Mot's Useless Card Review #61: Punishment Zone

First Contact Expansion has sent many players back to the dilemma drawing board, looking for good dilemmas that will affect the Borg affiliation as well as the other three. Punishment Zone is the card with it all.

A non-Borg player is faced with an unpleasant choice. Either one personnel is killed by random selection, a la Armus, or that personnel is saved at a point penalty. Now, at first you may not think much of this dilemma. An opponent would choose to save anyone valuable to them if you actually selected them, right?

Well, maybe not. They may think that a person is expendable, when in fact they aren't. Let's say you randomly select a SCIENCE personnel, when your opponent has another one still in the Away Team. They may well choose to let the person die, thinking him to be "extra." But what if they then hit a Crystalline Entity doubled by Lore? Or another killer dilemma or two followed by an Alien Parasites? Or a Yuta, followed by a Barclay’s Protomorphosis Disease? And maybe not just at that location, but on a later mission attempt. The crew whiddled down by one mission attempt can often be killed by good dilemmas at a second.

Of course, if they choose to save the targeted personnel, it could come back to bite them. A point penalty can hurt you when you least expect it, ask anyone who has ever lost on account of The Higher... The Fewer. (And that penalty is twice as high if the selected personnel is Federation.) Plus, if they choose to save the person, they'll have to beam them back to the ship - they won't be continuing in the rest of the mission attempt. Have the remaining crew take on any of the dilemmas mentioned earlier without their valued companion up on the ship! Once removed, they're as good as dead for the rest of the mission attempt.

Against Borg, this dilemma is a scout killer, pure and simple. The Borg player cannot choose to return the scout to their ship when facing this dilemma, since that option involves point scoring, and bonus points are irrelevant. So rather than use two Armuses when your Borg opponent might Adapt to the second one, use a Punishment Zone instead, getting the most out of your dilemmas.

So, you have a dilemma likely to louse up any player. It works on the Borg. It's hardest on the Federation, the affiliation everyone seems to use the most. What more could you want out of a dilemma?