Insight: Close Quarters

Dog Fight: Starship Edition Game Insights Close Quarters

One difficult aspect of any customizable game is managing conflicts between mechanisms and/or rules. Such is the case with the ATTACK card Close Quarters.

So far in the development of Dog Fight: Starship Edition most ATTACK type cards are either Normal or Star cards. Seeing this type of card in the Gear or Jump form is rare. That's not a problem in itself but other game mechanisms can clash with these unusual combinations.

Case in point, there is a standard rule limiting only one copy of any card title equipped to the same vessel at a time. That's straight forward enough and there is no problem with equipping any Gear card to your ship. But what happens when an equip action encounters a repeat action?

The EQUIP type card Heavy Guns allows the duplication of ATTACK cards. Initially, Heavy Guns did not specify Normal cards, as it does now. Back in the day this caused problems with Close Quarters. Questions arose such as "how many times does the card equip to the ship?" Of course, the answer is "only once". So Heavy Guns was retooled to apply its effect only to Normal form ATTACK type cards.



However, the F.A.S. Achilles still allows the player to duplicate any form of ATTACK card. So the problem persists. What to do?

Dog Fight was always, from its inception, intended to follow real world concepts as closely as possible. This applies to aspects of physics behind a card idea as well as the ways in which game components interact.

But there has also been the intention to let players do what they want. So when a "can I..." type question is asked the preferred answer is in the affirmative. But sometimes the stars don't align. In the case of Close Quarters duplicating its effect, this simply causes too many problems. So the official ruling on this card (addressing several details) precludes repeating its effect.

By extension, for the sake of keeping a consistent game system, other ATTACK type Gear cards also will not indulge the duplication of their effects. See the card database for a full explanation of Close Quarters.

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