1. Why is the background of Action - Reaction cards blue instead of White and Blue? It seems that either this or Treasure - Reaction or Action - Victory is "wrong", i.e., there seems to be no simple to explain convention regarding how to assign colors. Maybe a Treasure - Reaction was not planned when Moat got full blue background?
I remember answering this one on BGG, and hey here's that post.
I did think of this back when, and mentioned it in case anyone cared.
In Dominion, color indicates type, but type doesn't always mean a color, and the Action type does not always have its color represented.
The way to think of this is in terms of functionality. Why have colors at all?
- Green lets you know that you don't need to look at those cards in your hand, they are doing nothing. And it helps you sort them at the end too.
- Yellow lets you know you can play that card in your buy phase.
- Blue lets you know that this card does something at an unusual time. Look at your hand, see if there's a blue card.
- Orange reminds you that this might stay out an extra turn instead of being discarded.
Curses didn't strictly need their own color but it seemed nice to help sort them and they got one. Attacks were originally pink but I switched to the default white there because that word "attack" didn't have any meaning. It's just there so cards can refer to it.
White is just the default color; an Action with nothing extra going on is white.
So then, why make Nobles etc. white-green? Because normally you can ignore victory cards in hand, that's their deal, but you don't want to ignore Nobles. So it reminds you that it's an action.
Whereas orange-white isn't needed for duration cards because the orange color doesn't mean "ignore this."
For Moat in particular, there it was as the only reaction in the main set. It did not want to be two colors, that seemed more confusing rather than less confusing.
The "when-gain" ability could have had a type and color, to help remind you to do something when you gain one. But then Mint couldn't have been in Prosperity, and I didn't consider this back then.
Anyway, Moat could have been blue-white, this did not go unnoticed but it did go undone.
2. Is it possible / feasible to have Treasure - Duration type?
I would have to read the Seaside rulebook to know for sure. Read the Seaside rulebook, see what you think. The Seaside rulebook could have been written such that treasure-duration worked, but I don't know if it was.
3. When learning that Dark Ages had a trashing theme, I was expecting a Victory Card scoring points per cards in the trash (or something else trash related). This is a really simple idea, so my wild guess is that it was considered. Is there something particularly broken about something like that? (maybe an Action - Victory that potentially trashes, so there is always a trasher in the board).
There are secret histories for each expansion, you can see the Dark Ages one on this very site at
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=4318.0- Another late card was a treasure-victory card, worth $1 plus $1 per nontreasure in your hand, and worth 1 VP per 10 cards in the trash. The VP part was crazy, and I replaced this with a treasure worth $1 per different card type in your hand. It was cute in all-Dark Ages games and not so great otherwise. It flirted with staying in the set, then I replaced it with Rebuild.
Seaside also once had a victory card that counted the trash, and Seaside also has a secret history viewable on this site.
- The victory card that Island replaced was an Action-Victory with "Trash a card from the supply costing $6 or less / Worth 1 vp per 3 vp cards in the trash." I always thought it seemed cool and interesting, but in practice it wasn't much fun. If you went for it, other people would get in on it. It would do nothing some games, then dominate others, but never in a fun way. No-one was sad to see it go. There could still be a card someday that trashes supply cards, but in practice it's mostly a waste of time, with players sitting there trying to work out which card to trash in cases where it really doesn't matter (and so it's hard to decide).
4. After Prosperity, there seems to be a really thin line between non-terminal non-village Actions and Treasures, but there are lots of cards that care about that thin line (even disregarding the "drawing nonterminals dead" possibility). At this point, I even think the difference between Actions and Kingdom Treasures is more of a "spirit" things, so that things that interact specifically with one kind have some meaning. After a kind of long introduction, my question is, do you base the decision of weither something should be an Action or a Treasure purely based on possible game interactions? If so, is there any kind of rule of thumb to decide what type to assign to a card to put something to avoid bad interactions in future cards?
Prosperity had a theme of treasures that did things. Originally many of them were "when you spend this," but that created questions that I could solve by going either to "when you play this" or "while this is in play."
Since other sets don't have that theme, they don't have treasures that do something when played unless there's a compelling reason for them. It's not that an action with +1 action could be a treasure; it has to want to be a treasure. Only one card has been tried both ways - Horn of Plenty was an action, and switched to being a treasure in order to count treasures you'd played (in the simplest way). Diadem, Ill-Gotten Gains, and Fool's Gold all do something when played just to let them be worth varying amounts. Spoils does something to be one-use. Counterfeit is specifically a Throne Room for treasures, it plays treasures and so naturally it's a treasure (while some people like that Black Market plays treasures in the action phase, it's too confusing to be worth doing again).
I am not seeing the +1 Action cards that want to be treasures. Obv. anything that also draws cards is unhappy to be a treasure. Forager could be a treasure that makes a variable amount. Rebuild has no reason to be a treasure. Bag of Gold sounds like a treasure, but makes $0; even though Horn of Plenty is a treasure worth $0, that's not something to do for no good reason. Ruined Village for sure did not want to be a treasure.
So overall there's just Forager. I did not consider making Forager a treasure. I applied no rule of thumb; I just never considered it. It was an action and nothing said "wait let's think about this."
