Seize the Day

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Seize the Day
Info
Cost
Type	Event
Set	Menagerie
Illustrator(s)	Hans Krill
Event text
Once per game: Take an extra turn after this one.

Seize the Day is an Event from Menagerie. It lets you take an extra turn without any limitations, but only once per game.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• The extra turn is like a normal turn, except that it does not count for the tiebreaker.

Other rules clarifications

• Unlike Outpost and Mission, Seize the Day doesn't check if the previous turn was another player's. So if you take an extra turn with Outpost, you can buy Seize the Day on the extra turn, and take a 3rd turn.

Strategy

Seize the Day is almost always worth buying at some point. With one Buy, it's beneficial any time you expect your next hand to be better than your current one. With multiple buys, it's beneficial any time you can spare 4 and expect your next hand to be worth more than that. Given that, the real question is "when to buy it?" At least in two-player games, there are three fairly distinct situations.

First, obviously, is to end the game. You can break free of the Penultimate Province Rule, get a point lead one turn and empty piles the next, or prep a strong next turn with cards like Archive. (This is doubly powerful when something like Militia is getting played every turn, and you can reach a 5-card hand.) If you can't make your bonus turn a guaranteed winner, sometimes it will make more sense to try for a single-turn win, and reserve Seize the Day as an insurance policy should you fail. But be careful here - if you're in the lead, your opponent may Seize first and hope to get lucky with their own finish.

Second, in light of that, is to preempt an opponent's Seize by gaining too big a lead. If you spend 2 turns gaining  , it becomes much harder for your opponent to win via one turn of   and one turn of pile-emptying. Or, after some Duchy dancing, it's possible to buy 2-3 Duchies so that there simply isn't enough   remaining to overcome your lead. This strategy is mostly relevant in engine games where victory depends on paying for green cards; once megaturns or large numbers of   tokens get involved, it's much harder to get an insurmountable lead.

Third is to Seize much earlier, for some advantage other than VP. Giving your opponent an uncontested pair of turns in the end game is risky, but it can pay off in games with dramatic turning points early. Being first to Tournament is an obvious case, or setting up a nasty lock like Throne Room plus Possession. Winning a Curse split is probably not sufficient on its own, but might be worthwhile in a case like Wall and no trashing.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Once per game: Take an extra turn after this one.	Menagerie	March 2020

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Pluk de Dag			Eenmaal per spel: voer na deze een extra beurt uit.	(2020)
German	Nutze den Tag			Einmal pro Spiel: Führe nach diesem Zug einen Extra-Zug aus.
Japanese	今を生きる (pron. ima wo ikiru)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

Originally you took an extra turn in which you couldn't draw cards. This seemed neat and then weak but maybe okay, but then Ben and Steveie played a game with it and Scrying Pool, oops. Not all card-drawing is "drawing." We talked about wordings to fix that, then I tried a version that limited your cards in play to 5; that was not remotely restrictive enough, you could do plenty. Maybe there was a good version of one of those, but it was late, and I tried a straight "once per game, an extra turn" and was happy with it.

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

Why is it cheaper than Fleet?

Main answer: When I made Fleet, I settled on ; when I made Seize the Day, I settled on . They were made at different times and each had to deal with "what should I cost." Seize the Day was not going to answer that with "just copy Fleet, whatever." If Fleet had been a whole category of cards, I might have felt like, this needs to fit in relative to Fleet; it wasn't, it was one card, and I could just make Seize the Day better or worse than it if that was best.

But also. Fleet you can buy whenever, just do it before the game is over. The extra turn is likely to at least get you a Duchy, so it wants to cost at least as much as Duchy. Seize the Day does its thing when you buy it; it wants to be cheaper so that it's tempting to buy it earlier in the game, making it more interesting.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Fleet vs Seize the Day