Design Log: Stardate 06.09.2003

All Good Broken Links Must Come to an End

Since the dawn of time – well, at least since the dawn of Star Trek CCG – there have been broken links. As far back as the primordial Premiere, there were cards that named in their game text other cards that didn't yet exist. Whether a concept that the designers hadn't yet fleshed out, a card that simply didn't make the cut for the set, or a tantalizing glimpse of what the future might bring, a broken link was a loose end that wanted wrapping up.

Many of those broken links did get swiftly mended – Thermal Deflectors and Hail remained broken links only until Alternate Universe, the first expansion set – while others took longer (Guinan didn't show up till the Fajo Collection, about three years later). And of course every new set brought more of those pesky but fascinating loose ends, from Alternate Universe's intriguing mention on Barclay Transporter Phobia of transport via Dimensional Shifting, through Voyager's tease that you could get around a Hull Breach with the elusive Environmental Suit, right up to The Motion Pictures' Saavik, who could special download the as-yet-non-existent Kobayashi Maru Scenario.

Not every broken link is as obvious or clearcut as these "named cards." Some involve a card that will affect some class of cards with a specified characteristic – when no cards with that characteristic yet exist. A good example is the mission Insurrection (The Motion Pictures), which lets Ba'ku report on the planet. All well and good, except there weren't any Ba'ku personnel in the set. A similar but even more subtle kind of broken link is the one where a card affects "any" of some type of card, uses a plural, or otherwise implies there is more than one card with the specified characteristic, such as Bajoran Shrine which allows "Prylars" to report there (but there was only one). In both cases, while not naming any specific card, such cards strongly imply that there should be at least two of whatever-it-mentions.

A third category of broken links, also "implied," is that of cards which name personnel or ships in the lore of another card, best exemplified by ship/matching commander pairs. This is the most nebulous category, because lore has gameplay significance only when other cards make it so, and often it gains gameplay meaning retroactively. The matching commander definition didn't appear until First Contact, more than three years after Premiere, so inevitably a number of ships and commanders from earlier sets possessed the qualifying lore without the other half of the pair being in existence. But often players were anxious to get the benefits afforded to matching commanders for as many cards as possible – so Robert DeSoto became a "broken link" by virtue of being named in lore as the captain of the U.S.S. Hood from the Premiere set, even though he was never mentioned by name in any card's game text.

Not every one of these broken links has been implemented exactly as you might have expected. We'll look at the main broken link types in more detail in an upcoming series of Design Logs from now until the release of All Good Things. Which brings us to a final "category" of just one card.

Admiral Riker first became a retroactive broken link when the First Contact rules made him the missing matching commander designated by the lore of the Future Enterprise, from the Alternate Universe expansion. Now, Admiral Riker has since appeared as a card – one of four white-bordered preview cards inserted in The Dominion (not to mention as a foiled box-topper in Reflections). So he's no longer a broken link as far as the matching commander definitions go. But while the other three previews (along with the First Anthology and U.S.S. Defiant previews) appeared one by one, as promised, in normal black-border form, by the time the final First Edition expansion rolled around, Admiral Riker was still hanging out there as the last remaining preview card without a "regular-issue" counterpart. So this unique type of broken link will also be wrapped up in All Good Things – appropriately, since the good Admiral came from the episode that gave this set its name.

Kathy McCracken (Major Rakal)
Star Trek CCG Intelligence Officer

June 9, 2003

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