Caravan

Caravan
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Duration
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Seaside
Illustrator(s)	Marcel-André Casasola Merkle
Card text
+1 Card +1 Action At the start of your next turn, +1 Card.

Caravan is an Action-Duration card from Seaside. On the turn it is played, Caravan is just a cantrip, giving +1 Card/+1 Action; however, since it gives +1 Card at the start of the next turn, playing Caravan this turn is equivalent to playing a Laboratory on your next turn.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• You draw a card and get +1 Action when you play this, and then you draw another card at the start of your next turn.

Strategy

Caravan acts as a cantrip on the turn you play it while providing a card’s worth of Duration draw for next turn. As a non-terminal way to increase your hand size, it is a positive addition to most decks, although it often has a high opportunity cost, since cards costing or less often provide more benefit than a single card’s draw every other turn. However, it is often a good target for gainers that make it easy to gain many cards in that price range, such as Ironworks. Because Caravan is slow to improve your deck’s drawing capabilities, adding them is usually a lower priority than the usual early game goals of thinning and getting deck control, though its presence may make it worth buying an early gainer.

Compared to other non-terminal draw cards (e.g. Advisor), Caravan has the drawback of being a Duration (which means its effect is delayed, you can only play it every other turn, and it has a higher risk of missing a shuffle in a case in which you can’t draw your deck). However, the start-of-turn draw can be valuable in that it provides you with extra reliability to reduce the odds of dudding by increasing the chances that you’ll find, e.g., both Village and Smithy in your starting hand. The increased hand size at the start of your turn also synergizes with some other start-of-turn effects that can capitalize on it, such as Transmogrify. If you are using Caravan as a reliability booster (as opposed to a primary source of draw) and your shuffles permit you to do so, it may be worthwhile to try and split your Caravan plays evenly across your turns, so that you have a consistent hand size to work with. It also somewhat counteracts discard attacks but anti-synergizes with draw-to-X cards.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Card +1 Action At the start of your next turn, +1 Card.	Seaside	October 2009
		+1 Card +1 Action At the start of your next turn, +1 Card.	Seaside (2017 printing)	July 2017
		+1 Card +1 Action At the start of your next turn, +1 Card.	Seaside (Second Edition)	June 2022

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Chinese	商隊 (pron. shāngduì)
Czech	Karavana
Dutch	Karavaan
Finnish	Karavaani
French	Caravane
German	Karawane			+1 Karte +1 Aktion Bei Beginn deines nächsten Zuges: +1 Karte	(2009)†
	Karawane			+1 Karte +1 Aktion Zu Beginn deines nächsten Zuges: +1 Karte	(Nachdruck 2018; 2019)
Italian	Carovana
Japanese	隊商 (pron. taishō)			+1 カードを引く +1 アクション あなたの次のターンの開始時に、+1 カードを引く。
Korean	대상 (pron. daesang)
Polish	Karawana			+1 karta +1 akcja Na początku twojej następnej tury: +1 karta.	(2016)
Russian	Караван (pron. karavan)			+1 Карта +1 Действие В начале вашего следующего хода, +1 Карта.
Spanish	Caravana

^† The line separating start-of-turn abilities is unwarranted and was removed in later print runs. This matters e.g. when you are Enchanted or you use a Way.

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

A card from pre-development but after Jay had picked up the game. For a long time you actually set a card aside when playing it, and then drew that card next turn. That way was a little more flavorful, but the published version is slightly simpler.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Seaside Cards