14 KiB
Richese Ambassador: paid acquisition and faction modifiers
Primary-source decision review, 7 September 2026. Implement the paid draw as a purchase: Harkonnen receives its ordinary extra card when there is room, and another purchasing faction's payment follows Emperor income substitution. Ixian allied replacement additionally requires Bidding timing. These are applications of general triggers, not claims that GF9 published an Ambassador-specific worked example. The earlier Ambassador audits' unresolved acquisition classification and categorical bank-only recommendation should not remain implementation blockers.
Fresh primary evidence
All four official PDF opens returned HTTP 403 in this pass. Targeted searches recovered indexed publisher pages, which were compared with the available local publisher text. Search-engine publication dates are not edition dates. No community FAQ or tournament amendment supplies a rule below.
| Source | Relevant evidence |
|---|---|
| GF9 2019 base rules, pp.6,12,17,19 | Harkonnen receives a bonus for each purchase, with no Bidding timing qualifier. The hand cap still applies. Emperor substitutes for the bank when another faction pays for a Treachery Card. A player cannot join multiple alliances. Local base.txt lines1038–1044 and1150–1153 confirm the two income/acquisition triggers. |
| GF9 Ixians & Tleilaxu rules, p.9 | Allied replacement requires a card purchase “during bidding”. The buyer may discard that acquired card and draw the deck's next card. This is an alliance ability, not an extra acquisition power granted to Ixians themselves. Local ix-official-mirror.txt lines385–387. |
| GF9 November 2020 FAQ, pp.2,6–7 | Allied purchase funding is authorized in Bidding. An Ixian ally sees the purchased card before deciding on replacement. Karama can stop a use of an alliance ability and the relevant faction income/acquisition advantages. The FAQ directs Emperor-funded extra-revival payments to Tleilaxu despite the base alliance text naming direct payment to the bank. |
| GF9 Ecaz & Moritani rules, pp.7–8,15–16 | The Richese effect costs three spice, names the bank, takes the Treachery Deck's top card, and requires space in hand. Ecaz may assign the effect to its ally. Triggered effects interrupt the entrant's remaining action. The Ambassador Karama entry concerns placement; it does not newly define acquisition modifiers. Local ecaz-audit.txt lines263–307,329–331,705–707 and769 onward. |
Classification and beneficiary coverage
Exchanging a fixed spice payment for a new deck card is a purchase in the ordinary meaning of the general acquisition rule. The verb draw specifies where the card comes from; it does not say the acquisition is free, exclude a purchase, or suppress other factions' advantages. Consequently, apply the existing Harkonnen purchase benefit. Do not reinterpret the separate, unpaid Ixian Ambassador discard-and-replace effect as another purchase.
Emperor's exact operative sentence on printed base p.19, under BIDDING, is: “Whenever any other faction pays spice for a Treachery Card, they pay it to you instead of the Spice Bank.” The heading names the advantage; the sentence contains no express phase condition. This differs from the Ixian sentence's express timing clause. Do not silently insert a Bidding-only condition into Emperor's operative trigger.
Likewise, the bank instruction is not an explicit exception to Emperor's replacement of the bank as recipient. Ordinary shipping and revival instructions also name the bank before faction income substitutions apply. The FAQ's extra-revival example is particularly useful: even direct bank wording can coexist with such a substitution. Treating this paid draw as a purchase for Harkonnen but categorically not a card payment for Emperor would require an exception absent from the retrieved sources. This recommendation is also consistent with the project's existing Richese special-purchase composition.
For the default two-faction alliance rules, the complete beneficiary matrix is:
| Beneficiary | Acquisition handling |
|---|---|
| Ecaz | Receives the purchased deck card. If allied with Ixians, replacement additionally requires an actual Bidding-phase purchase. |
| Harkonnen, as Ecaz's ally | Receives the purchased card and applicable Harkonnen bonus. Cannot simultaneously be Ixians' ally. |
| Emperor, as Ecaz's ally | Receives the purchased card; does not collect its own payment. |
| Ixians, as Ecaz's ally | Receives the purchased card; its alliance power does not let it replace its own purchase. |
| Atreides, Bene Gesserit, CHOAM, Fremen, Guild, Moritani, Richese, or Tleilaxu, as Ecaz's ally | Receives the purchased card. Naming the Ambassador Richese does not acquire a cache card or invoke the beneficiary's special Karama. No additional ordinary acquisition modifier was found for these beneficiaries. |
The buyer is the chosen beneficiary: it pays and receives the card. The owner does not buy a card and then gift it to the beneficiary. Retain each player's actual hand limit and currently available resources; do not hardcode a universal four-card cap in an effect helper.
Trigger authority and an unavailable private beneficiary
E3 p.8 assigns Ecaz the choice to give its ally the benefit of a triggered effect. Base p.12 leaves allied assistance to the particular player-sheet abilities. Neither adds an ally acceptance right. The Richese instruction contains no internal optional purchase or refusal branch. Therefore, do not offer an affordable beneficiary a new Buy / Decline choice after consuming the token, and do not invent a mandatory pre-trigger permission dialog. Ecaz can leave the physical Ambassador in place at its original offer.
For an ally's private inability, the recommended resolution is: Ecaz commits the otherwise legal trigger and beneficiary; the server attempts the conditional acquisition; if there is insufficient available spice, no hand space, or no drawable card after normal recycling, no payment or card occurs and the triggered token remains used. Do not partially debit the price. No Emperor income or Harkonnen bonus arises without the primary purchase. The printed trigger conditions concern the entry and token, whereas the Richese effect itself conditions acquisition on room; those are separate checks.
This is an explicit implementation interpretation of an unavailable effect, not a quoted publisher failed-cost rule. It preserves the printed optional trigger, required price and conditional acquisition without inventing either a beneficiary veto or resources. CHOAM's separately printed allowance to discard any number of cards is not, by itself, proof of a universal zero-effect rule. A future contrary publisher clarification would warrant revisiting the unavailable-purchase branch, not the purchase-modifier classification.
The privacy consequence matters: do not expose an ally's affordability or fullness as a free projected eligible/blocked answer to Ecaz. Ecaz may receive its own private eligibility explanation. An actual committed effect may publicly succeed or fail; that unavoidable outcome is different from arbitrarily probing another player's secret holdings without consuming the opportunity. Public failure wording should not distinguish spice shortage, a full hand, or hidden card identities.
Ixian timing is a positive requirement
The real ordinary movement, shipment and worm-entry callers resolve outside Bidding. They therefore do not offer Ixian allied replacement, even if Ecaz is allied with Ixians. Do not delay the draw until Bidding to create eligibility. Do not create a fictitious auction receipt merely to reach the current replacement implementation.
If a separately implemented, legal entry effect eventually triggers this Ambassador during Bidding, evaluate the literal timing requirement at that actual event. For Ecaz with an Ixian ally, such a paid deck acquisition meets the general purchase-and-timing conditions; a new direct Ambassador FAQ is not needed. This conditional statement does not assert that the current engine has such an entry producer. A Richese-family card recycled into the ordinary deck is still being acquired from that deck; the Ambassador does not become a sale from Richese's separate cache.
The same timing distinction matters for funds. Existing allied shipment aid is not general-purpose available spice. The FAQ's Bidding purchase-funding permission does not authorize spending movement-phase shipment escrow on this purchase. Use the beneficiary's available spice in current non-Bidding entry paths; compose any separate funding permission explicitly.
Runtime integration implications
Current line anchors are navigation aids, not rules evidence. ambassadorEffectBlock near game/engine.ts:6261 still blocks Richese through the implemented-effect list. resolveAmbassadorEffect near6396 and finishAmbassador near6372 are the real acquisition/resume boundary. draw near2067 already owns deck replenishment. It must execute once after commitment, never while constructing public eligibility or probing a cancellation.
The shared auction machinery cannot be called unchanged. settleAuction near4690 and settleRicheseLot near4141 create actual sale receipts. continueAuctionSale/auctionBonus near4804 subsequently reach nextAuction, while the Ixian response near10627 requires currentAuctionSale and stages a replacement discard with auction provenance. The new effect must keep its Ambassador event and resume destination rather than advance any auction or phase. Reuse narrowly shared benefit calculations, with an explicitly different acquisition continuation.
Suggested deterministic sequence: validate the public entry/token/beneficiary authority; commit the trigger; evaluate the acquisition using the beneficiary's private resources; if executable, commit payment and the first physical draw, then settle applicable income and bonus responses; otherwise record the unavailable effect without payment. Finish the Ambassador and its original entry once in either case. The first card's identity remains private. Do not make public availability enumerate a hidden top card. Harkonnen cancellation affects the extra acquisition, not the already purchased card; Emperor cancellation affects income, not the completed purchase. Existing choice-free automatic continuation should apply when its prerequisites are satisfied.
Meaningful evidence should include all beneficiary rows, Harkonnen near its cap, Emperor present/absent/self/canceled, Ecaz–Ixians outside Bidding, recycled deck cards, no-card supply, exact-once JSON/SQLite recovery, and the original worm/movement suffix. Test an actual Bidding entry only when a real producer supports it. Do not fabricate one merely to obtain coverage.
Remaining scope
No material source conflict was found that requires withholding the acquisition modifiers for these beneficiaries. The unavailable-effect behavior above is identified separately as an interpretation, rather than silently presented as explicit text. The lack of a named worked example is not such a conflict. Optional Homeworld, Nexus, skill and nonstandard-alliance modifiers need their own existing module contracts; this audit does not silently certify them. Competing arrival reactions, future Bidding entry producers and safe nested response/discard persistence are implementation work, not reasons to redefine the purchase trigger.
This review changes no runtime or tests and does not establish complete Ecaz or expansion-game compliance.