Torturer

Torturer
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Attack
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Intrigue
Illustrator(s)	Franz Vohwinkel
Card text
+3 Cards Each other player either discards 2 cards or gains a Curse to their hand, their choice. (They may pick an option they can't do.)

Torturer is an Action-Attack card from Intrigue. Keeping with the choices theme in Intrigue, Torturer gives opponents a choice: they can either take a Curse, putting it in their hand, or discard 2 cards. Since it also gives +3 Cards, building to play several Torturers per turn to both draw and attack your opponents is often desirable.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• If it matters, the other players choose what happens to them (and resolve that) in turn order, starting to your left.
• A player can choose to gain a Curse even with no Curses left (and thus not gain one), or to discard 2 cards even with one or zero cards in hand (discarding their only card if they have one).
• Gained Curses go to players' hands rather than their discard piles.

Strategy

Torturer is a terminal draw card with a potentially devastating attack. Like other options for terminal draw, Torturer works best in an engine where you can reliably play it after a village, enabling you to keep playing further Action cards. Torturer's attack becomes more oppressive when you play it multiple times per turn, making access to extra terminal space correspondingly more important. Torturer is therefore best when cheap villages like Village or Fishing Village are available. Without the ability to play multiple Torturers per turn, its attack is much less punishing, so other terminals may be preferable.

Some effects can mitigate Torturer by undoing the discard attack (e.g. draw-to-X cards such as Cursed Village), trashing the Curses (e.g. with Chapel), or ignoring the attack entirely (e.g. an attack immunity effect like Guardian), but even in their presence Torturer can still be desirable as a draw card. As a village that provides more terminal space when discarded, Village Green performs well as both support for playing multiple Torturers and a slight mitigation of the discard attack.

In the absence of such mitigating effects, each Torturer played by your opponent forces you to choose between a discard attack and a junking attack. There are a number of things to consider when making this decision:

1. If your opponent can only play one Torturer, you only have to evaluate the cost of discarding two cards against that of gaining a junk card, essentially trading off a (usually small) reduction in the quality of your next turn against your long-term deck quality. The former makes sense if you have low value cards to discard, while the latter may be more appealing if, for example, you need those cards to hit an important price point. This tradeoff is also highly dependent on the available tools to achieve deck control, especially trashing: if there is no trashing at all, it is much more important to avoid gaining a Curse whenever possible, while if you have a strong trasher the negative effect on deck control is much lower, especially if you can trash the Curses before they enter your reshuffle.
2. If your opponent can play multiple Torturers in a turn, the evaluation is different, as discarding a second time usually leaves you with only a single card in hand, almost always resulting in a dud turn. The best way to avoid this when attacked by multiple Torturers is typically to gain the Curses to your hand initially and subsequently discard them, keeping as many useful cards as possible in your hand. In other words, you can opt to accept junking attacks first to secure a buffer against discard attacks later. However, an unconditional handsize attack (e.g. Militia) played between Torturer attacks can void this buffer and force you to take even more Curses in order to have a turn at all.
3. You can still decide to take a Curse rather than discard after the pile has run out, making the attack useless at this point.

The best way to respond to each Torturer attack is thus dependent on how many more such attacks you expect to happen. Your opponent can try to play their turn in a manner that will obfuscate how many Torturers they can and will play to make it harder for you to choose optimally, but you can usually make a good estimate by counting how many copies they have and tracking the locations of those copies and their remaining terminal space.

As with many other junkers, the long-term goal with Torturer is usually to win the Curse split, as doing so can give you a decisive advantage in deck control. Because Torturer typically only junks when played in multiples, this is something you will want to intentionally build towards from early in the game. As a draw card, Torturer can help you cycle quickly and build towards playing more copies of itself, which also means that an early Torturer can quickly snowball in impact while also slowing down your opponent.

Torturer is much more impactful in multiplayer games: two opponents each playing one Torturer each has the same effect on the other players as one player playing two copies, so it can easily lead to a slog in this scenario, even without a village effect available.

External strategy articles

Note: Article(s) below are by individual authors and may not represent the community's current views on cards, but may provide more in-depth information or give historical perspective. Caveat emptor.

• theory's 2012 article

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+3 Cards Each other player chooses one: he discards 2 cards; or he gains a Curse card, putting it in his hand.	Intrigue 1st Edition	July 2009
		+3 Cards Each other player either discards 2 cards or gains a Curse to their hand, their choice. (They may pick an option they can't do.)	Intrigue 2nd Edition	October 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Chinese	酷刑者 (pron. kùxíngzhě)
Czech	Žalářník (lit. jailer)
Dutch	Folteraar
Finnish	Kiduttaja
French	Bourreau (lit. executioner)
German	Kerkermeister (lit. dungeon master)			+3 Karten Jeder Mitspieler muss eins wählen: 2 Karten ablegen oder eine Fluchkarte auf die Hand nehmen.	(2009) one or more other versions listed here
German	Kerkermeister (lit. dungeon master)			+3 Karten Jeder Mitspieler legt nach seiner Wahl entweder 2 seiner Handkarten ab oder nimmt einen Fluch auf seine Hand (es darf eine Option gewählt werden, die nicht ausgeführt werden kann).	2. Edition (2021)
Hungarian	Kínvallató (lit. tormentor)
Italian	Carceriere (lit. jailer)
Japanese	拷問人 (pron. gōmon-nin)			+3 カードを引く 他のプレイヤーは全員、次のうち1つを選ぷ: 「2枚捨て札にする」:「呪い1枚を手札に獲得する」。
Korean	고문기술자 (pron. gomungisulja)
Norwegian	Skarpretter (lit. executioner)
Polish	Oprawca			+3 karty Każdy z pozostałych graczy wybiera jedną opcję: odrzuca 2 karty lub dodaje kartę Klątwy, biorąc ją na rękę.	(2016)
Russian	Мучитель (pron. muchityel')			+3 Карты Каждый другой игрок либо сбрасывает 2 карты, либо получает Проклятие в руку, по своему выбору. (Они могут выбрать вариант, выполнить корорый не могут.)
Spanish	Torturador

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

One of the cards added when going up to 25. I had a "decisions" theme, and wanted a card that gave your opponents a decision. This is a pretty basic implementation of that concept. The set had had another such card in Envoy, but that left for being too redundant with Smithy. This card also gives you +3 Cards like Smithy, but adds something to the game in a way that Envoy didn't. I am avoiding giving strategy advice in general, but I am going to have to give some here. I had a game in which one of my friends stood up, enraged, and went into the other room to calm down. This card was the reason. Don't let it happen to you! The secret to happiness is, do not simply refuse to take a Curse no matter what. Sometimes, you have to take that Curse. Discarding five cards and passing is not the path to greatness. You've been warned!

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