Dune/docs/NEXUS_ECAZ_RULES.md

Ecaz Nexus source contract

Audited 10 September 2026. This is a source and integration audit, not an implementation or release claim. The immediate scope is Secret Ally; the other two printed effects remain separate. See common Nexus rules.

Primary evidence

The Ecaz panel was freshly inspected in the photograph of the original GF9 components, cached at /tmp/dune-nexus-cards.jpg. Secret Ally selects one player and requires a yes/no disclosure of whether that player holds any of the user's leaders as Traitors. It expressly withholds which leaders. It has no printed phase, battle, location, payment, live-leader or opponent-only condition. The face does not specify that this answer is secret or addressed only to the user. Its Cunning takes Duke Vidal for a turn despite capture, Tanks or Ghola custody; Betrayal concerns Ecaz's ally returning co-located forces before Shipment and Movement. Those are not Secret Ally prerequisites.

The GF9 E3 rulebook, pp.11 and 16 provides common mode eligibility, consumption and the Nexus FAQ. Secret Ally requires Ecaz absent from the seated faction roster and does not create a real alliance. The holder cannot retain the card through joining an alliance. Use consumes the physical Nexus card. There is no Ecaz-specific FAQ answer. The cached publisher-authored text at /tmp/dune-e3-nexus-rules.txt was inspected; fresh official-domain indexed excerpts confirm the two Nexus FAQ entries. A publisher-authored mirror supplied the previously cached PDF.

Leader identity and custody

Certain: Duke Vidal cannot make the answer positive. E3 expressly gives him no Traitor Card, despite changes of controller. Its Moritani FAQ permits an ordinary traitor call against a native Moritani leader captured by Harkonnen, so capture does not erase that leader's printed identity. E3, pp.3, 8 and 14

Certain: a leader's death does not remove an already held Traitor Card or make that identity cease to be a traitor. Revival preserves it. The effect supplies no alive-only filter. The later FAQ also distinguishes Tleilaxu's native leaders from foreign Ghola leaders and permits foreign Gholas to return through the Tanks. GF9 FAQ, April 2020 p.1, GF9 FAQ, November 2020 p.6

Not authoritatively settled by the inspected sources: whether this card's possessive means native faction identity, the current controlled leader pool, or native leaders plus acquired foreign leaders. The E1 Ghola advantage, p.7 explicitly adds foreign leaders to the Tleilaxu leader pool. It does not redefine the Ecaz card, which was published later. It is therefore unsafe to label either a native-only or current-control interpretation an explicit GF9 ruling.

The ordinary uncontested case is an owner's native faction leader identities, including dead leaders, against a target's actual held traitors. Canonical faction matching avoids accidental dependence on whether a captured disc remains in its original owner's array. For a full implementation, keep the ownership scope explicit and resolve the exceptional scope before claiming captive/Ghola coverage. Do not silently use only currently battle-available leaders: that adds an unsupported live/used-at constraint. A native-only choice would include native leaders currently captured elsewhere; a current-control choice would instead include held foreign captives/Gholas. Those can produce opposite answers.

The ordinary Cheap Hero/Heroine Treachery Cards are not faction leader discs and share a separate physical traitor identity. They must not silently become part of every faction's native leader set. Advanced CHOAM's Auditor is a real native leader with its own component identity; use the initialized canonical inventory rather than a hard-coded count of five. These are component/model observations, not a retrieved Ecaz-specific ruling about a controlled-pool interpretation.

Face Dancers and targets

E1 makes Tleilaxu's drawn identities Face Dancers instead of ordinary selected traitors. The E3 Harkonnen Secret Ally FAQ expressly preserves that classification when Tleilaxu obtains another such card. GF9 E1, pp.6–7, GF9 E3, p.16

A literal traitors-only composition therefore reads the target's ordinary traitors and answers false for Tleilaxu; it does not disclose either revealed or unrevealed Face Dancers. This is a defensible composition of the distinct card roles, not an explicit Ecaz-versus-Tleilaxu FAQ. Do not merge faceDancers into traitors merely because they share the physical Traitor Deck. Extending the question to Face Dancers would reveal additional information and needs an explicit selected interpretation.

The card does not restrict the target to a combat opponent, an unallied player, a faction with a matching traitor, or a faction whose cards are still secret. Target availability must not depend on the answer. An allied target remains a player; the user's own alliance status is constrained by common Nexus custody. The wording does not explicitly exclude selecting oneself, although it reveals no new information to the user. Do not claim a self-target exclusion comes from the face.

Disclosure and transaction timing

The phrase on the face is a disclosure requirement without an explicit audience qualifier. The inspected GF9 sources do not settle private-only versus table-wide disclosure. Atreides' nearby Cunning explicitly describes showing its user a plan element; this Ecaz effect does not. Existing private inspection code is an implementation precedent, not evidence that this different effect has the same audience. Preserve only the yes/no fact under whichever audience is selected, never a count, identity, faction breakdown, concealed captive status, or whole target hand. Do not use a tournament's added “publicly announce” wording as if printed on the GF9 component.

There is no prescribed separate answer delay. An atomic accepted play can spend Nexus and record the current answer without asking the target to confirm a server-known fact. That avoids an avoidable interval in which a hand exchange changes what is being answered. This is an implementation sequencing recommendation, not an extra printed phase restriction.

Read the target's completed current hand. Finish an already pending Harkonnen draw/return or Face Dancer replacement before a new inquiry: those operations expose an augmented intermediate pool and already have game-wide action locks. A later legal exchange can change the target's hand but must not rewrite the historical answer. Neither declared traitor-call history nor discarded/replaced identities substitute for what the player currently has. The answer cannot retroactively change an earlier battle call.

Current integration map and proposed boundary

• game/leader-control.ts separates original faction identity from capturedBy, gholaBy and temporary controller; engine.ts keeps native leader records in their original seat arrays. Its controlledLeaders helper is a different query from native faction identity.
• projectLeader hides appropriate capture/Tanks details. A new offer must not enumerate actual hidden foreign captives or vary availability with their presence. Any exceptional-custody gate must follow public configuration, not a secret capturedBy test.
• game/nexus-traitor-exchange.ts validates the exact global physical census and requires Tleilaxu's ordinary traitors array to be empty. Pending exchanges are locked through pendingNexusTraitors; completed history deliberately survives later custody changes.
• game/traitors.ts maps real leader identities and the separate Cheap Hero identity for battle use. It does not answer who owns a leader for this effect.
• game/tupile-intelligence-state.ts is the closest stored-observation precedent: retain a signed, dated answer and validate its intrinsic receipt without recomputing against future hidden hands. game/battle-inspections.ts concerns commitments to a plan and its answer/reopen history; Ecaz's past fact should not become an ongoing commitment.

Implement the common, source-clear contract as a pure boolean intersection of explicitly supplied queried leader IDs with an ordinary held-traitor snapshot. Let the engine select the agreed leader scope and audience. Bind the accepted event, original seats/factions, turn/phase, chosen target, scope and boolean in a completed receipt; keep private source evidence server-side if retained. Discard the one real Ecaz Nexus card in the same accepted transaction. Validate current global custody separately from historical answers. Public offers can be built entirely from roster, timing/continuation state and the owner's card, without reading target secrets.

Meaningful regressions should cover positive and negative answers with equal public hand sizes; dead/revived native leaders; native captive versus foreign captive/Ghola cases for the explicitly selected scope; Duke and Hero identities; Tleilaxu role separation; Harkonnen exchange before/after inquiry; stale/replayed/concurrent play; JSON/SQL historical persistence; and exact audience projection without counts or matching identities. Until scope and audience are selected, those unresolved branches must not be presented as fully source-verified behavior.