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Purr ... purr ... purr ... skweeee!
That's right ... tribbles have infested the Star Trek CCG. The first Star Trek CCG expansion set to feature material drawn directly from the original series, The Trouble With Tribbles, introduced the furry little title critters into the STCCG universe. Life on the spaceline will never be the same again.
Tribble cards and their associated trouble cards reside in a Tribble side deck similar to the Q-Continuum side deck or Battle Bridge side deck. Only tribble cards and trouble cards may be stocked in a Tribble side deck, and that's the only place they may be stocked. Tribble cards never go into your draw deck, your hand, or your discard pile. Whenever a tribble card is discarded or leaves the table, it goes face-up underneath the Tribble side deck. When all cards in the side deck are face-up, they are shuffled and replaced face-down for reuse.
The doorway card Storage Compartment Door seeds atop your Tribble side deck during the seed phase. While open, this doorway allows you to draw, play, and/or discard up to three cards from your Tribble side deck during each of your turns. You may also stock Storage Compartment Door in your draw deck (or Q's Tent side deck) and play it once during each of your turns to download a tribble or trouble card (from the face-down cards in your Tribble side deck) or to nullify any card closing your seeded Storage Compartment Door.
Tribble cards come in two "sizes," small and large; at present they come in six "denominations," namely 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 Tribbles. 1 Tribble and 10 Tribbles are small tribble cards. 100 Tribbles and all higher denominations are large tribble cards.
Once tribble cards are in play, they form "groups." All of your tribbles on one site, facility, ship, or planet are one group.
Each tribble card has a colored tribble icon showing the word "Bonus," "Clone," "Discard," "Go," "Poison," or "Rescue." These words and icons have no effect on the use of tribble cards in the Star Trek CCG. All tribbles of a particular denomination have the same game text, even if their tribble icons differ. Those tribble icons are used in the Tribbles Customizable Card Game, a game that is played independently of the Star Trek CCG using only tribble cards.
Small tribble cards "report," while large tribble cards "breed." Regardless of whether you are reporting small tribbles or breeding large ones, only one tribble card may be played to each group of your tribbles per turn. 1 Tribble and 10 Tribbles may report anywhere. Large tribble cards breed from tribble cards already in play, which is another way of saying that having the "mother" tribbles in play is a prerequisite to playing the large tribble cards to a group. Each large tribble card specifies -- in the phrase, "Breeds from x Tribbles" -- how many tribbles must be in a group in order for the large tribble card to be played to that group. Note that large tribble cards add to, rather than replacing, the group from which they breed. However, breeding tribbles is playing a tribble card to a group, and thus counts against the one card play per group per turn limit.
Example: Suppose you have 1 Tribble at a site, 10 Tribbles on a planet, and 10 Tribbles on an opponent's ship. You draw three cards from your Tribble side deck: 1 Tribble, 100 Tribbles, and 1,000 Tribbles. You may play your 1 Tribble card to any one of your tribble groups, or report it anywhere else to start a new tribble group -- but after you do, you may not play any more tribble cards to that group (whether pre-existing or newly created) on that turn. You could, for example, add your 1 Tribble to your 10 Tribbles on the planet, and breed your 100 Tribbles from the 10 Tribbles on the opponent's ship. You could not, however, report the 1 Tribble card to the 10 Tribbles card on your opponent's ship and breed that same 10 Tribbles card into 100 Tribbles. Nor could you breed 10 Tribbles already in play into 100, then breed those 100 into 1,000, on the same turn.
Tribbles cause troubles. You might not think it to look at them, or hear them purring softly as they wriggle warmly in your palm, but it's true. In game terms, these troubles are represented, logically, by trouble cards. Like tribble cards, trouble cards are stocked in your Tribble side deck. You may play one trouble card per turn to each of your groups of tribbles (although obviously the number of cards you draw from your Tribble side deck sets a limit as well). Each trouble card is "activated" by the presence of a certain number of tribbles. Those "activation" quantities are not a prerequisite for playing the trouble card. For example, Trouble on the Bridge is activated by 100 tribbles or 1,000 tribbles, but can be played on a single tribble. If the quantity of tribbles required for activation is not present, the trouble card simply has no effect until such time as the tribbles multiply to that quantity.
The activation quantities on trouble cards refer to the total number of tribbles present, not to card titles. The 100 tribble activation level can be met by a 100 Tribbles card (or a single card of higher quantity), ten 10 Tribbles cards, or one hundred 1 Tribble cards. Similarly, ten 100 Tribbles cards can activate a 1,000 tribbles effect on a trouble card. A trouble card has all of the effects for which sufficient quantities of tribbles are present. Thus, a trouble card with a 100 tribble effect and a 1,000 tribble effect has both effects if 1,000 tribbles or more are present.
If your tribble group, or part of it, is moved, you may choose to have your trouble cards present go along with the moving tribbles.
Small tribbles can be carried like equipment by either player's personnel, and then "dropped" in another location. A personnel who "drops" a tribble is "stopped" for the remainder of that turn.
Large tribble cards can be beamed by personnel with Transporter Skill. Any given personnel with Transporter Skill can beam one large tribble card for each unit of Transporter Skill they have. A personnel who beams a tribble card is "stopped" for the rest of the turn after completing this action. You may lower the SHIELDS of your Nor to beam tribble cards. Of course, you have to have somewhere to put them, and outer space is not a valid destination (see "beaming personnel into space" in the Glossary; those strictures apply to equipment, artifacts, tribbles, Rogue Borg Mercenaries, etc. as well).
To get rid of trouble cards, you must get rid of tribble cards. Whenever a trouble card no longer has any tribbles present with it, the trouble card is discarded (face up underneath the owner's Tribble side deck). Of course, when the owner's side deck runs out of cards, the discarded cards will be reshuffled and available for use again ...
The Star Trek Customizable Card Game is published by Decipher Inc. and is based on the Star Trek series and films produced by Paramount Pictures. All copyrights and trademarks remain the property of their respective holders. Neither Decipher nor Paramount has endorsed this web site. Christopher Heard a.k.a. Unimatrix Zero One is solely responsible for the contents of this site.