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[CPiGuy]

It's time for Dominion to take a trip to the New World... presenting my fan expansion, Pioneers.

Themes include cards which interact with the Supply, a Trade mechanic with piles that all players can add to and take from, and cards that let you trash or gain several cards at once. There are a total of 30 Kingdom card piles, 12 Events, and 9 Assets (part of the Trade mechanic, which will be explained below).

Without further ado, the cards:

Debt cost


$1 cost (Wanderer/Pack Horse is a split pile)


$2 cost


$3 cost (Purchase/Territory is a split pile)


$4 cost


$5 cost


$6 cost


$8 cost


Events:










You will notice that some of the cards mention Trade piles and have the Trader type. In any game using Trader-type cards, the 18 assets (two copies each of 9 cards) are shuffled into three piles of six, from which you can only see the top card. They are not in the Supply, but cards in them can be gained by some Trader cards, and altered by some Trader cards. Here are the 9 Assets.

[Drab Emordnilap]

Cards with vanilla bonuses always list them in the order [Card, Action, Buy, $, VP].

[ThetaSigma12]

So is this a selection of your cards with some new ones? I'd like it if I could see all your other cards too without overlap. Anyways, some of the cards look great. But some of them are... weird. Are these card ideas, or have you done some playtesting with them? I guess here's some feedback.

Prospectors: Here we are, here's a good example. Why is this a Gold Gainer, Village, and Looter, with a cost? It seems weird and uncohesive. Unless I'm missing something without playing, it seems boring.

Railroad Village: I prefer SettingFraming's Mountain Outpost, which was I think:

+3 Cards
+3 Actions
Discard 4 cards.
-----
When you gain this, gain a Copper and an Estate.

It cost . More interesting than yours.

Wanderer/Pack Horse: The wording on Wanderer should be "When you gain this, +1 Buy if you've gained no copies of this this turn." if you want to stick with an accurate wording, or "The first time you gain a copy of this each turn, +1 Buy." if you want to be shorter. It's just that "Once per turn:" doesn't really work. The card looks fun though. Thematically I'd make it like "Wilderness/Wanderer". The Wilderness does barely anything, but the Wanderers will find it.

Gold Pan: This seems too good for . I don't know how it fares, but I'm willing to accept it.

Tailor: Nah, we have Transmogrify. This is too similar.

Pilgrim: So um, why does this have a cost? A flat would be fine. Heck, it might need to be . It seems pretty good, although I remember a big discussion on it.

Hustlers: This can gain Assets really fast, but I don't know how much of a problem that is. But if it's a problem to spam Assets this can make you get 3 easily.

Land Grant: I've reviewed this one before and it hasn't changed methinks. It's like my fan card named Escort, except I like mine more, because it's like mine.

Purchase/Territory: A less interesting Castles. I think it would be hard to save this one.

Stockade: I like it.

Credit: I did like it, but it's very similar to Capital, so meh. It needs something more unique going for it.

Demolition: Seems good on its own, but I think it's just a more boring version of Ritual.

Fur Traders: Why do so many of the Trader cards give +? It seems like some Cards/Buys would be nice.

Homestead: Seems like an elegant card. Good in Shepherd decks methinks.

Native Guide: I think this could be fun to play around with.

Outfitter: I feel like this should be able to gain any price card. It's less words anyways. It should clarify the copy comes from the Supply though.

Township: Hmm. I think it's good but it could get too crazy. If it does, I think having it give you + instead of cards if you have 5 or more in play seems good.

Trapper's Camp: Every set needs a Village. Looks fine.

Treaty: Should say up to 4 cards in hand. Right now you play one and everyone else gets to draw 4 cards.

Cyclone: This can empty out hands completely.

[CPiGuy]

I'm particularly interested in feedback on the Assets, both the general mechanic of Trade piles and the balance of them (I tried to ensure that they were all cards that would actually be priced at $3 or $4 were they Kingdom cards).

Cards with vanilla bonuses always list them in the order [Card, Action, Buy, $, VP].

This is true, and I was aware of this rule, but appear to have subconsciously violated it in the case of sifters. Good catch.

So is this a selection of your cards with some new ones? I'd like it if I could see all your other cards too without overlap. Anyways, some of the cards look great. But some of them are... weird. Are these card ideas, or have you done some playtesting with them? I guess here's some feedback.

This is some of my cards (selected for flavor and theme mostly) with some new ones (including all the Assets and some of the events). I also changed a couple cards (for example, Blockade is now Stockade for flavor reasons, and Circle the Wagons is no longer an unmotivated mess), and turned a couple cards (Drought and Emigration) from bad cards into better events.

Thanks for the feedback! Responses:

The first part of Prospectors that I came up with was the revealing-cards part, with the idea being it would be a higher-variance Gold gainer that could sometimes gain you two or three, but sometimes give you junk. Then the set didn't have very many villages (or nonterminals at all for that matter) so it got +2 Actions as the extra bonus. Then it got a 6D cost because I thought it was strong for 4 but underwhelming at 5.

I'm pretty satisfied with Railroad Village, but you're right that it's not super interesting.

With regard to Wanderer, I interpret "once per turn" as meaning "whatever follows this only takes effect once per turn". This wording has the added effect of not giving you unlimited buys of Estates when you've inherited Wanderers.

I think Gold Pan is pretty strong for $2, but then again so is Fool's Gold, and also it tends to get in the way of itself since getting it in multiples invariably adds cards to your deck that are not Gold Pans, and then you can get rid of them but you get even more cards in return.

Tailor is in fact similar to Transmogrify, although it lacks the ability to easily pile out with a stack of them. However, there are actual cards which are very similar to previous cards (Guardian/Lighthouse comes to mind), so I think it's different enough to justify including.

I seem to remember that the result of the Pilgrim discussion was that $4 is probably too much, since on-play it's a choice you have little control of between two cards which are worse than or equal to $4, and when you have two of them they're either a Smithy and a dead card or a Village and a Lab. I didn't want to make them a flat $3 though because I didn't want you to be able to use gainers on them.

Hustlers can gain Assets very fast, but I don't think Assets are any better than other $3 or $4 cost cards, so I don't think that's a huge deal.

Purchase/Territory is probably first to go if I cut anything, yeah. It's pretty boring and not even a new mechanic.

Fair point about Fur Traders -- this set is kind of lacking in nonterminals and +Buy, so perhaps I'll make Fur Traders +1 Action +1 Buy.

Homestead and Shepherd... yikes!

Outfitter can't gain $0-$2 cost cards because I don't want people junking the Trade piles out of spite if their opponents have more Trader cards.

I think your proposed change to Township, while you're right that it can get kinda crazy, is a bad idea, since after playing five Townships you're going to have drawn 15 cards, and you'll probably have other things at that point and so you're going to have your whole deck drawn, and so if you want to draw your whole deck with Townships you're going to need more Townships than the "ideal" amount since shuffle luck works that way, so rewarding people for drawing dead Townships will just make the card more powerful.

Good catch on Treaty... that was certainly not my intention.

I'll probably change Cyclone so that each player draws up to 3 unless the card you trashed was a Victory card, since if you've built an engine that can draw your whole deck, trash multiple Provinces to Cyclone per turn, and still win on VP, you deserve the win.

[LibraryAdventurer]

I like Incorporate and Furs. Incorporate returns you to the action phase like Villa, but gives you a very different reason to do so. When you want to use Incorporate, you need to have actions left from your action phase or else the only good it will do is let you play any treasures that you draw (which usually don't do you any good if you don't have +buy). If you have extra actions but no +buy, it gives you a mini Mission turn. It's not a bad thing for an event to be situational like this.

Any cards that are so wordy that you need to use a tiny font size (Roving Bandits, Silversmith, Flea Market, Duel, Survey) need to be simplified.

[Aquila]

An overview of my initial impressions:

Prospectors: the thing with expensive debt cards is they can always be opened with, so they are designed to not be good early. This is contrary to the rule; it's only good early. You collect Golds from naming Copper and also have a way to deal with the Ruins. It feels strong like this.
And a Village that junks your own deck is questionable, it 'helps' play your Ruins but it doesn't really want a flood of Gold.

Railroad Village looks rather expensive.

Pack Horse is only useful when you have Wanderers, otherwise it's useless. It's also useless if you draw your Wanderer(s) in hand. Rather weak.

Stockade I think I raised in your first thread. Without any source of +buys this can break games.

Demolition looks very strong compared to Bishop.

Homestead surely has way too much potential to cost $4. It can make your hand consistently hit $5 early and lots more later. Not dissimilar to Bank but counting Victories instead.

Does Native Guide need to reveal your 6 cards? It seems to make it needlessly slower. Nice otherwise.

Posse can lock your opponents out of having a hand at all, and all you have to do each turn is play it last.

Prairie Schooner is very strong draw, better than Wharf. The latter may have +buys, but maybe this could be $6.

Card Game gets silly with 4+ players, you'll never buy it.

Drought may be nice to play, or it may never be right to buy it. Either way, does the Curse to hand need to be there when you have the two Coppers?

Duel is both slow and a way to get VP without pushing the game to its end.

Circle the Wagons could be nice. Might $2 be too expensive?

Incorporate has a smell of neverending turn about it...but I don't think it's actually possible?

Bank Robbery is an offender like Duel is, an everlasting source of VP.

And Waterfall you've tried to make really slow, perhaps so slow so as to never be viable. In a heavy slog game, you may never get to hit $8 anyway.


The assets could be interesting as a new mechanic. I guess they'd want heavy playtesting to be as interesting and compelling as possible. That's the only real way to tell if they're good. Map and Favour especially want the other assets to be worth getting, as does the mechanic of shuffling Supply cards in.

[Asper]

I think there's potential in this. You successfully avoided the #1 mistake of fan card design for most of these cards, which is trying to squeeze too much in one card, or generally not having one straight concept for one individual card. I am less convinced of the theme, but well, that's just flavor.
Others have pointed out already that the bonuses need to be in another order.

I like the idea of Assets, but I think they would be better if all of them did something that goes in the same direction, like offer consistency, or flexibility, or boost themselves, like Handcart, Map, Favor and Deed do. Well, and Supplies to some extend.

I think you put debt cost on too many cards where it's not all that meaningful. It's totally pointless for Pilgrim, and for Prospectors, 6 debt doesn't keep you from opening with 2 of them, as 8 debt do (which I think is the reason that cost appears so often in Empires).

About individual cards:
Prospectors are a counterexample to my point above. They do too much to be one cohesive idea

Railroad Village should also probably have another cost. It's a bit bland, but okay.

Wanderer/Pack Mule seems fine, but I don't like you can gain two Wanderers at once.

I like Tailor. It tries to do a similar thing as my Well.

I don't like that Gold Pan adds Golds to the Trade piles for the reason that it makes the piles less interesting and strips the Assets of the ability to go in a common direction. But I get why you want to re-fill the pile. It's just kind of annoying to have to buy Gold with other Trade cards just to get to the cards that are actually unique to the pile...

Pilgrim should cost 3$ or just a higher amount of debt.

Hustlers seems absurdly good, giving more than +4 for Assets. Maybe it should just say +2$, you may buy one card from a Trade pile this turn? It's still pretty much Black Market with known cards that way...

I don't like that you can't use Land Grant if other players don't go for Treasures.

Purchase and Territory are bland and Territory should not be a Treasure.

I still think cards that go on supply piles to block them, like Stockade, are not worth it. They lock players out of stuff and in the end are not sufficiently different from Embargo to be worth it.

Credit seems a lot like Capital. I don't see the point of it.

Flea Market should just use the Crossroads Wording and is pretty complicated.

I'll go over some of the others when I find the time. Cheers 

[popsofctown]

Pack Horse is only useful when you have Wanderers, otherwise it's useless. It's also useless if you draw your Wanderer(s) in hand. Rather weak.

You realize that some games you'll just randomly be the one who had an unspent 1$ more of the time and gained more Wanderers because they're free?  And then you'll have to decide whether you actually got enough Wanderers for Pack Horse to be a good call.  Seems fine to me.  As an example of the best case scenario for them, in a Double Mountebank Mirror the player who hits 6 and 7$ when he actually wants Mountebank might split these 4-1, and be drawing 5 cards from a 20 card deck pretty soon, and then this is asymptotically close to a 4$ Lab (The odds of whiffing the first one would be less than 10% for sure, I think far less).

This is one of my picks for favorite card in the set, that's subjective, but objectively people would be buying Pack Horse to win games. 

Edit: Oh, it's a 4$ Lost City.. I liked it better as a lab tbh.

[CPiGuy]

I've made a number of edits to cards. Here's the changelog:

Pilgrim now costs straight-up 4D.

Prospectors now costs 8D, is slightly less likely to gain Gold, and is also a sifter (because I realized I didn't specify what was happening to the revealed cards, and this makes it strong
enough to justify often gaining a Ruins).

Purchase is now an Action with a mild on-gain trash effect, which is far more interesting.

Stockade now gives +Buys, in case there aren't any anywhere else in the Kingdom.

Fur Traders is a Peddler variant, since "trade equal-value cards" is not actually a super powerful ability. Also, fur traders are peddlers of a sort.

Treaty no longer doubles your opponents' handsize.

Cyclone only locks opponents out of games if you can trash Victory cards (specifically Provinces, since Duchies only decrease handsize by 1.)

Duel now has cleaner wording.

Bank Robbery is no longer limitless.


Changes I still need to make:

Territory should not be a Treasure, but I'd also like to make it more interesting than a SuperDuchy, so I've held off of editing it.

I'd like to perhaps provide a means to trash Stockades rather than just cycling them around the Supply.

I'm still concerned this set has too many terminals as a portion of Actions, and that not enough of the cards are draw cards. I'm going to try to compare this to actual sets to see if I'm right in this belief, but if I am, I'll add some draw cards, and maybe some of them will be nonterminal.

[Asper]

I see now that the Trade piles are orr the most part gained from, not bought. That kinda devalidates part of my critizism on Gold Pan and Hustlers.

[CPiGuy]

I've made a couple of changes.

Territory is now also interesting.

Stockade no longer gives you the opportunity to gain another Stockade.

Demolition has been replaced with a new card, Construction, for being boring. Incidentally, this makes Pioneers an incredibly good set for Courtier, with by my count 9 cards with at least three types.

Edit: Posse has been nerfed.