Files
Dune/docs/LEADER_SKILLS_CAPTURE.md
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Quintine 6e6fecc9d4 Prototype Leader Skills setup, battle disciplines and capture
Connect all fourteen physical skills and private setup to five card-role battle
modifiers, public posture, Harkonnen skilled capture, death return and optional
own-leader revival through controls, legal AI and persisted room actions.
Nine skill effects and combined-mode/publication acceptance remain unfinished.
Captured replacement entitlement and foreign ghola integration stay guarded.

Fresh publisher/designer research supports skilled-capture publicity through
its unique known physical card; this is recorded as a component inference.
Independent review found and fixed Voice/must-use-leader and invalid saved
assignment/offer cases. A pre-existing Discovery privacy assertion confused
card ID prefixes; the corrected deterministic physical-pair scenario was
independently reviewed. The first broad run was 4410/4411; corrected final
verification passes types/lint, all 4411 offline tests, build and 43 HTTP tests.
Final durations: check 149741ms, build 6659ms, integration 28274ms.
Source fingerprint: aef655ac1ebc0eb2f64294e13d3d27337167312cf8ab17568a166ee9c39f6a85.
Private final report: 20260913-leader-skills/checks-final/report.json.

Three seeded prototype games completed with no rejected bot candidates. Browser
setup/card inspection/refresh passed. Another user-reported power outage stopped
the server; backup and necessary restart restored the same private seat. All
292 games at restart and their original application records remain unchanged;
33 isolated HTTP-test rooms bring the current total to 325. No database reset.

Efficiency: one shared setup/lifecycle implementation supports five connected
role effects; selective existing agents handled catalog/UI/tests/research and
independent reviews. One repeated broad check was required by the reproduced
ID-prefix assertion failure. Aggregate goal counter rose from 65529766 to
67313673 through this checkpoint (1783907), including inherited context and
coordination; this is not a billing or savings estimate. Full goal remains active.
2026-09-13 17:31:37 +10:00

4.7 KiB

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.pdf and its .txt extraction 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.pdf and its .txt extraction preserve the publisher-authored expansion rules.
  • leader-skills-designer-video-auto-transcript.txt preserves 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.

Remaining separate ruling

Capture does not settle whether the original faction counts as having no skill card while its only card is attached to a captive, and therefore whether a later own-leader revival may create a replacement assignment. That entitlement should remain gated until separately ruled. It does not affect the custody and visibility conclusion above.