I like the mandatory gain. It makes the card feel more dependant on the board to me. If there are other Villages, you got to balance which and how many of them you gain. Or maybe you just want Town itself, for the action - but how to deal with the appendage? Would you buy one to push your Gardens or Vineyard? Town isn't strictly better than Village and worse for some use cases, so i'm actually considering whether i should try it at $3 some time (though the name isn't very plausible at that point - i guess you can claim Towns are Villages that have Roads leading to them...). It's funny how we once said that Road should cost $4 on its own, and now it seems weak even if you get a Village for free (at least without other Villages). I'm not sure where this will lead.
Making the gain of Road conditional takes a lot of the decision out, i think. Sure, even if something is conditional, you don't always want to do it - but you have to make the decision easier if you want to make sure fulfilling the condition feels like it "pays off". So that's what gets us to the +3 cards variant. My problem: The question isn't anymore about how to handle/balance Roads, but about how to reach that condition. And really, how different are conditions in Dominion? It's always "reach a good deck fast" or "be set back and return to a good deck fast". That's, like, something we try to do every game, isn't it? Well, slogs aside.
One condition i mentioned earlier is to return a card from your hand to your deck. If i do a condition, i think that's the one i'll take. Province discarding just doesn't thrill me. It was on Tournament. And hey, it's on Sultan, too. Actually, i'm currently leaning towards re-adding the third +action part back on Nouveau Riche, and that would be three cards in one set. Besides i like my cards to be multiplayer-friendly, and i don't think this kind of thing is. Towns will run out, it won't feel like it pays, Stan will draw it dead once with his Torturer and tell us how it lost him the game for weeks. It really feels like on-gain Tournament to me, and i don't want another one. Oh, and Explorer reveals them, so i guess i just don't feel the "do stuff with Province" design space is very spacey anymore.
Duchy is a different thing, but again, there's allready Nouveau Riche. While i'm not doing a "set", i wanted to make the cards as easy and different as possible, and this feels a bit like two ideas glued together.
Sorry for being so ignorant of your ideas
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