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[Jerk of All trades]

I'm a bit confused by the blue backed cards and the brown/yellow backed cards when playing with echoes.
When do you draw 1 or the other?
When do you draw "up" a level. Like if your highest card is a 3 on your board, when is the 3 pile "empty" and you start drawing 4s?
When a card says "draw and meld a 1" or draw and tuck a "4" does the pile have to be completely empty, or is it only when all of the yellow cards are gone?

I didnt see anything about this in the echoes rules. In fact those rules just said to like shuffle up 3 expansion and 6 base cards per level, but this is not how the ISO version works.  Where did the "blue"/"gold" card rules and mechanics come from?

[ksasaki]

they have new echoes rules that they came up with a couple years ago

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/767330/retroactive-errata-to-echoes-setup-and-drawing

Now you have all the echoes cards in a separate stack, none of this shuffling nonsense.

The gist of it is like this:

You start with 1 echoes and 1 base in your hand to start

1) if you have AT LEAST 1 card in your hand and 0 echoes (blue-backed cards) in your hand, then you will draw an echoes card.
2) if you have no cards in your hand OR 1+ echoes cards in your hand, then you draw from the base stack.
3) the base stacks determine the current age to draw from.  i.e. if the 1 base stack is empty but you still have age 1 echoes cards, then you will draw from age 2.  However, if the 1 echoes stack is empty and base cards remain, you will continue to draw from age 1.

[Jerk of All trades]

Interesting.  So for those "draw and reveal a card, if it has a bonus, do XXXX" cards you have to make sure you have no echoes cards in your hand and at least 1 base card.

Good to know!

[ConMan]

They introduced this rule for two reasons that I'm aware of:
1. To allow all Echoes cards a chance to appear in each game, but in a way that doesn't result in crazy boards with hundreds of echo effects etc.
2. So that when "hypothetical future expansion" comes out they can just extend this rule (e.g. by replacing "Draw from Echoes" with "Draw from expansion of your choice") rather than having to work out some weird balance of how many base, Echoes and HFE cards should be shuffled together in each Age deck.

[Jerk of All trades]

Yeah, it still seems not great though. Those achieves for having like 5 echo effects in one column seem practically impossible.

It also sucks that all of those "draw a card, if it has a bonus" are guaranteed to fail in many situations.  However, with the old shuffle method you'd just see a brown card on top and know it would also fail.

[popsofctown]

Having four echo effects in one column is even easier.  Just use tuck effects when you are eligible to draw echoes cards, then spam

[Jerk of All trades]

Except quite a few echoes cards have bonuses instead of echo effects. getting 4 of the same color, only really being able to tuck 2 echoes cards per turn seems like a real long shot to me.  I don't think I've ever seen more than 2, even with ferment/refermation going.

[popsofctown]

Industrialization gets history just on its own.
Loom goes a long way towards it, it tucks 3 cards a turn.
Humble colonialism can tuck multiple cards per turn.
Soap and Toothbrush greatly amp up the number of enablers for draw-draw-draw tuck-tuck-tuck engines.

[ksasaki]

Industrialization will pretty much give you monument wealth history probably empire and supremacy.  When I see my opponent meld industrialization with 6-8 factories I just groan.