Quintine
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User ruling 13 October 2026: the original faction keeps its existing Skill assignment while its trained leader is captured. Reviving a different eligible own leader is legal and simply draws no replacement card while that assignment exists (selected reading of authorized supplied Advanced physical p21 "if you have no Leader Skill Card"). Not a new publisher ruling; captor lower-band use, card movement and death-return unchanged. Remove the replacement-question veto that suppressed the entire ordinary/Ghola revival: leaderSkillRevivalBlocked/requireLeaderSkillRevival, the gholaLeaders early return, the view revival.leaders: [] filter and the beginRevival/Ghola/ Emperor-special-Karama call sites are gone. offerRevivedLeaderSkill is unchanged and still suppresses a second assignment or draw. Rewrote the two committed rejection assertions (tests/advanced-native-skills.test.ts, tests/leader-skills-capture.test.ts) and added native regressions covering ordinary paid, held-Ghola and Emperor special Karama revival from a genuinely captured skilled state: exact cost, no draw or offer, retained captive/card/controller and a conserved all14 deck. Docs: RULE_DECISIONS, LEADER_SKILLS_CAPTURE, LEADER_SKILLS_RULES, LEADER_SKILLS_RUNTIME, NEXUS_CARD_RULES, CURRENT_STATUS, IMPLEMENTATION_STATUS and the game/reference.ts leader-skills topic.
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Leader Skills and Harkonnen capture
Updated 13 September 2026. This note resolves the public-state boundary for a skilled leader captured by Harkonnen. It records a source interpretation for implementation; it does not claim the Leader Skills module is complete.
Strongest source-supported answer
A Harkonnen capture is not universally secret in the published base rules. The explicit face-down procedure applies to the branch where Harkonnen kills the randomly selected leader for 2 spice: the leader is placed “face down into the Tleilaxu Tanks.” The alternative branch says Harkonnen keeps the leader for one later battle, but does not instruct players to turn that retained leader face down or conceal its identity. GF9 base rulebook, p. 17
The official FAQ's restricted-view answer is likewise framed around the leader Harkonnen chose to kill and place face down in the Tanks. It authorizes Harkonnen, the leader's original owner and Tleilaxu to inspect that dead disc; it does not establish a general secrecy rule for every retained captive. GF9 FAQ, p. 6
Leader Skills adds a later, component-specific rule. A faction's one chosen skill and its assigned leader begin face up together, and “If a skilled leader is captured, the skill goes with them.” The expansion Q&A then says Harkonnen may use only that leader's battle skill, and only by using the captured leader in battle. GF9 CHOAM & Richese rulebook, pp. 9, 12
The rules never literally instruct Harkonnen to announce the captured skilled leader's name. The physical procedure nevertheless makes that identity public or necessarily inferable. The assignment was already public, the unique skill card must travel with the captured leader, and the card must leave play and be shuffled into the Leader Skill deck if that leader dies. Concealing the leader while exposing truthful custody of its unique public card is impossible without adding a proxy or decoy component that the rules do not provide.
The source-supported implementation boundary is therefore:
- capturing the skilled leader publicly transfers that leader's attached skill to Harkonnen custody, which identifies that one captured leader;
- Harkonnen loses the normal/top effect and may use only the battle/lower effect when actually using that captured leader in a battle;
- an unskilled retained captive keeps the ordinary base-game privacy treatment;
- a captive killed for 2 spice still follows the FAQ's face-down Tanks access rule, although killing the skilled captive also returns its unique public skill card to the deck and therefore makes that particular identity inferable; and
- if a used skilled captive survives, the leader and attached skill return to the original faction together.
This is a necessary inference from the published component movements, rather than an express publisher sentence saying “reveal the captured skilled leader.” It is narrower than a rule that all Harkonnen captures are public.
Source record
The Future Pastimes expansion page links the GF9 expansion rules and identifies the official design/publisher lineage. A fresh search of that designer site, the GF9 rulebook and FAQ, and Jack Reda's official Leader Skills walkthrough found no contrary instruction that the attached skill should be concealed or detached during capture.
The persistent local source archive is
/home/quintine/.local/share/dune/sources:
dune-rulebook-gf9-mirror.pdfand its.txtextraction preserve the publisher-authored 2019 base rulebook. SHA-256:02660bcce906d13dde65e0eb7599b49543af4d76e8cf6c7617bc19117887933c. The readable mirror was retrieved from 1jour-1jeu's document archive.choam-richese-rulebook-en.pdfand its.txtextraction preserve the publisher-authored expansion rules.leader-skills-designer-video-auto-transcript.txtpreserves Jack Reda's card walkthrough. The walkthrough explains the skill bands but does not add a capture-privacy exception.
The GF9 URLs now redirect or reject some direct clients, but their indexed publisher text and the byte-stable local copies agree on the quoted rules.
User ruling — 13 October 2026
The original faction retains its existing Skill assignment while its trained leader is captured. Reviving a different eligible own leader is legal, but does not offer or draw a replacement Skill while that original assignment exists. This is the user's selected interpretation of the authorized supplied Advanced physical p21 condition "if you have no Leader Skill Card"; it is not a new publisher ruling. The physical card still accompanies its captive, and the normal band remains unavailable to both factions until the captive returns. The existing lower battle-band and death-return mechanics remain unchanged.
The engine's earlier replacement-question guard wrongly suppressed the whole ordinary/Ghola revival, not merely a replacement offer. The ruled implementation removes that revival veto while retaining the existing one-assignment-per-owner offer check. No second assignment, forced draw or replacement card is introduced.