I normally play with the freewheeling flares rule. I find this actually makes it a little easier as you dont have to remember if you have played a flare or not.

Last night, I got the Clone Flare and I had Card Zap in hand. So I kept card zapping other peoples flares and then clone flaring them back into my own hand. It didnt win me the game, but I sure got a number of enemies.

My query ruleswise was about the timing. Do I play the clone flare first or the card zap? And when exactly does the flare come back into my hand?

We had an odd situation where someone played a flare card. I card zapped it with my own clone flare to get my card zap back. Someone else then card zapped my card zap and then a third player played a Vulch flare to retrieve my card zap. It all got a bit confusing.

Paul Grogan said:

Heh. Welcome to Cosmic Encounter.

Paul Grogan said:

Coming from games with well-defined timing rules (e.g. M:TG) it's a bit hard for me to rule on things like this, especially since I haven't played older editions. Here's my interpretation of what goes down:

1. You play the Card Zap and then play the Clone flare as it's played in order to retrieve it.

2. If someone zaps your own zap, the question is whether you still get to take it back, or whether it's discarded. I'm going to go with discarded here, but I don't have any concrete reasoning other than "it feels right" especially when using the freewheeling flares rule.

3. Third player Vulches your zap and gets it.

The difficulty, of course, is that I'm thinking in terms of a "stack", meaning that the last effect played resolves first. Thus, I'm stuck in the trap of wondering what happens when you have an infinitely repeatable effect (when freewheeling flares are used) and someone tries to zap your own card zap. Can you just clone it again? I'm not sure, but the preceding is how I think it would work, because otherwise some very strange things begin to happen.