About this archive

This is a static copy of 14,399 threads (176,285 messages), from four places. Most of them come from the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad, spanning 1994 to 2010: every thread in which one of the game's rules directors posted — Thomas R. Wylie (from December 1994), Shawn F. Carnes (July 1996), Jon Wilkie (October 1996) and L. Scott Johnson (June 1998 onward) — which is where the rulings of the newsgroup era were handed down. The threads they answered in are here whole, questions and argument included, not just the answers.

A few hundred of them are not from that group at all. Jyhad was released in 1994, before rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad existed, and its first rules discussions — including the rules team's earliest rulings lists — happened in rec.games.deckmaster, the Deckmaster newsgroup. Those threads are here too, marked with the group they came from, so that the rulings citing them have somewhere to point.

Several thousand threads are not from Usenet at all. Rulings did not stop when the newsgroup did — they moved to the V:EKN forum, where Pascal Bertrand and then Ankha have answered them since. Every topic either of them posted in is here too, marked with the forum it came from, on the same rule that decided which newsgroup threads to keep.

Fifty-seven threads come from a fourth place. As the newsgroup wound down, L. Scott Johnson took to answering questions in the game's Rules forum on BoardGameGeek, and his last ruling as rules director was written there rather than on Usenet or the forum: 11 June 2011. A month later the seat passed to Pascal Bertrand and the rulings moved to the V:EKN forum for good, so the twelve threads here from after that date — he still turns up to answer a question, most recently in December 2025 — are a former director's and not a sitting one's. They are kept for completeness, not for citing.

Why it exists

The VTES rulings database is a curated list of rulings, each one sourced. Several hundred of those sources were links into Google Groups. Google Groups stopped accepting new Usenet posts in 2024 and its archive has been progressively harder to reach; a rulings database whose citations rot is a rulings database nobody can check. So the cited threads live here instead, as plain HTML that any web server can hand out and any browser from any decade can read.

What you are reading

Each page is one thread, in posting order. Message text is shown as it was posted, hard wraps and all, because Usenet was a fixed-width medium and its tables and diagrams only line up that way. Two things are not original:

• Author e-mail addresses were already partly obscured by Google Groups (someone...@example.com); that is how they reached us.
• Where you see [ quoted text not captured ], Google Groups had folded the quoted passage behind a "show trimmed content" control and the scrape never saw it. The text is not lost from the archive — it is in whichever message was being quoted.

Linking to it

Every thread keeps the identifier Google Groups gave it, so a link can be translated mechanically:

groups.google.com/g/rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad/c/KWekwiRSa2I
        ↓
  usenet.krcg.org/t/KWekwiRSa2I/

Within a thread, #m0 is the first message, #m1 the second, and so on. The # beside each author name is that message's own link.

A forum topic keeps its own number, and every post keeps the number the forum gave it, so a link into the forum keeps its fragment too and still lands on the post it was pointing at:

vekn.net/forum/rules-questions/75512-raptor-obedience#80020
        ↓
    usenet.krcg.org/t/vekn-75512/#80020

A BoardGameGeek thread translates the same way, except that it writes the post number into the path rather than the fragment, so that is where the number is read from:

boardgamegeek.com/thread/609699/article/6142361
        ↓
   usenet.krcg.org/t/bgg-609699/#6142361

Searching it

Search covers every word of every message, and the thread titles and author names besides. The word index is built with the site and split into small files, one per pair of opening characters, so a search downloads the words it needs rather than the whole archive — it works on a phone, and it works with no server behind it.

Words in quotes are a phrase, and the index cannot answer for those: it says which threads hold a word, not where in the thread the word falls. So the threads that hold every word of the phrase are looked up first, and pressing Enter reads those pages to keep the ones that say the words in that order. It is a page fetch each, so it stops after sixty and says that it did.

Provenance

The newsgroup threads come from Google Groups' copy, filled out from the Internet Archive's copy where Google's had gaps; the forum topics were read from the forum itself, and the BoardGameGeek threads from the JSON its own pages are built out of. The JSON the pages were rendered from is committed alongside the site generator in the newsgroup-archive repository, so they can be rebuilt, re-styled, or re-purposed without going back to any third party.

The posts are the property of their authors and are reproduced here for reference and preservation.