Guilds

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== Trivia ==
 
== Trivia ==
Guilds is notable in that its rulebook exclusively uses feminine pronouns; this is in contrast to all previous rulebooks, and all official cards, which exclusively use masculine pronouns.  It is also the only set not to include a [[Victory]] card, and the only set with a [[curser]] that does not match any of its main themes.  During development, the set's placeholder name was '''Tokens'''.
+
Guilds is notable in that its rulebook exclusively uses feminine pronouns; this is in contrast to all previous rulebooks, and all official cards (prior to the second edition), which exclusively used masculine pronouns, before changing to the neutral "they" after the release of [[Empires]].  It is also the only set not to include a [[Victory]] card, and the only set with a [[curser]] that does not match any of its main themes.  During development, the set's placeholder name was '''Tokens'''.
  
 
The first spoiler was unintentionally revealed by the release of a Dominion Set Generator by playtester Wei-Hwa Huang on 7th of December, 2012.<ref>[http://dominionsetgenerator.com/ Dominion Set Generator], Official homepage</ref><ref>[http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=5801.msg148347#msg148347 Dominion Set Generator Release Thread], [[Dominion Strategy Forum]]</ref> It was revealed that this expansion would have 13 cards and the abbreviations of all cards and their cost were visible.  The abbreviations were of names of the cards from early in development that had been shifted one letter down in the alphabet to hide their meaning.
 
The first spoiler was unintentionally revealed by the release of a Dominion Set Generator by playtester Wei-Hwa Huang on 7th of December, 2012.<ref>[http://dominionsetgenerator.com/ Dominion Set Generator], Official homepage</ref><ref>[http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=5801.msg148347#msg148347 Dominion Set Generator Release Thread], [[Dominion Strategy Forum]]</ref> It was revealed that this expansion would have 13 cards and the abbreviations of all cards and their cost were visible.  The abbreviations were of names of the cards from early in development that had been shifted one letter down in the alphabet to hide their meaning.

Revision as of 11:57, 26 September 2016

Guilds
Guilds.jpg
Info
Type Small Expansion
Icon Guilds icon.png
Cards 150
130 (13 sets)
13
7
Additional Material(s)  
Theme(s)
Release June 2013
Official Rulebook PDF

Guilds is the eighth expansion of Dominion. It was released in June 2013. The box contains 13 sets of Kingdom Cards. The set has two main themes - cards that give Coin tokens, and cards that you can overpay for, which are signified by a "+" in their cost. There are also two cards that name cards, several very wordy cards, and several cards whose art features bald people. It is no longer sold as a separate item, instead being paired with Cornucopia in a larger box.

Contents

Contents

Basic Supply Cards

  • Guilds is only an expansion, so no Basic Supply Cards are included.

Kingdom Cards

$2 Candlestick MakerCandlestick Maker.jpg
$2plus StonemasonStonemason.jpg
$3plus DoctorDoctor.jpg, MasterpieceMasterpiece.jpg
$4 AdvisorAdvisor.jpg, PlazaPlaza.jpg, TaxmanTaxman.jpg
$4plus HeraldHerald.jpg
$5 BakerBaker.jpg, ButcherButcher.jpg, JourneymanJourneyman.jpg, Merchant GuildMerchant Guild.jpg, SoothsayerSoothsayer.jpg

Additional materials

Additional Rules

  • "In play" - Action cards and Treasure cards played face-up to a play area are in play until they are moved somewhere else — usually until they are discarded during a Clean-up phase. Only played cards are in play; set aside cards, trashed cards, cards in the Supply, and cards in hands, decks, and discard piles are not in play. Reaction abilities do not put those cards into play.
  • Some cards in Dominion: Guilds give players Coin tokens. Coin tokens always come from the supply of tokens, not from another player. In a player's Buy Phase, before buying any cards, that player may spend any number of Coin tokens; each Coin token spent gives that player +$1. Spent tokens are returned to the supply of tokens. Coin tokens are not component-limited; players may use a substitute if they run out. They are the same tokens that come with Dominion: Seaside and Dominion: Prosperity, but abilities that give players Coin tokens cannot be used to put them on Pirate ShipPirate Ship.jpg mats or the Trade RouteTrade Route.jpg mat. They can only be spent in a Buy Phase; they cannot be spent when buying a card via the promotional card Black MarketBlack Market.jpg.
  • Some cards in Dominion: Guilds can be "overpaid" for. The costs for these cards have a "+" next to the coin symbol. A player may pay any additional amount for such a card, and then gets an effect based on how much extra was paid. PotionsPotion.jpg (from Dominion: Alchemy) may be used in overpaid amounts if desired, although this is not always meaningful. A player may choose not to overpay, even if she has extra coins, but cannot choose to overpay $0; to overpay, a player has to actually pay more than the cost. The coins used to overpay are gone after spending them to overpay; they cannot be then used to buy something else. Overpaying happens when a card is paid for, which is before it is gained. Players can only overpay for a card when buying it, not when gaining it some other way. The "+" is just a reminder; a card with "+" in the cost still has its normal cost for all purposes. For example if a player plays HagglerHaggler.jpg (from Dominion: Hinterlands), then buys a MasterpieceMasterpiece.jpg, overpaying, Haggler will still gain her a card costing less than $3, the cost of Masterpiece. Similarly, Masterpiece could be the Bane card for Young WitchYoung Witch.jpg (from Dominion: Cornucopia), since it costs $3. Reducing the costs of cards via cards like BridgeBridge.jpg (from Dominion: Intrigue) or HighwayHighway.jpg (from Dominion: Hinterlands) does not interact with overpay; for example, if you play five Bridges and have $5 total to spend, HeraldHerald.jpg would cost $0, but if you bought one the most you could overpay for it would still be $5.
  • When two things happen to a player at the same time, that player picks the order to do them. For example, if a player with Merchant GuildMerchant Guild.jpg in play buys a Masterpiece, she chooses whether to take a Coin token first, or overpay for Masterpiece first (in this case the order would not actually matter, since it is too late to spend the Coin token). When two things happen to different players at the same time, go in turn order, starting with the player whose turn it is. For example, if a player plays SoothsayerSoothsayer.jpg with only one Curse left in the Supply, the player to her left gets it.
  • At any point in the game, if a player has to do anything regarding her Deck (draw, reveal, set aside, look at, or trash cards), and she needs more cards than are remaining in her Deck, she must do as many as she can and then shuffle her face-up Discard pile to form a new face-down Deck. Then, she does the things with the remaining number of cards from her newly shuffled Deck. If a player’s Deck is empty, she does not shuffle her Discard pile until she needs to do something with cards from her Deck and cannot.

Flavor Text

Jobs, everyone’s worried about jobs. Whatever happened to tilling the fields in obscurity? The economy is just a trick, like stealing someone's nose, but lately people seem to have seen through it, like when you realize someone hasn’t really stolen your nose. So now everyone’s joining a guild, learning a craft, and working on a masterpiece - a painting so beautiful it blinds you, or a cheese grater so amazing that you never eat cheese again. The only people left tilling the fields are the ones doing it ironically. The guilds cover everything - ironic tilling, butchering, baking, candlestick making, shoemaking, cheesemaking, cheese destruction. Your advisor is convinced that somehow, control of the stonecutters is key to world domination. Very well. You will have stone handled so expertly that the world trembles before you.

Cards Gallery

Candlestick Maker.jpgStonemason.jpgDoctor.jpgMasterpiece.jpgAdvisor.jpgPlaza.jpgTaxman.jpgHerald.jpgBaker.jpgButcher.jpgJourneyman.jpgMerchant Guild.jpgSoothsayer.jpg

Impact of Guilds

Guilds is well-liked, but given its small size and the fact that it is the eighth expansion, the odds of even just one Guilds card being in any random Kingdom are low, making its impact rather minimal. However, the Coin token and overpay mechanics give Guilds a rather unique flavor, and even just one card from this set in a Kingdom can broaden a player's strategic options significantly.

Big Money

In general, the Coin token mechanic replaces Big Money strategies in games in which it is present, as $ can now be kept separate from your deck, but Guilds does offer these cards:

  • MasterpieceMasterpiece.jpg - literally gives you a pile of money (SilverSilver.jpgs) when overpaid for
  • SoothsayerSoothsayer.jpg - the only card in the game that directly gives you GoldGold.jpg without conditions

Engines

Since Coin token cards can remove the need for buying Treasures, those cards in general help with engines.

  • StonemasonStonemason.jpg - allows you to pick up multiple engine pieces at once (particularly with Border VillageBorder Village.jpg), and is a decent trasher
  • DoctorDoctor.jpg - one of the best trashers in the game, it can trim your deck down for a perfect engine
  • AdvisorAdvisor.jpg - in certain decks, can be an engine onto itself
  • HeraldHerald.jpg - it requires high Action density, but when it has it, it excels
  • JourneymanJourneyman.jpg - one of the best terminal draw cards in the game

Metagame and Complexity of strategy

Coin tokens and the overpay mechanic add further layers to Dominion strategy, and the community is still figuring out the best strategy for using Coin tokens. Most Guilds cards are also quite complicated, not just in terms of what they do or how much text they have, but in how to play (or buy) them effectively.

  • AdvisorAdvisor.jpg requires your deck to be constructed in a certain way
  • DoctorDoctor.jpg, HeraldHerald.jpg and JourneymanJourneyman.jpg require the player to have an intimate knowledge of their deck in order to be played most effectively
  • BakerBaker.jpg completely changes the opening two turns, allowing for a completely different game of Dominion

Guilds Theme

All names of Guilds cards have something to do with jobs. Most simply describe a job; apart from them, a Masterpiece is the pinnacle of someone's career, and a Plaza is typically surrounded by shops or businesses.

  • 5 cards produce Coin tokens: Candlestick Maker, Plaza, Baker, Butcher, Merchant Guild
  • 4 cards can be overpaid for: Stonemason, Doctor, Masterpiece, Herald
  • 2 naming cards: Doctor, Journeyman
  • 4 cards depict bald people: Advisor, Taxman, Butcher, Soothsayer

Trivia

Guilds is notable in that its rulebook exclusively uses feminine pronouns; this is in contrast to all previous rulebooks, and all official cards (prior to the second edition), which exclusively used masculine pronouns, before changing to the neutral "they" after the release of Empires. It is also the only set not to include a Victory card, and the only set with a curser that does not match any of its main themes. During development, the set's placeholder name was Tokens.

The first spoiler was unintentionally revealed by the release of a Dominion Set Generator by playtester Wei-Hwa Huang on 7th of December, 2012.[1][2] It was revealed that this expansion would have 13 cards and the abbreviations of all cards and their cost were visible. The abbreviations were of names of the cards from early in development that had been shifted one letter down in the alphabet to hide their meaning.

The cards were available on Dominion Online a few days before the physical expansion was released.[3]

In other languages

  • Dutch: De Gilden
  • Finnish: Killat
  • French: Guildes
  • German: Die Gilden
  • Japanese: ギルド (pron. girudo)
  • Korean: 길드를 위하여 (pron. gildeuleul wihayeo)

Secret History

Right around when Prosperity was due, the powers-that-be decided that they wanted small expansions too. Products that seemed more expansion-like than these giant game-sized expansions I was doing. The ideal time to do one would be next, and so Prosperity got pushed back, and Alchemy came out in its stead. I got Alchemy by breaking off a thematic chunk from a large set, and eventually reshaped the remains of that large set into Cornucopia.



I had two large expansions left after Prosperity, so this left me one small expansion short. I had to make one more small expansion to go in between Hinterlands and the last large expansion. Well I didn't have to, but you know. It was expected. So I made one. Guilds is thus the only expansion with no roots in Dominion as it existed prior to the main game being published. As it happens, the Base Cards product came out instead of Guilds, and then Dark Ages came out so we'd have a large expansion that year, so now the last expansion to be made is also the last to come out.

On my list of possible future mechanical themes, "tokens" was the easiest-sounding, so I went with that. There are a bunch of things you can do with tokens. My initial idea was to use them as money you could hang onto for later. This was simple and meant that any one card that used the tokens was useful by itself; there was no reason for anyone to insist on more than one token-involving card in the game at once, thus avoiding an issue that Alchemy had. The initial idea worked out and so there it is.

To supplement the tokens, I added the overpay cards. Overpay was a natural extension of the when-gain cards in Hinterlands, and was a good match for the tokens, since you could save up tokens for a big overpay. Two sub-themes is plenty for a small expansion, but I also flirted with a "name a card" sub-theme. In the end there's just a hint of it.

Before picking the tokens and overpay themes, I considered revisiting duration cards. I asked Jay what he thought, and he said that something new would be better than more of an old thing. Some of you are reading this and wishing I'd gone with the duration cards, but man, I have no regrets there, I am pleased with what Guilds offers up instead.

When I first made cards for this set, I hadn't picked out flavor for the set. So I gave some cards silly names, including Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker. It turned out people really liked those names, so that ended up determining the set theme. There's a lesson there for all of us.




Recommended Sets of 10

Guilds & Dominion

Arts and Crafts [images]
Laboratory Cellar Workshop Festival Moneylender
Laboratory.jpg Cellar.jpg Workshop.jpg Festival.jpg Moneylender.jpg
Stonemason.jpg Advisor.jpg Baker.jpg Journeyman.jpg Merchant Guild.jpg
Stonemason Advisor Baker Journeyman Merchant Guild
Clean Living [images]
Bandit Militia Moneylender Gardens Village
Bandit.jpg Militia.jpg Moneylender.jpg Gardens.jpg Village.jpg
Butcher.jpg Baker.jpg Candlestick Maker.jpg Doctor.jpg Soothsayer.jpg
Butcher Baker Candlestick Maker Doctor Soothsayer
Gilding the Lily [images]
Library Merchant Remodel Market Sentry
Library.jpg Merchant.jpg Remodel.jpg Market.jpg Sentry.jpg
Plaza.jpg Masterpiece.jpg Candlestick Maker.jpg Taxman.jpg Herald.jpg
Plaza Masterpiece Candlestick Maker Taxman Herald

Guilds & Intrigue

Name That Card [images]
Baker Doctor Plaza Advisor Masterpiece
Baker.jpg Doctor.jpg Plaza.jpg Advisor.jpg Masterpiece.jpg
Courtyard.jpg Harem.jpg Nobles.jpg Replace.jpg Wishing Well.jpg
Courtyard Harem Nobles Replace Wishing Well
Tricks of the Trade [images]
Stonemason Herald Soothsayer Journeyman Butcher
Stonemason.jpg Herald.jpg Soothsayer.jpg Journeyman.jpg Butcher.jpg
Conspirator.jpg Masquerade.jpg Mill.jpg Nobles.jpg Secret Passage.jpg
Conspirator Masquerade Mill Nobles Secret Passage
Decisions, Decisions [images]
Merchant Guild Candlestick Maker Masterpiece Taxman Butcher
Merchant Guild.jpg Candlestick Maker.jpg Masterpiece.jpg Taxman.jpg Butcher.jpg
Bridge.jpg Pawn.jpg Mining Village.jpg Upgrade.jpg Duke.jpg
Bridge Pawn Mining Village Upgrade Duke

Guilds & Adventures

Spendthrift [images]
Artificer Gear Magpie Miser Storyteller
Artificer.jpg Gear.jpg Magpie.jpg Miser.jpg Storyteller.jpg
Doctor.jpg Masterpiece.jpg Merchant Guild.jpg Soothsayer.jpg Stonemason.jpg
Doctor Masterpiece Merchant Guild Soothsayer Stonemason
Landscapes and Additional Cards
Lost Arts
Lost Arts.jpg
Queen of Tan [images]
Coin of the Realm Duplicate Guide Ratcatcher Royal Carriage
Coin of the Realm.jpg Duplicate.jpg Guide.jpg Ratcatcher.jpg Royal Carriage.jpg
Advisor.jpg Butcher.jpg Candlestick Maker.jpg Herald.jpg Journeyman.jpg
Advisor Butcher Candlestick Maker Herald Journeyman
Landscapes and Additional Cards
Pathfinding Save
Pathfinding.jpg Save.jpg

Guilds & Empires

Cash Flow [images]
Castles City Quarter Engineer Gladiator Royal Blacksmith
Castles.jpg City Quarter.jpg Engineer.jpg Gladiator.jpg Royal Blacksmith.jpg
Baker.jpg Butcher.jpg Doctor.jpg Herald.jpg Soothsayer.jpg
Baker Butcher Doctor Herald Soothsayer
Landscapes and Additional Cards
Baths Mountain Pass
Baths.jpg Mountain Pass.jpg

References

  1. Dominion Set Generator, Official homepage
  2. Dominion Set Generator Release Thread, Dominion Strategy Forum
  3. Guilds on Goko immediately after physical release, Dominion Strategy Forum


Guilds
Cards $2 Candlestick MakerCandlestick Maker.jpg $2plus StonemasonStonemason.jpg $3plus DoctorDoctor.jpgMasterpieceMasterpiece.jpg $4 AdvisorAdvisor.jpgPlazaPlaza.jpgTaxmanTaxman.jpg $4plus HeraldHerald.jpg $5 BakerBaker.jpgButcherButcher.jpgJourneymanJourneyman.jpgMerchant GuildMerchant Guild.jpgSoothsayerSoothsayer.jpg
Combos and Counters Masterpiece/Feodum
Other concepts CoffersOverpayNaming cards
Dominion Products
Sets DominionIntrigueSeasideAlchemyProsperityCornucopia & GuildsHinterlandsDark AgesAdventures • EmpiresNocturneRenaissanceMenagerieAlliesPlunderRising SunPromo
Collections Big BoxSpecial Edition (German) • Alchemy & Cornucopia (Japanese, German, Dutch)
Accessories Base CardsUpdate PacksPlay Mat • Base Cards MatCollectors CaseDominion Chest
Retired Products CornucopiaGuilds
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