A plague token is not as bad as Cutpurse because it only adds $1 to the cost of buying Victory cards, not other cards. If you have $8 and can't afford a Province but still want to empty Victory piles, just buy a cheaper Victory card! Or find ways to get rid of the Plague or improve your strategy by buying other cards. The aim of this set is to encourage a strategy combining more of the other Kingdom cards on offer, some of which may help get rid of Plague tokens, some of which may help gain Victory cards/tokens in other ways, some of which will give you phantom $ (I admit I probably need more of this in the cards in this set) and then there are always two ways permanently available to get rid of the Plague: Privy and giving to Charity.
Cutpurse subtracts one Copper from your hand when played, and it doesn't nothing if you have no Copper. Each plague token is guaranteed to subtract $1 from your hand every time you buy a Victory card. Yes, it only matters when buying a VP card, but you will be doing that in
most games, so it usually matters eventually. And because you can effectively only get rid of one token per turn, you actually can't afford to put it off. If you wait, pretty soon even Estates will be too expensive to buy! But the way to get rid of the plague token is by discarding a treasure card. This may be a Copper (again, that Cutpurse comparison) or it might be a Silver or better (worse than Cutpurse).
Now, it is possible to get rid of more than one plague token per turn by using Privy or certain cards from the set. But Privy is a really poor option. First, it is delayed -- you have to wait until you draw it before it helps, and that plague token is hurting you the entire time. Second, it is a terminal action that does nothing but get rid of a Plague token. It's junk, and taking the time to play it will often be worse than just sacrificing a treasure.
Making it non-terminal helps, but it's still adding junk to your deck! I would suggest buffing Privy by letting it remove 2 or maybe even 3 Plague tokens. This provides a more efficient way to remove multiple tokens and it gives you a strategic option to build up extra plague tokens for whatever reason until you remove them all in one quick go before you start greening.
The other cards in the set don't really factor into this. You can't guarantee that they'll be in the game. But what cards help anyway? Flea doesn't work unless you have trashing, and even then it's slow and unreliable to do. Quack is a single-target attack. Hospital still costs you $1 per token (via overpay), which is the same value as the charity method of discarding a Copper from hand. Barber seems like a weak card in general.
The options there aren't great, and it seems like there are more cards that
add plague tokens than those that remove, which just exacerbates the problem.
Correct, which is why I am considering the defence mechanisms. The Diseases, though, are not going to be an every game affair, and even then they are late game, potentially allowing a slower strategy to take effect against the quick starters, and yes, it will create tension when piles get lower. I quite like that. Also, curses or ruins running out would give the person a Disease. I'm thinking of making the Diseases work something like this though to make them less obnoxious: "You may gain a Plague token, if you do.......and then carry out the attack."
Tension is cool, but in this case I think that it would just feel too swingy. As pops said, they are too powerful to let somebody else do it, so people would be hesitant to lower any pile into easy clearing range, whether that's 2 cards remaining or 3 or 4. At that point, it's a bit of a lottery as to who can get enough +Buys and gains to clear the 5 cards or whatever. In practice, it may mean that most games with diseases devolve into players going for a simple BM+X so no piles are ever in danger of emptying. The same thing applies to Curses and Ruins -- players just won't play the junker when the pile is close to empty.
There are ways of getting rid of more than one Plague token per turn...not least play x number of Privies (assuming you have the Actions...maybe Privy should be +1 Action?) and/or give to Charity.
Discussed above.
(Flea)
These have been pretty fun when we've had them in playtesting so far so I think they're fine, apart from the text not being under a line in the above. There is very often either a trasher or a discarder or some sort when you mix sets and even if not the extra actions can come in handy if there's not many of those in the game. Not every card is bought every game so I don't see any problem here. It's a $1 card.
My comment is in the context of "what if this is a real set?" Rats is a 20 card stack where its primary niche is providing you with a bunch of $4 fodder for TfB. There is a sound mechanical reason in the design of Rats. With Flea, it feels like all the quirks are strictly thematic. That's not a bad thing, but it feels kind of clunky from a mechanical point of view. The most interesting thing about the card is that they multiply, which is a niche already covered by Rats.
It might be interesting in that a game with Fleas is guaranteed to have an abundance of +actions. But I think rigorous playtesting would still have you drop at least one of the reaction effects.
(Contaminate)
It doesn't really make a pile more expensive, it just adds to your plague tokens if you buy from it which makes Victory cards more expensive unless you can get rid of them by the time your buy phase comes around. I think it's different enough to Embargo to make it a good additional little card.
It costs you to get rid of a Plague token. It costs you one treasure from your hand, or a Privy in your hand that could have been a treasure or something better. Either way, getting rid of that token costs you. So gaining the plague token on the pile is, in a round-about way, an extra expense that you are paying to gain that card.
You may not be a fan, but plenty of people I play with like it. Possession goes to the left, Tribute goes to the left. In fact some of them want it to be pass a token to target player, but I vetoed that. Remember plague is not as bad as you think, there are plenty ways to get rid of it, this is one way itself!
If you and the people you play with enjoy it, that is awesome and you should keep on enjoying it! I am commenting from the perspective of whether it could be an official card, and the fact is that it couldn't. In Dominion, attacks hit all players, but this card does not. As Gendo pointed out, Possession and Tribute are not attacks.
You're right, it should definitely just say "draw an extra card in your Cleanup Phase". I thought it was too good when combined with itself and Outpost, but why shouldn't a card work well in combos? Perhaps it should cost $4 then? I thought the "While this is in play" clause would be simpler than a "Now and next turn" and then the bit about discarding. Why wouldn't it stay in play, it's a Duration card?
(PPE: I see that Gendo has answered this already, but I'll leave this explanation here anyway. He might be right about how Church compares to Outpost, but I am not convinced.
)
The Duration type doesn't automatically mean that it will stay in play. It's just a way to let the player know that, hey, this card might be sticking around longer than other cards! The official rule is that "A Duration is not discarded from play until the Cleanup phase of last turn on which it does something" (quoted from the wiki because it's handier than the rulebook). If you play Tactician but discard no cards, Tactician won't stay in play until the next round. If Lighthouse didn't have an effect on the next round, it would not stay in play and the "while in play" would only be in effect on your own turn, thus being useless.
So, I play Church. In the clean-up phase, I check to see if Church will do anything on a future turn. It does not, so it gets cleaned up. The Duration typing doesn't change that.
Here's a re-wording of it, trying to keep it close to your effect and in keeping with the wording on official cards:
Church$3 - Action-Duration
Now and at the start of your next turn: +1 Buy.
Draw an extra card in this turn's Clean-up phase.
While this is in play, when another player plays an Attack card, you may discard a card from your hand. If you do, you are unaffected by that Attack.
Like Lighthouse, the Reaction type shouldn't be necessary. The type tells the player that they may be able to reveal the card for an effect outside of their turn. Church will be in play so it doesn't need to be revealed.
It needs testing, but I doubt that it would be too strong for $3.
(Haemorrhage)
More complicated than Rebuild? I understand it is difficult to use, but again I think you are overestimating the plague tokens vs the benefit to the multi-trashing and card to hand ability this card offers. It should say somewhere that you don't have to put a card into your hand if you name one and don't find it in your deck. It's been quite a favourite in playtesting with some players...for instance, buy it first turn, name Duchy and trash all your estates for only 3 plague tokens! Also works well with Fleas and Tunnels.
Definitely more complicated than Rebuild.
OK, the early trashing of 3 Estates sounds decent. But that's about it? 7 Plague tokens to get rid of Copper sounds terrible. I don't see how it could work with Fleas. You'll usually have a few different Action cards, so naming one Action card is liable to get several other useful cards trashed alongside the Fleas.
Not sure how you set it up for Tunnels either. Naming a Victory card either gets your Tunnels trashed or it just draws you the first Tunnel you find. Naming a Treasure you don't have will get your Golds trashed along with gaining a bunch of plague tokens. Naming Gold (or Copper, if you don't trash out your Copper) could easily have that card found early. I guess you could play with almost no actions at all and name an action?
Just to be clear, limited numbers of Plague tokens are fine. Where it gets terrible is when they are coming every round (like with those Diseases), and when there is an attack on the board that multiple players are playing every round to hand out plague tokens. If the other players are giving me 2-3 plague tokens every round, it'll be almost impossible for me to keep pace in removing those plague tokens. Pretty soon, even Estates are $20 each. That's the problem.
(Hospital)
Possibly, but it's worse than Junk Dealer and doesn't have the when trashed ability of Rats. I suppose I could make it trash anything other than treasure, but I reckon that makes it too harsh. The overpay ability is important, maybe people will often only be buying it for $5/$6 or more anyway? Maybe making it $5+ and you MAY trash a card from your hand?
It's not worse than Junk Dealer. Junk Dealer gives you an extra +$1 whereas Hospital gives you an extra +1 action.
If the overpay is the important thing, I would suggest removing the trashing and maybe making it $2 and weaker than a regular Village.
(Leech)
The idea was to make a better version of Thief but not too expensive or obnoxious. This can trash bad cards for people, but you might get to trash a bad one as well.
A noble idea, but I think it could easily be too obnoxious.
(Barber)
Sorry, this should read "You may discard one of your tokens". I don't quite like it though, it was meant to be a sort of token remodeller. I thought about making it 2 tokens but it creates a lot of AP if you have different sorts and you might not want to remodel them. That's why I put the trash a card bit in, but I am beginning to think that is unnecessary. Yes the idea is you can discard or gain any sort of token. Maybe it should be $4 and just "You may discard one of your tokens. Gain a token of your choice."
My suggestion would be to make it a cheap terminal, maybe let it remove tokens from supply cards as well as from yourself, just to be interesting (this would affect Embargo, Contaminate and Trade Route) and maybe explicitly name the tokens you can choose to gain (if I choose to gain an Embargo token, what does that mean?). A $2 terminal that lets me discard a plague token and gain a Victory or Coin token seems perfectly fine.
(Royal College)
That's what I thought which is why initially this was 2VP for every 2 gold in your deck, but the people I played with said it should just be the other way. I reckon my initial thoughts were right though for the reasons you have made. It also makes the Hoard combo less obnoxious.
I think 2:2 is probably still no good, but it's better than 1:1 for sure.
(Black Death)
Ok I'll move the "During your buy phase" clause to the end of the top half description. You discard the cards when you play it, not during your buy phase. The doubling of plague tokens is a sufficient downside to the extra money you get on that particular turn. The plague tokens will be with you from there on! The idea of the card though is to give you a significant cash boost if you have the Plague (indeed it gives you plague!) and the extra buys are in order to encourage buying cards other than Victory cards which will be significantly more expensive should you wish to purchase them anyway. The card is also meant to be a bit fun, inspired in some regard by Dynamite in Bang! - which explodes when you reveal a certain card.
I missed that the card
must be passed. I thought it was optional; the card makes more sense now. So if I understand your intent, the wording should be like this:
The Black Death$8 Action-Infection
+2 Buys
Take 2 Plague tokens. Reveal then discard the top 2 cards of your deck. If they are both treasure, double your plague tokens and put this card in the discard pile of the player to your left. +$2 per plague token you have.
When you trash this, return half your plague tokens (rounded up).
Granting +$2 on play simplifies the wording a lot. The only difference is that you don't benefit from tokens you gain after playing The Black Death, which shouldn't usually matter. You can also pass the card immediately to make the wording simpler (otherwise you have to add more text specifying "at the start of your Clean-up phase" and it gets confusing with any text that comes after.
I think the timing is still overly complicated, but it may be OK if it is fun enough. If you really want to replicate Dynamite, the card should be passed whether it blows up or not. And maybe it should be top-decked or go into the player's hand so they have the option to gamble immediately. Though to
really replicate Dynamite you'd have to add some sort of clause that forces each player to play it.
Bath House $3 - VICTORY TREASURE
1VP. $1. When you gain this you may discard one of your plague tokens.
Sure.
Surgeon $5 ACTION
$2. Return to the supply a Victory card worth a fixed number of VPs from your hand. If you do, gain as many VP tokens as its worth in VPs.
Wording really needs work. Not sure if the concept is solid enough, because you kind of have to specify the "fixed number of VPs" but calling it out like that just doesn't feel right. Maybe make it narrower, like this:
Surgeon$5 - Action
+$2
You may return a Victory card to the Supply. If it is an...
Estate: +2VP
Duchy: +3VP
Province: +5VP
You could use the correct values if you want, but it might be interesting to do it this way where you get a small bonus on Estates and a small penalty on Provinces. You can also use it to return other Victory cards, but this would usually be a bad idea. Sometimes it might be good though (delaying a 3-pile).
Doomsday Book £0* - ACTION
Draw a card for each plague token you have. This costs £1 per plague token you have.
Suddenly, pounds!
For the variable cost, you really should put it under a line. And note, as written, the cost can't be reduced by Bridge and the others. If you made it "cost $1 more per plague token" then you would need a rulebook clarification about how it interacts with cost reducers.
Amputation $4 - ACTION
$3. Draw one less card after cleanup this turn.
I think I've seen this proposed before. I don't know how strong this would be, but $4 seems an OK cost. Grammatically, it should say "one
fewer card".
Town Crier $4 - ACTION
$2. Look at the top card of your deck. Either put it into your hand or discard it and each other player gains a copy.
Needs the Attack type. Seems OK to me.
Maybe a bit too powerful.