Tunnel

Tunnel
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Victory - Reaction
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Hinterlands
Illustrator(s)	Brian Brinlee
Card text
2  When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may reveal it to gain a Gold.

Tunnel is a Victory-Reaction card from Hinterlands. It is worth 2  , and it gains a Gold if you can find a way to discard it.

FAQ

Official FAQ (2022)

• Use 8 copies for a 2-player game, 12 for 3 or more players.
• This is worth 2  at the end of the game, and can gain you a Gold each time you discard it.
• See the When Discarded section.

Official FAQ (2016)

Tunnel's Reaction ability functions when you discard it. You cannot simply choose to discard it; something has to let you or make you discard it. This ability functions whether you discard Tunnel on your own turn (such as due to Oasis) or on someone else's (such as due to Margrave). It functions if Tunnel is discarded from your hand (such as due to Oasis) or from your deck (such as due to Cartographer), or when set aside. If Tunnel would normally not necessarily be revealed (such as when discarding multiple cards to Cartographer), you have to reveal it to get the Gold. Revealing it is optional, even if Tunnel was already revealed for some other reason; you are not forced to gain a Gold. This ability does not function if cards are put into your discard pile without being discarded, such as when you buy a card, when you gain a card directly (such as with Border Village), or when your deck is put into your discard pile (such as with Scavenger from Dominion: Dark Ages). It also does not function during Clean-up, when you normally discard all of your played and unplayed cards. The key thing to look for is a card actually telling you to "discard" cards. The Gold you gain comes from the Supply and is put into your discard pile.

Other rules clarifications

• You can only reveal a given copy of Tunnel once per discard. That is, you can't discard one Tunnel, reveal it twice, and get two Golds (see also: When Discarded rules).
• When you discard multiple cards at once (e.g. to a Minion), they are all discarded at once. This means if you discard a hand with Tunnel and Watchtower, you can reveal the Tunnel, but you can't use your Watchtower anymore (see also: When Discarded rules).

Strategy

Tunnel is a situational Victory card that is typically used as a Gold-gainer alongside effects that can discard it. Tunnel is best in decks that offer this possibility reliably (e.g., Warehouse can more reliably discard Tunnel than Crystal Ball can), can tolerate an influx of stop cards, and can make effective use of the Golds, typically either through trash-for-benefit or plentiful +Buy. When not useful as a Gold-gainer, Tunnel is usually not very impactful. However, its /  ratio is better than Duchy or Estate, so it can occasionally be the non-Province Victory card of choice in the late-game if you have plentiful Buys and can handle the extra stop cards.

Tunnel is usually added to your deck in the mid- or late-game, when you have deck control and can reliably collide it with a discarding card, which is often a sifter such as Warehouse. A good use case for Tunnel is one in which you have sufficient overdraw and can discard a single Tunnel multiple times in a turn to gain multiple Golds. Gamble and Tunnel work together particularly well for this while also mitigating some of the need for overdraw, effectively allowing you to buy Golds for after the initial if you only have a single Tunnel in your draw pile and discard. More generally, however, Tunnel is often useful for adding payload while you’re simultaneously sifting through your deck and building otherwise. For example, if you’re using a lot of sifting anyway to more reliably cycle to your Village/Smithy pairs, a Tunnel will allow you to gain Golds for little additional effort.

Tunnel is typically not a very effective defense against handsize attacks. In Kingdoms in which such Attacks are centralizing, being able to reliably draw starting from a smaller hand size is more important, and adding more stop cards in Golds usually works against that goal of finding those draw cards.

Notable Synergies

• Crop Rotation
• Dungeon
• Storeroom

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.

• Insomniac's 2010 article

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		2  When you discard this other than during a Clean-up phase, you may reveal it. If you do, gain a Gold.	Hinterlands	October 2011
		2  When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may reveal it to gain a Gold.	Hinterlands (2016 printing) Hinterlands (Second Edition)	December 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Tunel
Dutch	Tunnel
Finnish	Tunneli
French	Tunnel			2  Quand vous défaussez cette carte en dehors de la phase Ajustement, vous pouvez la dévoiler pour recevoir un Or.
German	Tunnel			2  Wenn du diese Karte außerhalb deiner Aufräumphase ablegst, darfst du sie aufdecken, um ein Gold zu nehmen.	(2019) Note: rulebook FAQ 2019 for this card significantly shortened
	Tunnel			2  Wenn du diese Karte außerhalb der Aufräumphase ablegst, darfst du sie aufdecken, um ein Gold zu nehmen.	2. Edition (2022)
Italian	Galleria
Japanese	坑道 (pron. kōdō)			2  このカードをクリーンアップフェイズ以外の場面で捨て札にするとき、これを公開してもよい。公開した場合、金貨1枚を獲得する。
Polish	Tunel			2  Kiedy odrzucasz tę kartę poza fazą porządków, możesz ją odkryć, aby dodać Złoto.	(2024)
Russian	Туннель (pron. tunnyel')
Spanish	Túnel

Trivia

Official card art.

Theme

This was a tricky one. I looked at the cards that cause discarding. There were three categories that came up a bunch: 1) attacks; 2) storage-related things like Cellar; 3) navigation-related stuff. Tunnel can be an escape tunnel for the first, a tunnel off of your Cellar for the second, and it's a place you can navigate through for the third. Obv. many discard-involving actions don't fit these categories, but this was the best I could do. And then, in the tunnel you find a vein of gold.

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

Preview

Tunnel was never officially previewed due to a leak at Essen, but Donald X. later released this text anyway.

Tunnel is a crazy card that does something when you discard it. This includes discarding it to actions like Inn, discarding it to attacks like Militia, and also discarding it without ever having it in your hand, due to actions like Adventurer. Just look for the word "discard" and study the FAQ, once it's available. It does not work with Chancellor, that's the only tricky part. The "clean-up" bit is to make sure it doesn't make Gold just due to discarding your hand at the end of your turn. What you get for your troubles is a Gold. In a Tunnel-heavy game, you may see the Golds run out. And when you're not discarding Tunnel, it's a Victory card, so you'll be happy discarding it. That Victory card is worth 2  for a mere , and well if that looks crazy, consider exactly how powerful Estate is.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Hinterlands Previews #5

Secret History

For strumphf's 2022 advent calendar, Donald X. went in-depth on the development of Tunnel.

At one point the main set had a card that had you draw a card if you discarded it. It was too wonky of an ability for the main set, and the card was bad anyway, so I cut it. When Hinterlands became its own set, I made a new card with that ability, this time a Witch variant. I ended up cutting that one because I didn't want two ways to get Curses in the set, and preferred Ill-Gotten Gains.

Late in the going, I wanted something else in the set that was exotic, and decided to try another do-something-when-discarded card. This time I had you gain Gold rather than draw cards, which slightly reduced possible confusion. It was immediately popular, but there was the question of what the top should be. It had to be simple. It couldn't be say + because then this would be flat-out worse than Silver in most games that had no combo. It was +2 Cards for a bit, which seemed okay.

Then it turned out Hinterlands wouldn't be a standalone after all, which gave me space for 9 more cards. A standalone only has room for 291 kingdom cards and randomizers; a normal large set can hold 300. I was already using 290 cards. So I couldn't quite fit another kingdom card, but an existing card could turn into a victory card. And I had been wanting to have a victory-reaction in the set. So I changed Tunnel to be worth 2 . It seemed like that might be crazy at , but what, why not try it? As you can see, it worked out.

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

Donald X.'s opinion

People go for this a lot, I mean if there's anything to do they do it. Obv. the smaller combos will break your heart, you wonder why you aren't drawing your Oasis with your Tunnel more often. If you are flipping over more cards, especially without drawing them e.g. Cartographer, it's nice.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, $3 Cost Card Rankings Bottom Half

People could not believe the Tunnel package. Two   and it gains you Gold and only costs . What crazy broken thing is this? The first trick is that you're comparing it to Estate, but Estate is bad; the second is that "gain a Gold" is a lot worse than it looks.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Dominion Discord, 2024