginnings of the card (which you see above) to the final product and to wonder why such a leap didn't come naturally. However, it wasn't for several days after that playtest that a key in the development of the Q-Flash occurred. What if you experienced multiple Q-Icon cards? As it was, a player would not expect to face more than 10 Q-Flashes a game, tops. This meant only 10 Q-Icon cards would ever be needed. That's not much of a side deck.

Thinking literally, the Decipher crew wondered what actually happened on the show when Q appeared. He would typically appear, present some challenge for the crew, and then leave. However, after he left,Picard would almost be glad for his interference, because he had literally taught them a useful lesson in life.

The closest thing Star Trek CCG had to "learning lessons in life" was scoring points, so the new proposal for the Q-Flash was this: When a Q-Flash is encountered (as a dilemma -- the notion of playing one from your hand didn't last long), Q randomly selects up to five personnel from each player (or all personnel if a player has fewer than five). You then encounter five cards from one player's Q-Continuum. Each card lists a way to score "Q-points" (different from normal game points). The team with the most points "won" and scored real points equal to the difference in "Q-points."

For example, a card picturing Q in African safari gear (as seen at the end of "Qpid") might say, "Score one Q-Point for each Archaeology present." A picture of the crew engaging in a battle such as in "Hide and Q" versus Vicious Animal Things might allow you to forfeit (kill) one personnel to gain 5 Q-Points. Another card might give 3 Q-Points to the player with the fewest cards in their hand.

This system was only briefly considered, as it didn't seem to fit perfectly into the notion of exactly how Q acts. He doesn't abduct two teams, one of Romulans, and one of humans, and run them against each other in some bizarre test (see TOS's "The Savage Curtain" for that). Also, if the only thing you could do from a Q-Flash is score points, it would get old quick. But the seed for multiple Q-Icon cards had been sown in the fertile minds of Product Development.

Putting it all together

One of Decipher's goals is always to produce new cards and ideas for counteracting abused strategies. One of the most-often used strategies is "overloading," blowing through dilemmas and missions with a mega-Away Team of ten to fifteen personnel. Somewhere along the line of development of the Q-Flash, something clicked and the Decipher PD crew came up with the key idea -- what if the number of Q-Icon cards you experienced in a Q-Flash was linked to the size of your Away Team or ship's crew?

This was the crowning glory of the mechanism. This would force a large Away Team to go through double-digit "mini-dilemmas" in the form of the Q-Icon cards, a hefty deterrent. Each Q-Icon card would either have a minor function that would useful a majority of the time, or a major function that would be useful a minority of the time. Also, it allowed us to make several anti-Federation cards you would not normally put in your deck, if you didn't want to assume that your opponent was playing Federation, as well as specific cards to combat Ressikan Flute, Amanda Rogers, and of course, Wesley Crusher. All of these cards could be added to your strategy at a minimal cost. Hence, Rules #1 and #3 were satisfied -- a random, yet useful mechanism, from a cost-benefit ratio.

Just like with your normal deck, though, there were undoubtedly going to be cards you favored over others. We didn't want to make the Q-Icon cards unique, but also realized that they could be abused in multiples. Also, Rule #2 forced us into non-repetition in our Q-Flash. So, just as normal dilemmas couldn't be used in multiples, it was ruled that Q-Icon cards would also not be effective in multiples within the same Q-Flash. This meant that from Q-Flash to Q-Flash, the cards could repeat, but each Q-Flash itself would present unique cards. Since duplicates would count against the total number of Q-Icon cards repeated, the player overusing such cards would be penalized for that strategy.

And so, the Q-Flash was all but complete. Several days were spent tweaking the individual Q-Icon cards so that their power level would be right, and the players have been the judges of whether that power was correctly fixed. Whether you use a Q-Flash or not, we hope you can appreciate all the work that goes into a major game element such as this, and that the mental leap from Point A to Point B in card development isn't always at warp speed.

For real Q-Flash strategy, read Q's earlier article "The Flash."