Thief

Thief
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Attack
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Base
Illustrator(s)	Julien Delval
Card text
Each other player reveals the top 2 cards of their deck. If they revealed any Treasure cards, they trash one of them that you choose. You may gain any or all of these trashed cards. They discard the other revealed cards.

Thief is an Action-Attack card from the first edition of the base set. It allows you to "steal" Treasures from opponents by making them trash Treasures from the top 2 cards of their deck and then letting you gain them.

Thief's effect tends to be extremely weak and often actively harmful to the player using it. It was removed from the second edition of Dominion and replaced with Bandit, a similar but more useful Treasure-trashing attack.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• A player with just one card left reveals that last card and then shuffles to get the other card to reveal (without including the revealed card); a player with no cards left shuffles to get both of them.
• A player who still doesn't have two cards to reveal after shuffling just reveals what they can.
• Each player trashes one Treasure card at most, of the attacker's choice from the two revealed cards, and then you gain any of the trashed cards that you want.
• You can only take Treasures just trashed—not ones trashed on previous turns. You can take none of them, all of them, or anything in between.
• Put the Treasures you decided to gain into your Discard pile. The ones you choose not to gain stay in the Trash pile.

Other Rules clarifications

• The treasures are trashed and then gained, so any things that happen on-trash happen first, and then any on-gain abilities activate afterwards.

Strategy

Thief was one of the weakest cards in Dominion before it was removed. The big problem with Thief is that it trashes your opponent’s Coppers, and the trashing of starting Coppers is often a major goal that players have at the beginning of the game. Coppers are stop cards which interfere with your ability to draw and play your good cards, so as long as you are buying some good cards to play, trashing your starting Coppers is a benefit. For the same reason, if you do play a Thief and hit Copper, you should almost never choose to gain it.

The core use case for Thief would be in a Kingdom with strong trashing where Treasures are the major source of payload. For example, if your opponent has already trashed all their Coppers with Chapel and the kingdom lacks Action-based sources of payload such as Festival or Vassal, it could be a good idea to buy a Thief, hoping to steal some valuable treasures like Gold. This is more likely to be strong if there are valuable Kingdom Treasures like Crown. Even under these conditions, however, making Thief work is difficult, because it is a terminal which provides no immediate benefit.

Thief is slightly more playable in multiplayer games, especially in those rare games where it’s useful to have Coppers (for example, if everyone is trying to score with Gardens).

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Each other player reveals the top 2 cards of his deck. If they revealed any Treasure cards, they trash one of them that you choose. You may gain any or all of these trashed cards. They discard the other revealed cards.	Dominion 1st Edition	October 2008
		Each other player reveals the top 2 cards of their deck. If they revealed any Treasure cards, they trash one of them that you choose. You may gain any or all of these trashed cards. They discard the other revealed cards.		2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Chinese	小偷 (pron. xiǎotōu)
Czech	Zloděj
Dutch	Dief			Iedere speler toont de bovenste 2 kaarten van zijn trekstapel. Als een speler geldkaarten toont, moet hij er één naar jouw keuze vernietigen. Je mag een of meer van deze vernietigde kaarten pakken en afleggen. De andere spelers leggen andere getoonde kaarten op hun aflegstapel.
Finnish	Varas
French	Voleur
German	Dieb			Jeder Mitspieler deckt die obersten zwei Karten seines Nachziehstapels auf. Haben die Mitspieler eine oder mehrere Geldkarten aufgedeckt, muss jeder eine davon (nach deiner Wahl) entsorgen. Du darfst eine beliebige Zahl der entsorgten Karten nehmen. Alle übrigen aufgedeckten Karten legen die Spieler bei sich ab.	(2013) one or more other versions listed here
Hungarian	Tolvaj
Italian	Ladro
Japanese	泥棒 (pron. dorobō)
Korean	도둑 (pron. dodug)
Norwegian	Tyv
Polish	Złodziej			Każdy z pozostałych graczy odkrywa 2 wierzchnie karty swojej talii. Jeśli odkryje jakiekolwiek karty skarbów, wybierasz jedną, którą musi wyrzucić na śmietnisko. Możesz dodać dowolną liczbę wyrzuconych w ten sposób kart. Wszystkie pozostałe odkryte karty należy odrzucić.
Romanian	Hoțul
Russian	Вор (pron. vor)
Spanish	Ladrón			Cada jugador (menos tú) revela las 2 cartas superiores de su mazo y elimina 1 carta de Tesoro entre las reveladas (a elección tuya). Puedes ganar los Tesoros eliminados que quieras. Las demás cartas reveladas se descartan.	First Edition (2008)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

This is the only card that Valerie and Dale changed (other than non-functional wording changes). Which is of course just the way I would have wanted things - I mean who wouldn't? They had no compulsion to make changes for the sake of changing things; they complained about a few weak/confusing cards that just left, and everything else but Thief ended up the way I made it. Anyway Thief originally revealed the top 2 cards, then put the untrashed ones back. Valerie didn't like how, if you got hit with Thief and your top 2 cards were non-Treasures, then subsequent Thieves would also get nothing. Also there was the issue of remembering the order to put the cards back. So they changed it from reveal to reveal-then-discard. I was initially skeptical but in the end I think it was a good change.

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

Retrospective

It would be nice if Thief were stronger, but it already scares new players, and once everyone was new.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, What Donald X. Might Do With a Dominion Time Machine

Second Edition Removal

Long before Donald X. decided to remove Thief from the second edition; it was clear that it was an extremely weak card. Noble Brigand was his first attempt to create a "fixed version" of Thief; when Thief finally was removed, Bandit became its replacement.

This is one of the weakest cards in the game. I mean you knew going into this that some of these cards were going to have to be some of the weakest cards, that was a reason for replacing them, but well Thief is way down there. New players are scared of it, maybe it will eat all of their Treasures and shut them out. Then you realize you aren't choosing to gain the Coppers and in fact are happy to lose them. Then you stop buying Thief. It ends up sometimes useful in games where you actually want Copper (e.g. multiplayer Gardens games), or games where your opponent is relying on Treasure but trashed their Coppers, or sometimes with special Treasures in expansions. But uh, most games it just sits there. I could do better. You can argue that Thief provides a certain learning experience, that there's real gameplay in learning that the card is weak the hard way; but other cards can provide learning experiences that leave the cards contributing more once they're figured out.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Dominion 2nd Editions

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