Gondola

Gondola
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Treasure - Duration
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Plunder
Illustrator(s)	Marcel-André Casasola Merkle
Card text
Either now or at the start of your next turn: +. When you gain this, you may play an Action card from your hand.

Gondola is a Treasure-Duration card from Plunder. It gives you the same + as Silver, but allows you to choose to receive it on your next turn if you don't need it immediately. Gaining it allows you to play an Action card without using up an Action—even if it's your Buy phase!

FAQ

Official FAQ

• When playing Gondola, choose whether to get + immediately, or at the start of your next turn.
  • If you choose "immediately," Gondola will be discarded in the same turn's Clean-up; if you choose "next turn," Gondola will be discarded that turn.
• If you play Gondola multiple times, such as with King's Cache, you choose each time whether to get the + now or next turn, and Gondola only stays in play if at least one of the plays was for next turn (in which case the King's Cache also stays in play).

Other rules clarifications

• Playing an Action card with this does not use up an Action.
• If you gain this by buying it, you can't play Treasure cards in your Buy phase after buying something, so if you draw any Treasure cards as a result of the Action you play with Gondola, you will ordinarily not be able to play them.
• If playing an Action with this sets up a "when you gain a card" effect (e.g. Livery, that will trigger off the Gondola gain (so the Livery will gain a Horse).
  • The exception is if the Action says "next time" (e.g. Secluded Shrine), which will instead trigger off the next Treasure gained.

Strategy

Gondola's benefit when played is fairly straightforward: it is like a Silver whose coin can be delayed until next turn if it suits you. It can be beneficial even without using its effect-on-gain.

There is a tradeoff when choosing to delay Gondola's coin vs. take it now: it is usually more beneficial to have one strong turn and one weak turn, than two average turns, which creates an incentive to delay the coin. However, doing this keeps Gondola in play longer which means it gets played less often, which can in some circumstances make it weaker than a Silver.

Gondola synergizes particularly well with cards that benefit from treasure diversity, particularly Pendant, as it can stay in play two turns and thus increase Pendant's value by + on two turns.

Gondola's benefit-on-gain can beneficial in a number of ways. One more obvious use is if you happen to draw an action dead, such as when you draw two terminals in a money strategy. As such, the presence of Gondola on the board can make it optimal to purchase slightly more terminal actions than you normally would in a money strategy. Usually the best approach in this strategy is to buy a similar number of actions as you normally would, but simply purchase them slightly earlier than they normally would. This limits the higher risk of collisions to earlier in the game, before the gondola pile runs out, and leaves you with a regular money deck with a lower risk of action collision by the time the pile runs out.

Gondola also provides a powerful synergy with some cards that normally cannot be played during the buy phase, but are beneficial if played then, even if you had the actions to play them. Probably the best example is Tactician: if you buy Gondola, then use it to trigger a Tactician in your hand, you effectively evade the forfeitted turn, while still benefitting next turn. This can enable a powerful double-tactician strategy in which you start each turn with 2 buys, buy Gondola and then a province, and play Tactician again. Normally, treasure harms a double-tactician deck but as long as you are able to keep buying Gondola, you can keep playing tactician in the buy phase. This strategy, however, depends on gondolas still being available so your deck must be resilient enough to function well as a single-tactician deck when the gondola pile runs out. As such this strategy is also dependent on whether or not other players are also buying or gaining this card, and it tends to be strongest when you are the only player doing so.

In decks where it is desireable, gondola also benefits from action-based gainers, and can turn terminal gainers such as Workshop into non-terminal ones, allowing you to play a second action when gondola is gained.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Either now or at the start of your next turn: +. When you gain this, you may play an Action card from your hand.	Plunder	December 2022

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
German	Gondel			Entweder jetzt oder zu Beginn deine nächsten Zuges: +. Wenn du diese Karte nimmst, darfst du eine Aktionskarte aus deiner Hand spielen.

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

Didn't change.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of Plunder