Now that Q-Continuum is out, many people are again asking me for "factoids," like those I compiled for previous Star Trek Customizable Card Game expansion sets.
"Factoids" are interesting tidbits of humorous (hopefully) "behind-the scenes" info which, statistics show, can improve your enjoyment of the expansion set by up to 11%.* * (Your results may vary. Void where prohibited.)
It is as delightful to design these cards as it is to play with them, especially for a wild set like Q-Continuum. I hope I can communicate some of that insider flavor to you. Often, knowing the background of a card increases one's appreciation of its subtleties. So, I hope you enjoy these stories as much as we did! ...
MORE ON LORE
A popular aspect of the cards is the lore. We always try to choose interesting info tidbits, and this set is no exception. But some things in the lore are subtle. Here are just a few examples of interest...
Sonya Gomez - We received many player requests for this personnel card. The card lore, "Has total recall" is a pun that refers to the actress's role in the Schwarzenegger flick, Total Recall, as the female mutant with three ...umm....well... you know. (She also popped up in a recent episode of "Lois and Clark" by the way.)
Katherine Pulaski - Her lore says, "Chief Medical Officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise in 2365. Dislikes transporters and turbolifts." The part about disliking transporters comes from the episode "Unnatural Selection, " while the reference to disliking turbolifts comes from an episode of L.A. Law.
Mr. Homn - His lore begins, "Silent, imbibing, lurching, uttaberry-eating, faithful servant of Lwaxana Troi...". 'Lurching' refers not only to his manner (he seems to rock back and forth slightly in each scene, as if on a sea cruise), but also to the fact that the actor played Lurch in the recent Addams Family movies.
Space - The lore on this unusual mission card is simply, "The final frontier...", which of course is a nice homage to the starting voice-over of Star Trek episodes.
Originally the lore on this card was, "As of 2370 the Federation had charted 19% of the galaxy, most of it empty space." I always thought that was good lore, a "statistic" that I often quote in discussions of Star Trek with various people. I've wanted to use it on a card for a long time, and this was the place. However, when it came down to final proofreading, we could not find the source for this information anywhere. I was certain I'd heard this stated in an episode, but couldn't find any reference in the Encyclopedia. I spent hours combing the episodes in which I thought the quotation might be found, but I finally gave up. Because we must be confident about the information used, we decided to replace this statistic when we were unable to confirm it.
Naturally, as soon as the set went off to the printer I stumbled across it while beginning work on Holodeck Adventures. Wesley says it to Salia (in "The Dauphin") in the scene where they visit Rousseau V in the holodeck. Good ol' Wes!
Mona Lisa -Part of this artifact's lore reads, "Stolen from the Louvre in 2243. Recovered from the collection of Kivas Fajo in 2366." As with the lore on "Space" (see above), this lore information had been in my files for a long time. However, in the final analysis I couldn't find the source from which I had taken this information. I'm still looking! In this case, however, we thought it was critical and submitted it to Paramount anyway. They approved it, so, I guess if it wasn't canonical before, it is now!
Jenice Manheim - Those of us who can remember watching the original Star Trek when it wasn't in reruns know that Dr. Manheim's wife was played by Michelle Phillips, who during the late 1960s was a singer in the enormously popular group The Mamas and The Papas.
For a long time we wanted to work this into the card somehow. We tried a lot of puns in the lore and game text. "Founded a famous parental organization" was in the lore for a long time, but was eventually dropped. My favorite example, in the game text, was, "Nullifies Maman Picard and Echo Papa 607 where present." :-) We decided this was too blatant, however, especially when Jerry Darcy spoke up for those of our market under age 30 by opining that it was silly. Therefore, we ended up with the current game text, which reads in part, "Ressikan Flute is limited to 4 Music personnel." This not only is a hidden reference to the famous singing quartet, but also is a strong function, working against the overly-strong Ressikan Flute artifact, thus making her a very useful personnel.
Klingon Painstik - The latter part of its lore reads, "Can make a two-ton Rectyne monopod jump 5 meters." To my mind, this is a perfect example of card lore! It seems so straightforward and scientific, yet it is so totally fictitious and meaningless. It only makes sense if your imagination is deeply within the Star Trek world - the kind of thing people in the 24th century might say to each other using the knowledge everyone is assumed to have then, though it is gibberish now. And the episode writers didn't even bother to give us any more information, choosing instead to leave it mysterious. (Try to imagine it!) At least this is the argument I made in a fight to keep this lore in, as several on the PD team thought it was a non-sequitur and meaningless. It eventually squeaked through. :-)
Drought Tree - Even though it doesn't say it on the card, this tree is the one in the Ressik community on Kataan, in the episode "Inner Light." The quotation is the marvelously vivid melancholy dedication speech spoken by Bataii. Would only that all politicians be so concise!
Paxan Wormhole - At the end of the episode "Clues", featuring the xenophobic Paxans, the crew's memory is wiped of the incident, except for Data who was sworn to secrecy. This presents a problem for the card, since it would not be logically possible to have a "mission" from Starfleet to investigate the Paxans, who are theoretically unknown and unsuspected there. Therefore, the lore reads, "Ngame Nebula: Investigate M-class planet and wormhole reported near T-tauri-type star." This technobabble from the show mentions the unusual suspicious nature of the area, providing the official "reason" to go there, but still presumes no knowledge. We did, however, decide to keep the title of Paxan "Wormhole" for collectability purposes (the same way the Encyclopedia lists it as well).
Note that this background also explains the unusual mission requirements for the card: "Diplomacy + CUNNING > 30 + Android. Relocate opponent's ship if no android aboard." Thus, interacting with this card is much like what happened to the Enterprise in the episode.
PARAMOUNT NON-PROBLEMS
One point worth mentioning here is that Paramount was nicely cooperative in the approval process on the Q-Continuum set, doing their job quickly. (The delays were our own fault; caused by changes and switches of cards between Q and new ST:TNG CCG premium products that have recently been announced.)
They also were open-minded enough to allow humor into the Q-icon cards, because it befit the Q theme and Q's personality. Originally we had tried to keep with the "tradition" of doing all Q names as some sort of Q pun (as in the episodes "Q-pid", "Deja Q", "True Q", etc.) But with dozens of Q cards like that, Warren Holland put his foot down about "too many Qs" in the set; they were repetitive and tedious. (Decipher goes to great pains to ensure variety in the sets.) He also didn't like so many images of Q, and we dealt with that as much as was feasible. But for the names, we made an effort to come up with humorous non-Q-ish titles.
For example,
The card "Q Toast" became "Lemon Aid"
(a nice pun, the drink is actually lemonade, and the card aids the person who is currently losing- the "lemon." :-)
The card "Mariachi Q" became "Tijuana Crass". :-)
The card "Drug Soldier Q" became "The Higher... The Q'er" (another pun, on our previous card "The Higher... The Fewer.")
The card "Doctor Q" became "Dr. Q, Medicine Entity" (a reference to the Jane Seymour television series).
MORE Q-STUFF
The Issue is Patriotism - Supposedly the uniform that Q is wearing in this shot is a reproduction of one worn by Ollie North, the disgraced U.S. Marine patriot who went through congressional hearings around the time of this episode. (Q is here talking about the obsessive tendency toward large-scale violence and fascism in the human race, and it was perhaps just a tad harsh on old Ollie to be selected for that symbol. (?)) Anyway, the card in early development had been called "Colonel Q", but upon hearing this factoid I changed it to "Quollie North." It didn't last, thank heavens. The final name is from a quote by Q in this scene.
Wesley Gets The Point - In one Q episode, Wesley gets stabbed by some "vicious animal things" of Q. That image was pegged a long time ago to become a card (before the premier set was out). For a long time I wanted to call that card "Die, Wesley, Die!", after the Wesley-hater internet newsgroup with the address "alt.startrek.wesley.die.die.die" :-)
Of course, this is all supposed to be in fun, jazzing up those fans who like to rag on our hero Wesley. The obvious problem, however, was how to get this past Paramount. The solution was to tone it down a bit, not being so blatant, and to properly position the card within the humorous Q world, where it is no longer so disrespectful of the character. Thus, after lots of changes, including last-minute work, we arrived at the current card name "Wesley Gets The Point". This name of course is a double-pun including the tie-in to the game text suggested by Bill Martinson - it is worth one point. :-) Congrats to Paramount for allowing this one through.
K'chiQ - This card's went through more name changes than Elizabeth Taylor. It's easy to make puns on Klingon names, (such as K'babe, an early attempt). For a long time it was K'Q, a name I liked because it molded together two Trek naming conventions: K-type Klingon names, and Q-type names for Q-related stuff. But it was found to be confusing to read and pronounce. Jason Winter (your answerman Q@decipher.com) suggested K'chiQ. Not only does it contain the Q reference, but reads as K-Chick. It can also be read as "Kitchy-kyoo".
Where's Guinan? - The name of this one was a bit of an inside joke. This question is the one most often asked of our customer answer people. She is coming!
Gift of the Tormentor - This devious card is an example of what happens if I turn my back on Decipher even briefly! :-) This card's image was on a totally different card which was "struggling" (not quite working). I had left one of our long design meetings briefly on some errand, and while I was gone Warren Holland and Bill Martinson had a brainstorm. I swear I was gone less than 10 minutes! But this new card had appeared on the wall by the time I got back. (We do our editing process by projecting the cards from the computer onto the wall, so that the group can easily see the whole thing at once.)
The idea of the card, of course, was to tempt people with a 100-point card which is devilishly hard to take advantage of. (I won't tell you about the cards which interact with it, and will let you discover this frustration yourself!).
The name contains another "insider" pun. It began as "The Tormentor" until Bill thought of our existing Star Wars: CCG card called "Gift of the Mentor." Thus, "Gift of the Tormentor" appeared. We have a policy of not mixing the two games (not even with Easter Eggs, and believe me there are lots of temptations to do so), but this little pun proved to be acceptable, considering how appropriate it was to the card and to Q.
"CHALLENGE" FACTOIDS
Parallax Arguers - Every set I like to challenge the design team to come up with some especially wild and innovative cards. The popular Devidian Door card from Alternate Universe, for example, came about because I made a challenge to us to design a card that gives a player the feeling of time travel "from the future" to the current point in a game.
In this case, we set the challenge to create a card that not only showed the arguers, but which actually would cause the players themselves to argue (in a playful way, of course). Bill Martinson and I came up with the design of this card (we spent a whole day on it alone) and, remarkably, even though people were skeptical, it survived virtually unscathed through all the playtests and editing. It seems weird at first, but it quickly grows on you as you get to know its uses, and of course it is fun to play. What other CCG could have a card like this!?
Manheim's Dimensional Door - Another "challenge" card was the Manheim Door. We wanted to capture the flavor of "hiccups in time", the feeling of "time overlapping itself" in the actual gameplay, as it did so eerily in the episode. Bill and I also did this one, and although it went through many refinements, I like the way it came out. The uses of this hyper-flexible card are mind-boggling.
Mordock - Another challenge card was, strangely, Mordock. This personnel, a Benzite, is best known for defeating Wesley to go to Starfleet, and as the inventor of the famous "Mordock Strategy" (which was very impressive to Wesley). But the show never explained or even hinted at what the Mordock Strategy was.
We wanted to integrate some kind of a Mordock Strategy into the card. This card was initially slated to be in the premier edition of ST:TNG CCG but was replaced by Mendon instead, to give us time to think of a way to try to accomplish this goal. The tricky part is that, because the writers deliberately left the Mordock Strategy unexplained, Paramount would not approve any normal attempt to give it a direct definition. Therefore, what we decided to do was to give the card an interesting game function which implied not just a game tactic but a whole strategic approach to playing the game. Thus, although we do not call it the Mordock Strategy anywhere, the fact is that when you attempt to use Mordock you are employing a distinct strategy - which inevitably people will call the "Mordock Strategy" even if the card itself does not!
Terraforming Station - Another challenge card. It is one of those cards you either love or you hate; but I really love it! The goal here of course was to simulate the altruistic nature of "real" terraforming stations. Terraforming is something even modern day scientists are studying for a project on Mars. The problem is, to transform Mars' atmosphere into an Earthlike atmosphere would take many lifetimes (at least, if not hundreds of years). Thus, the people who build and operate a terraforming station are real heroes, doing a good thing that they will never see the benefit of.
To try to capture this in our game brought out the thought that it be a card that has no use in the current game, but might be very useful in the next! I hesitated to propose it, but after I did we quickly worked out a simple function that really was interesting (it gives you the ability to "rewrite" a mission card that you terraformed). It is vulnerable to an opponent's away team, however.
Data's Body - This off-the-wall card was another last-minute card design. We laughed harder making this card than any other. The idea grew out of my offhand comment at an editing meeting that several players had written us saying that Data's Head (a card in Alternate Universe) should have been a personnel card (instead of Equipment). Well, before you could say "technobabble" we had found a way to do it! (See how your feedback affects the cards!?) The Head and the Body thus are now separate, and can be used either attached (making an android) or unattached (as equipment). There are advantages either way, giving the player nice tactical flexibility; and the card also has non-aligned status when in android form. It is weird, but you must try playing with them sometime, it's fun.
Yuta - Bill and I spent a long time designing the "formula" on this card. Yuta's deadliness mimics her being able to match the "DNA" of her intended victim. It works like this:
The card is fun to play with if you just guess a likely number, as players like me do, but we also knew that there would be many players who attempt to analyze the formula very seriously (because if you guess well you have a good chance to knock out a key opponent's personnel). Indeed, there has already been a lot of "Yuta Numbers" discussion on the internet discussion groups. Jason Winter, for example, has all the current Yuta numbers memorized, and is a terror to play against.
Bill and I investigated several formulas, therefore, and found this one to be the simplest one that works well. One advantage of it is that personnel of widely different types and strengths can have the same Yuta Number; so there is no "automatic" choice of number, and it is even possible to protect a key personnel by "escorting" them with a personnel who has the same Yuta number!
OTHER FACTOIDS
John Doe / Transformation - A lot of people have commented that they like this two-card pairing. It might interest you that early in the design process for the initial ST:TNG CCG premier edition we developed plans for all our expansion sets, and this card played a big part. One of our planned expansions was going to be called "Alien Powers." The image of the transformed John Doe was chosen to be the signature image of the entire Alien Powers set. (By this I mean that it is the image seen on the display box, the one which presumably will attract customers by its cool factor.) Unfortunately, following the Paramount situation last year we had to revamp all those plans. John Doe and Transformation became "just another great card" in the Q-Continuum set.
Heisenberg Compensators - Here is a tease: this popular card which affects your draw decks has a companion card. The companion card was going to come in Q-Continuum as well, but we decided to save it for a future set.
Here is a funny email feedback we received on this card: "My friend is notorious for stacking his deck, putting red alert and traveler on the top. However, with HC, his world turned upside down..." :-)
Timicin - Jason Winter came up with the function of this card, which cleverly mimics "The Resolution" (ritual suicide) that people of Timicin's species undergo at age 60. Thus, the card is stronger than normal at the start of the game, but becomes weak when you near 60 points.
The Commitments - Several of the cards in this set were "previously committed to" by being foreshadowed on earlier cards. Examples are Calamarain, Marouk and Plexing. Calamarain was mentioned on the Data Laughing premium card that came with the strategy book. (When we designed Data Laughing, a year and a half ago, we had no idea what the Calamarain would do other than being an anti-Q card! But we are careful with such things, and made it work out nicely.) As we have announced before, we plan to wrap up all "loose ends" like this. This includes continuing our little traditions like a Mot card and a Barclay card in each expansion set, etc.
Aldea - Of course, this is another very fun card; the cloakable planet. But beware of cloaking yourself. More than one player attempted to do things like build a colony on Aldea, only to find out the unpredictable cloak on/off switch was more of a hindrance than a help!
Romulan Stuff - Finally, I want to mention the Romulan issue here briefly. Romulan fans have complained that we have done a lot more interesting stuff with Klingons than we have with Romulans. We are aware of this concern, and have built-in several subtle pro-Romulan elements into Q-Continuum and have plans for more in upcoming sets. The underlying problem, of course, is that there was simply not much Romulan stuff in the episodes compared to Klingon stuff, and even in the episodes that show Romulans the sets were often weak and the information about Romulans was often very thin. For Klingons we have a whole language, plus scenes of various rituals like sonchi, the Ascension Ceremony, Klingon Death Yell, etc., all of which gave fertile territory for interesting pro- or anti-Klingon cards. But the Romulan stuff is pretty bleak.
There are only a few Romulan characters left we haven't already used. We have asked Romulan fans if they would mind us creating some more Romulan personnel using computer morphing techniques (which Paramount allows), and they have said yes, so we do plan to do that. But more importantly, we do have more Romulan stuff up our sleeves, including plans for more subtle Events and Interrupt-type cards that are special to Romulans, although even here finding good images to use is tough. That's why some of the pro-Romulan things in Q are very subtle. I'll give you one example of a card we designed to be pro-Romulan, even though you might not realize it: "Space." This mission card, surprisingly, can be used effectively in certain Romulan decks if you know the right approach (which I won't tell you here, it's fun to discover things like that yourself). The approach works better for Rommies than it does for Feds or Klingons.
Non-Aligned Stuff - Similarly, some players have asked for enough mission cards to be able to have completely non-aligned decks. (Using none of the three main affiliations). You can already do rudimentary non-aligned decks now, and we do in fact have plans to phase-in other card elements that support that idea over the remaining sets. This will always be limited, of course, since to enhance this too much would be just to turn them into another affiliation. But there will be interesting possibilities for clever approaches in this regard.
GRAPHIC FACTOIDS
I'm constantly amazed at how well Decipher's art department not only reproduces but actually enhances the images we see in the episodes.
A great example of this is Data's Medals. Not only did their enhancement make the medals crystal clear (they are hard to see in the video of the episode), but there is also a marvelous Easter Egg in this image. (If you haven't seen it, try to find it now. Check out the postings on Easter Eggs on decipher.com for the answer. This is one of those which has already been found, so it's safe for me to hint about it here.)
Similarly, the enhancement the art department did gives us a sharp look at Amanda's Parents - two new Qs!, except that they gave up Q-omnipotence to become human and have a child. (Isn't that sweet?).
If you're like me, there are some things that are easily misunderstood about some episodes until it gets cleared up by the "focus" of these cards. For example, take the card Aldebaran Serpent. Though I had seen this episode many times, I had always assumed that the image shown on that card (the spinning ball of light with three horn-like things projecting on top) was supposed to be Q's "true appearance", because he says in that form "If my magnificence blinds you captain, then perhaps something a little more familiar..." and he changes into a human in Starfleet admiral uniform. For a long time, in fact, that image had been in my database as "Q's Magnificence." But during the design cycle Bill Martinson and others proved to me that was all wrong, that the ball of light was in fact an "Aldebaran serpent." "A serpent that looks like that?" I scoffed. But yes, after Q changes into human form Picard then says, "You are no Starfleet admiral, Q." To which Q replies, "Neither am I an Aldebaran serpent captain, but you accepted me as such." And indeed, the enhanced artwork on the card allows you to see that the horn-like things on top are three cobra-like snake heads. I still find this scene extremely weird - the idea that the planet Aldebaran has serpents that look like that - but hey, that's science fiction for ya.
Of course, the art department also did a good job on "created" images for Q-cards. One example is Q's Planet . Even though the planet was not seen from space in the episode, the image on the card was not just created "out of thin air." The greenish atmosphere and the color of its two moons can be seen on the horizon in the episodes.
The Penalty Box is another example. The problem with this card is that when Q sent Tasha to the penalty box, she was shown as appearing on the bridge, where Picard was alone. Thus, the concept of the card was great, but the image from the episode was weak - it looked just like the normal bridge, not like a supposedly deadly penalty box. The art team discussed several options, and eventually created the image used, which incorporates three elements: 1) Tasha's image as she looked in the penalty box, plus the "bridge" background was removed and replaced with 2) a platform created with computer graphics based on Q's "throne" (as seen in the Farpoint episodes) and 3) the "cage" of the box created by a Q-Net. I like this final effect a lot.
The thing I like most about Q-Continuum is the large number of game-warping cards. Many cards in this set have a plethora of uses, many of which are undiscovered. I'm still curious as to the ways people will find to use cards like the Zalkonian Storage Capsule, and End Transmission; not to mention the Q-Continuum side deck and Q-icon cards. Have fun, and let us know what you discover!