A: If your Transporter is Malfunctioning, no, it will not get you all the Crew in play. You will get the same effect from Beam Us Up as if you had no Transporter.
(Note that in Star Fluxx, it’s called a Teleporter, and the Keepers which are Beamed Up are Beings, not Crew, but this question could still arise if Beam Us Up is played with a Malfunctioning Teleporter)
…and what about Attached Creepers?
A: First off, lets clarify that the people who can be Beamed Up (or Beamed Back) by any Transporter include all “Crew Members” (AKA “Starfleet Officers”) as well as the “Visitors and Other Personnel” called out by the DS9 version of this card.
OK, so we know that a standard transporter pad has six spots for people to stand on. (Never mind that some artwork seems to only show two spots, we know they can all handle six.) The person who plays Beam Us Up takes their choice of the first six eligible Keepers. Control then passes around to the next player in turn order who has a Transporter, that player beams up the next group of up to six. If any player has more than one Transporter in play, they get six per Transporter. This continues around the table, even possibly reaching the original player if there are enough eligible Keepers in play.
As for Creepers, any that are attached go with their crew members, and then are immediately replayed by the person who collected them, since Creepers cannot be in a player’s hand. See If someone plays Beam Us Up…
A: To review, if someone plays the Action Beam Us Up, if a player has the Teleporter in play the person with the Teleporter takes ALL Being Keepers into their hand. Since this is someone else taking your Keepers, you can counter that Action with It’s a Trap. This would cancel the playing of Beam Us Up (saving everyone’s Keepers).
It’s pretty clear what’s going on when the person playing Beam Us Up is the person who has the Teleporter: they’ve triggered the action, and they’re the one stealing your Keepers. It’s a Trap takes one of their Keepers. But what if the person who played Beam Us Up is NOT the person who has the Teleporter? It could happen! Maybe they were forced to play it because of Play All, or they didn’t have any being Keepers to lose, so they didn’t care. In that case, who do you get to steal from when you play It’s a Trap?
After some deliberation, Andy and I played it out, looked at the exact wording on all of the cards involved, and ruled that It’s a Trap targets the person who is stealing your Keepers, i.e. the person who is receiving them, regardless of whether they triggered the action or not. So you’d steal a Keeper from the person with the Teleporter.
This more complicated scenario looks like this:
Player A has the Teleporter in play
Player B plays Beam Us Up
Player C, who has Keepers which would be taken by A in this scenario, plays the Surprise It’s a Trap out of turn to cancel B’s Action Beam Us Up, and steal a Keeper from Player A, the person with the Teleporter.
…Beam Us Back! Specifically calls out Visitors and Other Personnel in addition to Starfleet Officers. Will Beam Us Up! from the other Trekk Fluxxen also affect all of those categories of people?
A: Yes, any Transporter can Beam Up all “Crew Members” (AKA “Starfleet Officers”) as well as the “Visitors and Other Personnel” called out by the DS9 version of this card.
A: Not so much. From the person who has the Expendable Crewman, they’d first have to take the Expendable Crewman, clearly, but since they get ALL Beings, they don’t stop there — they take any other Beings that person has in play as well. So really, the Expendable Crewman can only protect you when a single card is being taken. It provides a buffer… but that buffer is only one card deep, as it were.
A: Yes. In Star Fluxx, the use of the word “beings” in that card’s instructions indicates only those cards with the Living Being icon (the brain). In either of the Star Trek Fluxxen, the use of the phrase “Crew Members” indicates cards with the Crew Member icon (the starfleet badge). In Star Trek: DS9 Fluxx, this is extended to also include Keepers with the “Visitor / Other Personnel” icon.
A: The Keeper and Creeper would get sucked up into that person’s hand… but a Creeper can never be in your hand, so the Creeper is then immediately played back to the table by that player. It would either then reattach to some other Keeper if possible, or hang around for as long as it takes for a new Keeper of the right type to show up to attach to.
Once you understand what’s happening with Beam Us Up in the normal case, you can figure out what will happen if someone has the Teleporter or Transporter in play. The Creeper won’t be left behind with the original owner, it is attached to the Keeper which is Beamed up, and when taken up into that person’s hand it’s then “spat out” in front of that player… not the person the Crew Member was taken from.