Night

Monastery, a Night card.

Night is a card type that may be played during one's Night phase, which comes after one's Buy phase. Night cards have black frames and white text. During their Night phase, players may play any number of Night cards. Night cards are introduced in Nocturne.

Overview

The ordinary vanilla bonuses that many Action cards provide are not useful in the Night phase, so Night cards have to benefit the player in other ways. They include Attacks, gainers, trashers, and Durations that provide benefits in the following turn's Action phase.

Most Night cards have their typing because their effects have to take place after your Buy phase: some care about cards you have in play or cards you've gained this turn, and several are gained directly to your hand so they can be played the turn they are bought. A couple, though, are Night cards purely for flavor reasons, such as Cobbler and Vampire. Either way, having a new type and a new phase to be played in has the following consequences:

• Night cards are usually not drawn dead, and are non-terminal.
• In general, there is no way to multiply a Night card with a Throne Room variant (the exception being calling Royal Carriage on Werewolf).
• Cards that care about specific types will not have their usual effects when dealing with Night cards, whether positive (e.g., Ironworks or Magpie) or negative (e.g., Rabble).
• Cards that care about specific phases (e.g., Villa) will not have their usual effects in the Night phase. Haunted Woods is particularly brutal, as it prevents you from playing any of your Night cards if you buy anything.

List of Night cards

• Guardian, Monastery
• Bat
• Changeling, Ghost Town, Night Watchman
• Devil's Workshop, Exorcist
• Ghost
• Cobbler, Crypt, Den of Sin, Vampire, Werewolf
• Raider

Official Rules

• Nocturne adds Night cards and the Night phase.
• In games using Night cards, the Night phase happens after the Buy phase - it goes, Action, Buy, Night, Clean-up.
• In your Night phase, you can play any number of Night cards.

Card gallery

Trivia

In other languages

• French: Nuit
• German: Nacht
• Russian: Ночь (pron. noch')

Preview

It's always the same dream. I'm working in a factory, making giant marshmallows. When I wake up, I have an extra pillow. And also it's time to post a Dominion preview. Or am I still dreaming? Well I'll just get the preview posted, and worry about that later.

Nocturne has five themes, and there are five weekdays, so that's all going to work out neatly. Today: Night.

Night is a new phase. It comes after the Buy phase, and in it you can play any number of Night cards. That's all there is to it. We get right to the point here in Dominion-land.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Nocturne Previews #1: Devil's Workshop, Raider, Ghost Town

Secret History

The second mechanic in the set. It was an old idea to try adding a phase. I put it after the Buy phase because that sounded more interesting than the other options. I let you play any number of Night cards because I couldn't really have Night villages; you'd need the Night village to show up with the other Night card. It endlessly would not. It could still have been that you could just play one Night card, but letting you play multiples meant you could load up on those cards if you wanted, and played into part of what's special about them, that you don't draw them dead.

At first it wasn't clear what I'd get out of Night, and the first couple cards didn't do anything fancy with the idea. Then I hit on having them care about what happened in the turn. This lets you do really novel things that would otherwise be a lot more complicated; Horn of Plenty is an example among older cards. Later on Billy Martin suggested doing Night cards that went straight to your hand when you gained them; you could immediately play them. This was similar to a few cards already in the set, but sleeker and more worth doing more of. And then a bunch of Night cards ended up being Duration cards; that wasn't intended as a theme, but you are limited as to what's useful to get in the Night phase, and Night-Duration cards get around that.

For a while Night cards all said "(Night is after the Buy phase)" on them. You were going to have to look in the rulebook anyway to figure out Night cards, so in the end I dropped it.

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

Will Night cards be used in future expansions?

Mechanics without much in the way of rules have been repeated since the beginning; Seaside for example has some choose-one cards and an action-victory card, just the expansion after Intrigue. Stuff with components has been limited to expansions that include the components, and stuff with lots of rules requires more of a commitment too. Night, like Duration cards, has very short rules and no components. So it would be easy to use again. But it wasn't as popular as Durations; there were people who specifically disliked it. And even Durations, with that tiny paragraph, carry some complexity with them, make the sets with them just a little less friendly to new players. I don't really want a second thing like that. Night still has a chance at being revisited if there are enough expansions, but probably just all at once.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.

Applications to past cards

Obv. Horn of Plenty would be a Night card, the example I have endlessly given already, and sure maybe Scheme.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, How would old cards be made differently with new mechanics?