Loth Cat And Mouse

By Luke Devon, in Star Wars: Destiny

The card states: Force an opponent to choose and remove one of your dice. Then remove one of their dice.

Does the opponent choose both dice or is the card grammatically incorrect for the sake of rules?

Lets just say FFG does not hire English majors. The opponent chooses one of your dice and then you choose one of their dice. The condition being the opponent has to choose and remove a die in order for you to remove a die.

The card should read: Then you remove one of their dice.

This will need to be included in the Errata as it stands now it will be impossible to solve disputes at store level. Any idea on how/who to contact?

Edited by Luke Devon

I don't see at need for that. There is an implied "you" before Force, which is normal for a command sentence. You can say "you shut up" or just "shut up". Here it is "You force an opponent .... Then Remove one of their dice."

What FFG doesn't understand is this is for an international audience so they can't be so short and colloquial with the wording of cards. Despite the poor wording the intent of the card is very clear and I wouldn't want to play with someone trying to argue that they get to remove both dice off a card you played.

Grammar rules only apply in the absence of a game rule that provides clarity. Card instructions apply to the player playing the card, unless otherwise instructed. Loth Cat and Mouse has two effects connect by a Then operation. Meaning you only get to the second effect if the first effect is fully resolved. Both effects have an implied "you" at the beginning of each effect.

So the first effect is: (You) Force an opponent to choose and remove one of your dice.

Second effect is: Then (you) remove one of their dice.

This is not a paragraph in English, or even two sentences. It is a card effect in a game that has pretty clearly defined rules. Sometimes grammar rules can help, but this is not one of those cases, and no clarification is necessary.

Edited by kingbobb

The argument is that you and your appear on all the other cards and not this one thus making it different from the rest/ standard rules. As a moderator it makes it hard to settle this based on speculation. I did rule the one who played the card removes the second dice but then I found another player who plays it the other way. In a tournament setting this could be a disaster waiting to happen.

It's really not that bad. Read it as if the card is speaking to the player playing it. There really isn't speculation for native English speakers. A good TO should know how this card is played, make a firm ruling and have no disaster.

Idk, seems internally consistent. It's just 2 lines of text, but I'm adding how I interpret it in ().

-(Player A) Force(s) an opponent(player B) to choose and remove one of your(player A's) dice.

-Then (player A) remove(s) one of their(Player B' s) dice.

I agree it could probably be more clear for non-English speakers but I have never seen it played in any other fashion tbh.

11 hours ago, Luke Devon said:

The argument is that you and your appear on all the other cards and not this one thus making it different from the rest/ standard rules. As a moderator it makes it hard to settle this based on speculation. I did rule the one who played the card removes the second dice but then I found another player who plays it the other way. In a tournament setting this could be a disaster waiting to happen.

Examples of some other cards that use a different construction would be good. I'll try to notice next time I'm working on a deck, but if you know of some examples it would be faster :)

After a quick look through the event cards, I don't see any inconsistency. Effects include a pronoun when they are necessary. The default rule is that the player playing the card is following the instructions. If an effect, or part of an effect, doesn't specifically identify your opponent/other player, the player playing the effect/card takes the action.

Edited by kingbobb

It's a quirk of the English language where command sentences (pretty much all the cards tell you to do something) have addressing pronouns as optional. So the sentence can read "You reveal the top card of your deck" or just "Reveal the top card of your deck". To native english speakers they sound identical. To everyone else it could be ambiguous who does the revealing even though it isn't when the English skills are good enough.