Sure, why not!
New World Secret History
New World came to be when I found inspiration for the flavour of the set. Woops, that’s not how designing things should go, right? Well, I channeled this inspiration into cards and put this set together. The flavour was taken after a discussion we had on the Discord. We were talking about setting ideas for hypothetical expansions and we mentioned the western hemisphere. I thought there was potential there. I know a tiny bit of history from aboriginal tribes like Algonquins, Métis, Iroquois, Mohawks, Crees, Incas, Innuits, etc… so this was right up my alley.
I first settled for 15 cards. I wanted a small set. But with 2 new mechanics for such a small set, well, I needed more cards. So in the end, I got 18 cards. I knew I wanted some Duration cards, and eventually I sort of just added cards with VP tokens, because eh. Why not.
I think the Piety mechanic was heavily inspired by Scolapasta’s Worshippers. I mean the similarities certainly are there. I wanted something a little more than simple Ratcatcher tokens though, so upgrading tokens sounded like a fun and intuitive minigame. Since I had VP tokens in the set already, why not make the topmost level an alternative way of scoring? And it was the perfect place to included the VP mat too. All mats together, like Renaissance’s Coffers/Villagers mat. Efficient! Level 2 Pieties used to say: “[…]and gain a card costing up to $2 more than it”, just like Remodel. Until I milled Provinces with my Pieties. That did not feel good in the slightest. Glad we caught that one... Piety’s timing was strongly considered. What if you could use them anytime during your turn? But then, the timing was a little more tough to pinpoint rules wise and it was just better to have it at the start of your turn. It’s harder to trash this way too, so everything’s in check.
Laws, I wanted to make for the longest time. My favourite board game of all time is Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization. In this game, there is an Event deck, filled up with cards players seed during the game. The cards you seed in this deck are kept secret from other players, so only you know what’s to come. I was always enamoured with this gameplay mechanic, and Laws tried their best to recreated that feeling. At first, I was scared that Laws were too convoluted. I mean, they are bounded by a lot of rules to make them work as intended. That’s a little borderline for me. In the end however, it took a couple of games to see how cool it is to see the game rules being modified via players’ input alone. It’s thrilling! So, despite how rules-heavy they are, I could accept them for what they are: fun. And hey, this is fan-cards land here, I can get away with stuff, harr harr!
Shaman: First version was unplayable and weak. No one bothered with it. I think it only gave you one Buy and one Piety or something. So you never really could thin with it because of the Treasure card it forcefully gives you (ignoring the setup clause). The two choices now make it like some kind of hybrid between Count and Squire. I like that. The second choice, the Copper to hand or Silver to discard pile, is a popular concept among fan cards, and I guess it was my turn to make a card using that idea.
Shaman was mostly made for the setup clause truthfully. I know I wanted a card doing that. It creates an interesting start-of-game choice. Do I want to thin 2 Estates immediately or Remodel one into a $4 card? The answer, of course, depends on your opening split and on what the Supply has to offer. It’s a very cool choice, and it’s exciting to see both players in a 2-player game splitting their setup Pieties differently!
Sunrise Emissary: First iteration was the simplest thing ever. It just gave you 2 Laws on each play. Didn’t take long for me to realise how bothersome it is to mess with Laws when you constantly get to take some. “I need draw and Sunrise Emissary is there to fulfill to niche, but I’m not going to buy it simply because it takes forever to just… take Laws, discard them and ugh…” is a comment I got. Imagine ignoring something you need to win simply because of how annoying it is to execute. That’s… not good design. So now, Sunrise Emissary has a limiter and weew lad that feels much, MUCH better! Still fits on 2 lines too, harr harr!
Eagle Warrior: It had to also self-trash alongside another Eagle Warrior for you to get the Gold. It kinda sucked. Eagle Warrior is the first card I made for this set. The name sounds like an Attack, and if I recall correctly, it briefly was. It changed to not be an Attack no more, but it kept the flavour. Sorry about the dissonance behind a Warrior not attacking!
Fabergé Egg: This card exploits the whole “Law can only be enacted in your Action phase” thingy. I always feared that this card was too weak. This is the only Leader card that actively encourages you to quickly rotate Laws. Still not 100% sure how I feel about that, but at least that’s the only Leader card that has this sort of minigame. So I believe it’s ok. I tried alternate ways of playing with this concept for Fabergé Egg, but settled on that.
Inuksuk: Behold! The once most overpowered card of this set by far. That’s because it gave you +2 Pieties on-gain and on-trash. Man that was bonkers. Silk Merchant kind of bonkers. You opened 2 of those and Remodeled them into powerful $5 cards, keeping your 2 Pieties afterwards. No, I’m serious, it was always THE play each game. It was fun to execute, don’t get me wrong! But man...
So anyway, at the last possible moment, like a couple of days before I released this set, it
finally got nerfed into giving you 1 Piety. The nerf is significant. You can’t do the aforementioned tricks anymore. Now, it’s better paired with other trash-for-benefit cards. I still like the card.
Spiritual Advisor: Used to give you +$1. You got another +$1 if you took the Law. Man, why not just have a +$2 above and a choice below? I did that and it is what it is now. Spiritual Advisor came to be out of a desire to combine the 2 new mechanics of New World and it does so in the simplest way possible. Sometimes you need the simple cards.
Lone Wolf: Before, you had to reveal your whole hand no matter what (still reflected in the rulebook – I really need to correct that already). Now, you only do so if you didn’t discard another Lone Wolf. Less cumbersome that way. I wanted a Peddler in this set, and Lone Wolf is that Peddler. Compare to Poacher, I suppose.
Purify: It is your non-Piety trasher of the set. I wanted one of those. And Purify is pretty strong, not gonna lie. Can you believe it used to cost $3? It was like that for a long time too, until I had enough of this power creep and bumped its cost.
Tipi: This is still a strong card. Upper tier of $4 cards I’d wager. And yet, and yet, the +$1 option used to be +$2. Well that got nerfed pretty quickly. I knew for 18 cards I needed 2 traditional Villages, and well, this is one of them (the other is Chief’s Hut, which was designed first).
Totem: A card taking one of the few “wacky” slots. Okay so a few things changed here. Let’s go from top to bottom.
Alright so the top part had a change of wording. It used to be: “Take a Law, you may immediately enact it”. But what if you take a Law through Totem and prefer to keep the one you already had? May you enact that one instead? Original version says no, but that’s kiiiinda bullshit a lil’, ain’t it? So that got corrected.
As for the bottom part, the Duration bonus was always +$3. I needed something to justify the “until then”, which is the core of the idea. And well, Totem has always been kind on the weak side from where I stand, so Gatekeeper’s +$3 it is. The part where other players need to spend $2 to enact a Law used to be straight up: “Until then, each other player cannot enact a Law”. Period. No compromises. That sounded cool, until that one game where I rotated a pair of Totems, playing one each turn. Now I was in full control of the Laws, my opponents didn’t have a say about them anymore. That does not sound so cool anymore, does it? The penalty now is more manageable. You’ll need to spend $ you collected in your Action phase to enact a Law while an opponent has a Totem in play, but hey look at that, you’ve got a nice +$3 Duration card to help you: Totem! Everything worked out in the end.
Totem is still not an Attack, not unlike Possession and Masquerade. The oppressiveness of Totem is self-contained with itself, and Laws are a minor part of having a functioning deck. So yes, it feels like it hinders other players, but like, not so much when you really think about it. Let’s leave poor Totem to do its thing, who needs to Moat that weak card. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Altepetl: Second card I made for this set. First use of Laws I came up with. This didn’t use to give you cheaper cards. It needed the help. Overlord can freely play it, I know. Good on you if you pull that play!
Canoe: Okay. So I wanted some kind of recursive Duration card. I think there’s some uncharted design space there. Canoe v1 returned to your hand at the start of your next turn when you didn’t buy a card on the turn you played it. Two problems. One, it’s weak as hell. Yeah yeah, there are other ways to gain cards in Dominion. But who wants in general to forgo their purchase in a turn? Dominion is all about buying cards. That version of Canoe was pretty anti-Dominion by its very nature. Two, it created a wording nightmare. “If you don’t buy a card this turn, put this into your hand at the start of your next turn.” What is “this turn”? The turn you played it, or the turn you evaluate the Duration effect? There were ways to work around that, but none of them were particularly elegant.
Canoe v2 simply asked you to discard a card to put itself into your hand next turn. I don’t need to tell you it was overpowered. Now, this Canoe is hitting the sweet spot I always wanted. The decision is a good one, sometimes a tough one too! Canoe might be my single-most favourite card of this set, for what it’s worth.
Chief’s Hut: First version gave you a Gold instead of a Silver. One game later, that got rightfully deemed too strong. So now, you get a Silver. The rest remained unchanged.
Hunter-Gatherer: First version made you gain any cheaper card from the trash. The thing is, if players are thinning their deck, you’ll sometimes be put in a position where you need to fish for a Copper or Estate in the trash. That… does not feel very good. Why am I bothering with this card if it’s just going to self-junk? Anyway. Now it only fishes for Action cards, that feels better.
This card is fulfilling a lot of needs I had. I wanted something interactive that was not an Attack card, and Hunter-Gatherer is highly interactive. So mission accomplished on that end. Also, since VP tokens were coming back, I did not want Wendigo to be the only Kingdom card that used this mechanism. The perfect candidate to slap a +VP onto it was, of course, Hunter-Gatherer, so I did that. Now the set looks a little more consistent. Hunter-Gatherer got some debate about its power level when compared to Monument. I like it as-is, to be fair.
Invaders: “Each other player reveals their hand, discard all revealed non-Victory cards, then draw up to 5 cards in hand” was the Attack. It sounds like a cool Attack on paper, but it took a whooping one game to demonstrate how feelsbad this was. Show of hand: who likes the Attack on Minion?
Manor: A card that went in all sort of crazy places. Used to give you a +Buy along the +$1 for each differently named card you gained. Ok, so one game I played 4 Manors and had an infinite amount of +Buy (not infinite, but it was crazy high). This was a hard to track overpowered nightmare. Then the card got changed to what it looks like now, except that it gave a flat +2 Buys. Still a tad too strong. It got nerfed into what it is afterwards.
Missionary: Except for some very minor wording touch-ups, the premise here did not change since its inception. The idea was to have one card giving each other player Piety and hey, Missionary does that. They share their faith (forcefully)!
Wendigo: The Curser of the set (not counting the Sacred Pipe Law). I don’t think this has changed at all. It’s a strong card, you should probably buy it when it’s there.
Cleaner: First Law I’m talking about and, ironically, the last one to be added in the set. It used to say: “[…] return a non-Duration card you have in play to the Supply”. Okay, so, guess I can’t return my Mercenary or Necropolis, huh? To be more concise, that wording got changed to the one we have today.
This card is nice in the sense that it morphs from something helpful early on to a (small) nuisance later on.
Cultivation: My favourite Law! This is super thematic. There are less goodies to cultivate from the land, reflected by the decreasing cost of the cards to gain. It is super interactive between players too. Enactor’s got the best bonus by grabbing a $5. Second player’s got a decent goodie too, by getting a $4. In a 2-player game, it returns to the enactor, and they get a $3, or a Silver if nothing’s better. Now is where it’s starting to get not-so-good. The other player might be forced to add an Estate to their deck at this point. Then it returns to the enactor and they get nothing. And then it’s the era of getting nothing but Coppers, starting with the opponent of the enactor. So the timing works way better to the advantage of the enactor, which is truly what I wanted. Sorry if I drag on about Cultivation, but I really do think it highlights what Laws should be about!
Divine Gifts: It trashed from $1 to $4. But there was one time where I believe I would’ve preferred to kill a $5 from my hand rather than a Silver. Yeah. Doesn’t happen often, but why not be inclusive here? So I changed the range a little. Also, it didn’t make you draw if you trashed. That sucked. It’s already annoying enough to be on the receiving end of a trashing “Attack”, why add the hand size reduction too?
Divine Gifts closes the triangle of “Attacking” Laws. War Measures is the hand size reduction one, Sacred Pipe is the junking one and so Divine Gifts is the trashing one. I knew I wanted 3 Laws to be oppressive in their own respective ways, so Divine Gifts was created to fulfill that niche.
It is an interesting Law, because it is the only one that can potentially do immediately nothing for the enactor. In fact, it can be even damaging to enact it at the wrong time, because you can actively help your opponents to thin their Estates. In thinned decks during the mid game, it is more devastating. So Divine Gifts is one of the only Laws where it matters
when in the game you enact it. It’s a little trickier I suppose!
Peace Treaty: This used to not have the clause under the dividing line. As it turns out, the enactor needed to feel compelled to enact a Law. The added bonus makes it more appealing to do so. It ties nicely with the top part too. This is the first Law I imaged, but I didn’t design it first. The Law concept was birthed out of ideas like Peace Treaty.
Sacred Pipe: This has not changed one bit. I wanted a cursing Law, so here it is.
Speech: If I recall correctly, the +1 Action when enacted used to be slapped on Homeless Refuges, but this makes way more sense to have it here. I quickly saw the cuteness of having to spend an Action on a Law only to have it given back to you.
Speech was made out of a desire to make an interaction between Laws and Leaders. After all, you can’t have one without the other. Speech creates an interesting bridge between the two. Also, it behaves differently depending on which Leader is available. Not so good on Altepetl, but having a Silver Fabergé Egg is a good offer.
And oh, it used to give +$2 per Leader played. Too strong.
Homeless Refuges: Second Law I made. Imagine a world where this used to give you +$1 for each Copper you played. There was once such a world. Coppersmith, the Law. As it turns out, players were just drowning in money. That sounds tough to believe, but it was so, I tell you. I then tried to make it give +$2 for the first Copper you played. Still no good.
My idea here was to make junkier games with subpar (or non-existent) trashing more manageable. So now, if you play 3 Coppers in a turn, which happens more often in such games, you get more money. Get outta the junk, this Law says. And the +2 Cards when enacted is a small push to help you get those Coppers. Or you can just do it if you need a Moat in your engine when your components didn’t quite connect. As I said before, it used to have Speech’s +1 Action. I think it also came with a +$2 when you enacted it. Man, that was just random bull crap at this point.
This Law is probably the most situational one out of the bunch. As such, it is also the one I find the most “meh”. They can’t all be the best ones. Still, a specialist Law is nice to have in a sea of generalist Laws, and I’ve seen some cute uses out of Homeless Refuges.
Long Houses: I think this was named Housing, before it settled more on the New World theme. It didn’t change besides that. I wanted to invoke VP tokens in Laws, and this is one of 2 Laws that do so. Hurray!
Mountain Lands: Accidentally named “Moutain Lands” for the longest time, oops. Shame, shame! This Law was made to punish those who under build and help those who still want to build more. There’s been some head scratching moments figuring out how this Law worked with other cost reducers and Wayfarer, but it was all figured out in the end. S’in the rulebook too.
Trailblazers: I wanted a contrast to War Measures (which was created before Trailblazers), so there you go. This used to have a dumb name, I don’t remember what.
War Measures: First Law I drafted. Enactor discarded a card, other players discarded 2 cards. Well if you enacted this, you won the game, basically. Crap. I fixed it into what it is now. Enactor still needs the extra bonus. So a mini sifting was added instead.
Ball Game: A very wacky Law, but probably one of the coolest. Play testers really enjoyed this one. This is a weird Event/Law/Landmark chimera, what’s not to love? I truly wanted to demonstrate the power of Laws with Ball Game. Mission accomplished.
Besides that, the effect never changed. The name, however, did. It was named “Beautification”. What is beautification? Who knows? Hence the cooler name now.
I don’t have many outtakes. I might’ve had some, but didn’t document anything. I remember a couple of dud Laws though.
One Law gave the enactor a copy of the first card costing $4 or less other players gained on their turn if they so desired. That was utter shit, lmao. It didn’t reflect at all the “everybody is affected by this thing” I wanted out of Laws. Also it was too strong. Also it was completely nuts in 3+ player games. I’m ashamed to even talk about this.
I tried to have a Law that messed with Golds. Like, making them yield $2 and cost $5 on a turn you didn’t enact that Law. To mess with Big Money bros. Big meh. Mountain Lands already exists and is cooler.
I had one called Oligarchy. “When you gain a Leader, gain a copy of it.” That was actually pretty cool, but I wanted more variance in Laws. I already had Speech to deal with Leaders.
Then we had Prohibition. It made the enactor flip 2 Action Supply piles face down. Cards from these piles could not be gained or bought (until the Law was replaced). Suuuuuper wacky! Except… one problem. You could flip the only Leader pile and then nobody else could ever replace that Law if you were the only one who gained that Leader beforehand. That was problematic enough for this Law to go on the chopping block.
