Acting Troupe

Acting Troupe
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Renaissance
Illustrator(s)	Julien Delval
Card text
+4 Villagers Trash this.

Acting Troupe is an Action card from Renaissance. It is a one-shot source of 4 Villagers.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• If you do not manage to trash this (for example if you play it twice via Throne Room), you still get the +4 Villagers.

Strategy

Acting Troupe is mostly used as a supplemental village. Ideally, when using it, most of your extra Actions will be coming from other villages. In this case, Acting Troupe mainly serves to add reliability to your deck. This can be especially important if you are relying on terminal draw, in which case you would ordinarily not be able to kick off your turn if your starting hand contained the terminal draw card but no village. With a few Villagers from Acting Troupe, however, you do not need to start with a village, and are therefore less likely to dud. If there is no unconditional village effect available, but there are some restricted village effects (such as Crossroads), Acting Troupe can make an engine more viable in Kingdoms where it would otherwise be difficult to make one work.

Acting Troupe generally does not work very well as the only village for a few reasons. First, it is a one-shot card that has to be trashed every time you use it. Therefore, to continue using the same number of terminals each turn, you must keep gaining more Acting Troupes. Second, since there are only ten copies of the card in the Supply there is a hard limit on how many terminals can be played in the game (unless you can regain copies from the trash, e.g. with Rogue). If you run out of Acting Troupes and thereby of Villagers, your deck stops working. Finally, Acting Troupe is a stop card, so each one makes it harder to draw your deck, meaning that if you are playing with multiple Acting Troupes you have to invest in additional draw. Using Acting Troupe when it is the sole source of +Action may be more palatable if you have both good non-terminal draw (such as Laboratory and strong terminal payload (such as Bridge).

On the other hand, Acting Troupe does have strong synergy with Command variants such as Band of Misfits, Inheritance, or Necromancer. These effects can play Acting Troupe without actually trashing it due to the Stop-Moving rule, and since getting the Villagers is not contingent on trashing Acting Troupe, this can allow you to accumulate many Villagers easily and without a hard limit. Though to a lesser extent, Acting Troupe synergizes with Throne Room variants for a similar reason.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+4 Villagers Trash this.	Renaissance	November 2018

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Chinese	舞台演員 (pron. wǔtái yǎnyuán)
Dutch	Toneelgezelschap			+4 Dorpsbewoners Vernietig deze kaart.
French	Troupe de théâtre			+4 Villageois Écartez cette carte.
German	Schauspieltruppe			+4 Dorfbewohner Entsorge diese Karte.
Japanese	劇団 (pron. gekidan)			+4 村人トークン これを廃棄する。
Polish	Trupa aktorów				Although Polish version is not released, this name is referred to in Polish Dominion 2E rulebook.
Russian	Актёрская Труппа (pron. aktyorskaya truppa)
Spanish	Comediantes (lit. comedians)			+4 Aldeanos Elimina esta carta.

Trivia

Official card art.

Preview

Acting Troupe gets right to the point: 4 tokens, it's gone. How much of a village is that exactly; what decks are possible when this is the only village-like thing? As always I leave those questions to you.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Renaissance Previews #2: Acting Troupe, Sculptor, Recruiter

Secret history

Here you go, some villagers. At first this gave +5 Villagers. Too many.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of Dominion: Renaissance