DECIPHER.com > Star Trek > Expansions > Fractured Time

A Turn For the Worse

by Michael Girard
Game Designer

Let's start the article with a quote from the current reigning World Champion, Andrew Ehret.

"The reason I choose to play it is for surprise, its favorable matchup against a Klingon-oriented dilemma pile, and the fact that it significantly reduced my opponent's chances of playing dilemmas. It won the first game of the final confrontation in only 5 turns and my opponent only got to play 1 dilemma the whole game! I guess it should've been titled 'Your dilemma pile doesn't matter.'"

This was an excerpt of a small interview I did with Andrew right after he won the World Championship at Gen Con. We were talking about which is more important, your deck or your dilemma pile?

He went on to tell me that he had decided to go with a "Swiss army knife" setup for Klingons on Day 2 and Day 3. His deck could deal with pretty much anything the opponent threw at him anti-Klingon-wise. He refers to his win over an assassin + ship destruction deck as a prime example of how well the deck handled anything. He decided to go with a totally opposite build for Day 4 as a way to trip up his finals opponent.

When asked about his dilemma pile he had this to say:

"By Day 3 and Day 4 I took any dilemma that requires skills to establish a wall out of my dilemma pile. With Garak, Klingon Riker, Confessions, Natural Instincts, The Promise, and other cards floating around out there I didn't successfully play a wall the entire tournament! For instance I had 2 copies of Captains Holiday in my pile on Day 2 and didn't get to play it once."

He also went on to say that he just went with automatic stop dilemmas and tried to attrition his opponent.

Andrew, have we got a dilemma for your strategy.

The dilemma, "Double Down" as it was called in development, started out as an alternative for players that don't set up their dilemma piles as filter, filter, wall. This dilemma was developed as a way for players to put the "wall" up front and have their filters actually cause more harm then just setting up the wall at the end. For those who don't quite understand what I'm talking about, a filter dilemma is one that stops a small number of personnel while still letting some through. An example of this is Personal Duty – it only lets one guy with Leadership or Officer through. A wall dilemma usually ends with "... all your personnel are stopped." So, in a perfect world, Personal Duty would only let one Officer through and then Maglock would stop the remaining personnel.

Tragic Turn sets up the finishing move right up front. So if someone isn't smart enough to throw the grenade back (Trabe Grenade), he takes another personnel with him as he goes down. If three of your personnel stop to check out the bull skull (History Repeats Itself), then guess what, three more have to stop and look as well. During development, this proved to be really powerful in combination with huge kill dilemmas like Whisper In the Dark and Tsiolkovsky Infection. The cost of this dilemma bounced around a few times from only costing three because it was "part of a combo and not contained within itself" to eventually costing three with two consume because "while it's only part of the combo, it doubles the effectiveness of almost every dilemma... EVER."

August 31, 2004