Marco Polo (Action-Traveller) Cost:
You may put this on top of your deck. If you do, +.
When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for Board a Ship.
Step 1: A dead action card with no advantages or an endless terminal silver. Which is not a particularly bad thing even, so even then you'd want a marco polo. Reasonale card in itself and interesting trade off.
Terminal silver is really bad, actually...
Board a Ship (Action-Duration-Traveller) Cost:
+1 Action
If you end your Action phase with at least 1 unused Action, play this again at the start of your next turn.
When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for Visiting Bagdad.
Step 2: If you *don't* have a second action card, you can't discard it. So unlike the previous one, this card *incentivizes* progressing your deck. If you use the +1 action, you can discard it and go on to the next step. I don't think this is good: if you want to make this card interesting, I would make it always that you would want to choose: either progress the traveller line *or* get an advantage.
That choice between "progress" and "advantage" is the choice in step 3. As it is, the situation here is either you move on with a minor advantage or you wait a little bit and then move on. It's Walled Village.
Visiting Bagdad (Action-Traveller) Cost:
Gain a Gold. Pay an Action. If you don't, put this into your hand.
When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for On the Silk Road.
Here we have a choice again: either make sure you have an action in 'reserve' (village or whatever) or progress.
Note that both here and the previous card really increases the effect of shuffle luck. (Depending on your hand there is a choice or there isn't a choice.) But I guess that's not that unusual.
So the choice here is what you said would be good in Step 2. You either get an advantage (use that extra action you have) or you move on with the Traveller.
Shuffle luck is actually low. Step 2 just waits until it happens. This one can be accomplished with the card from Step 2 which, again, waits until it happens. You don't need to draw multiple cards together because they'll stick around until success.
On the Silk Road (Action-Traveller) Cost:
+1 Action. Discard any number of Victory cards and add up their total cost in . If they cost...
to : +1 Card, +.
to : +3 Cards.
More than : Exchange this for Visit the Khan.
Here is the biggest random factor. Not only is the randomizer effect bigger than with typical Tournement (which I find absolutely dreadful, even if I win the race), this is just the Province race to the luxe.
Also: that makes it a 'similar' path. You still need to buy province and all; it just a bigger boost to what buying provinces increases. When ahead, it's easier to stay ahead. Again: I don't think that's a good mechanism.
But by buying into this chain, you'll be slower to Provinces unless you've had a good plan all along. Also, if you actually think about the effects, they aren't that amazing.
0-2 = Peddler. You don't have to discard for this so it's always available.
3-10 = Double Lab. That sounds amazing until you remember that you had to discard cards for it. You draw 3 cards, but you're also discarding at least 2 cards!
This makes it barely better than Cellar. Possibly worse, actually, since you can't discard Copper to it.
10+ = exchange, but no other bonus other than the +1 action. You'll need to shuffle before you get any advantage out of that.
It's not at all like Tournament because, by this point, you'll have done a significant amount of deck building.
It's like a game we had with 4 players, and the first player to start won because she was the first one to get a hand of 5 (or 6, I don't remember) with coins; everyone after her always had to remove 2 cards, causing a serious delay. That's an effect I don't like.
What card was causing this? Militia? I don't see how it's related...
Visit the Khan (Action-Victory) Cost:
The game ends after this turn.
Worth 10 if you played this.
Because of the 'you need victory cards anyway', this is almost always a 'whoever plays this first, wins'. So I'm ok with keeping it at +10 VP, but then it has to be an alternative to provinces (which it's not really at this point). If you want to keep it, I'd make it (1) that it feels less swingy and, more importantly, is an alternative to provinces, rather than build on top of it.
That can be modified by lowering the VP value if necessary, but I think 10VP will often be too little to overcome somebody who just ignored this card from the start.
I'm really still not seeing the swinginess. The more I think about it, the more it seems that every card was designed to
mitigate swinginess. For perspective, the possible swinginess in this card seems far, far less than the swinginess of having Chapel miss the second shuffle.