Hello. Something that I've heard discussed a few times in podcasts is the concept of continuously turning a specific Crit card face-up, such as Blinded Pilot with pilot abilities or saboteur crew.

This has made me wonder about the wording and what it actually means for the game. Obviously it says you should flip a "random damage card", but unless I'm mistaken there are no further rules clarifying how this is done, so most of the time I guess it's just the opponent choosing, however by definition that is not "random". Would it be against the rules in some way to shuffle the damage cards for a specific ship so that a player can't "randomly" pick the same card every time to keep someone continuously blinded/stressed/whatever?

Not something that will come up often, but it seems very frustrating and almost a form of abuse based on the wording of the abilities, so I figured I'd ask for some clarification on the subject.

Not only would it be OK, that's exactly what you should do. You have to randomise it somehow, the obvious way is by shuffling and then picking one randomly.

If there's only one card there, then obviously there's no need to shuffle.

Random means RANDOM with no "picking" especially when you already know what's hiding behind some, or even all, of the cards.

At the very least all of cards in the pools should be "shuffled" before the pick is made. I guess my only issue here is that it's somewhat difficult to properly shuffle just a few cards. Instead of trying to shuffle two or three cards my choice would be to have a die assigned to each although X-Wing dice may not be the best suited for more than two cards.

For two cards, just hold one in each hand under the table, switch them back and forth a few times, and tell your opponent to choose left or right.

Alright, so as long as there's more than one damage card to flip it's up to the players discretion how to do the random selection. Makes sense, though I wish they would include it in the rules somewhere just for the corner cases where this might come up. What words mean and what the rules say can sometimes seem contradictory or undefined after all...

Hopefully this won't come up however, just so I won't have to have that conversation xD

Alright, so as long as there's more than one damage card to flip it's up to the players discretion how to do the random selection. Makes sense, though I wish they would include it in the rules somewhere just for the corner cases where this might come up. What words mean and what the rules say can sometimes seem contradictory or undefined after all...

Hopefully this won't come up however, just so I won't have to have that conversation xD

There's more than a few instances where FFG hope players just use common sense to sort things out. This is one of those instances. If they were to write a rule for every corner case or unusual event, the rulebook would be several times larger than what it is. And there's nothing worse than spending several minutes during a game hunting through a rulebook looking for some obscure little rule when simple common sense should prevail on how to resolve it.

Some things don't need to be complicated.

For two cards, just hold one in each hand under the table, switch them back and forth a few times, and tell your opponent to choose left or right.

Cards disappearing "under the table" is never a good thing to do. Just shuffle them and ask the opponent to not watch too closely while you do. It's not that hard and it must be a random choice.

Alright, so as long as there's more than one damage card to flip it's up to the players discretion how to do the random selection. Makes sense, though I wish they would include it in the rules somewhere just for the corner cases where this might come up. What words mean and what the rules say can sometimes seem contradictory or undefined after all...

Hopefully this won't come up however, just so I won't have to have that conversation xD

There's more than a few instances where FFG hope players just use common sense to sort things out. This is one of those instances. If they were to write a rule for every corner case or unusual event, the rulebook would be several times larger than what it is. And there's nothing worse than spending several minutes during a game hunting through a rulebook looking for some obscure little rule when simple common sense should prevail on how to resolve it.

Some things don't need to be complicated.

While I understand your sentiment and I kinda agree, leaving things to "common sense" is how many rules debates are started, because what makes sense to one person might not to another. Plus not having rules for something is what invites rules lawyering. This might not be one of those instances I suppose, but how they want you to randomly select damage cards would be nice.

For two cards, just hold one in each hand under the table, switch them back and forth a few times, and tell your opponent to choose left or right.

Cards disappearing "under the table" is never a good thing to do. Just shuffle them and ask the opponent to not watch too closely while you do. It's not that hard and it must be a random choice.

If it's two cards roll an attack die: One card gets the eyes and the blanks and the other card gets the hits and the crit.

PS. Random is random. As long as the process isn't biased there should be no issues.

If players don't have the mental capacity to exercise some common sense to resolve something that really isn't complicated at all, then maybe X-wing isn't their game. And any **** that wants to "rules lawyer" a simple random selection, really isn't worth playing.