Nuclear War Expansion Cards
Created by Bernard HP Gilroy and students
(c) 2005 Gilroy. Free for non-profit use.
More information (including a consolidated list) is available.
Top Secret
Quantum Computer

Card
Text

Advanced simulation allows limited prognostication.
Each turn, draw 1 more card than you would normally; of these, discard one of your choosing.
But you must roll higher than the number of turns you've had this power on a d6, or it is lost. On a die roll of "1", the computer suffers a Blue Screen of Death and detonates its power plant (equivalent to 10 Mt) in your country.
Additional Notes and Information:

Quantum computers are the current Holy Grail of the computer and cryptographic industries. By taking direct advantage of quantum mechanical effects (such as entanglement or superposition), a QC can attack some problems much more efficiently than a classical one. More science-fictiony, a QC should "find all solutions at once" and partake of the weirdness of quantum mechanics. It'd be a little like peeking into all the alternate worlds... or at least, that's what this card assumes.

The ability to dodge nasty Secrets makes this a powerful card with no intrinsic downside. So I built in the timer, which can justified as a coherence limit. (The more a QC interacts with the real world, the more likely its parts will decohere and become useless.) The Blue Screen of Death is karmic retribution.

The icon, modeled on Intel's swish, contains a Star Trek joke too.

I wrote a Python script to simulate the span of time that a typical Quantum Computer would last. I was caught off guard by the high percentage of runs (37%) that end in BSODs.

Quantum Computer simulator for NukeWar
Number of simulations: 1000000
The average span was 3 turns.
There were 366852 Blue Screens of Death, a percentage of 36.69
Bins of span frequency percentages:
0 :  0.00 ( 0.00)
1 : 10.06 ( 10.06) ###########
2 : 17.93 ( 27.99) ##################
3 : 21.58 ( 49.57) ######################
4 : 20.16 ( 69.73) #####################
5 : 15.08 ( 84.81) ################
6 :  9.09 ( 93.90) ##########
7 :  4.28 ( 98.18) #####
8 :  1.46 ( 99.63) ##
9 :  0.33 ( 99.96) #

-=-BhpG

Originally the card read "Each turn draw 2 cards and keep whichever one you want". Then we played with it and discovered, of course, there are turns when you need to draw 2 or more cards already (after a missile detonates, after playing a Spy, etc.). So we modified it. The nasty bit comes when there's a turn when you don't draw any cards: Now you pick one and then immediately discard it. :)

-=-BhpG 2005 0621