Guilds

Guilds
Info
Type	Small Expansion
Icon
Cards	150
Kingdom	130 (13 sets)
Randomizers	13
Blank Card(s)	7
Additional Material(s)
Tokens	25 Coin tokens
Theme(s)	Coffers Overpay
Release	June 2013
Cover artist	Matthias Catrein
Official Rulebook	PDF

Guilds is the eighth expansion of Dominion. It was released in June 2013. The box contains 13 sets of Kingdom cards. The set has two main themes—cards that give Coffers, and cards that you can overpay for, which are signified by a "+" in their cost. There are also two cards that name cards, several very wordy cards, and several cards whose art features bald people. It is no longer sold as a separate item, instead being paired with Cornucopia in a larger box.

Early printings of Guilds used the wording "take a Coin token" where the revised edition of the combined expansion Guilds & Cornucopia has +X Coffers as a vanilla bonus.

Contents

Kingdom cards

• : Candlestick Maker
• : Stonemason
• : Doctor, Masterpiece
• : Advisor, Plaza, Taxman
• : Herald
• : Baker, Butcher, Journeyman, Merchant Guild, Soothsayer

Additional materials

Mats

• 6 Coffers mats (only included in the revised mixed box)

Tokens

• 25 Coin tokens

Additional rules (2017)

Coffers

• Some cards in Guilds put tokens on a player's Coffers. "+1 Coffers" means "add a token to your Coffers mat." In a player's Buy Phase, before buying anything, that player may remove tokens from their Coffers for + each.
• Coin tokens are provided for this. They are not component-limited; players may use a substitute if they run out. The same tokens are provided in Dominion: Seaside and Dominion: Prosperity; they can all be mixed together.
• Coin tokens being used in other ways, such as on the Pirate Ship mat for Dominion: Seaside, cannot be removed for +; just the Coin tokens on a player's Coffers mat.
• Coin tokens come from the supply of Coin tokens, and return there; they are not taken from other mats or other players.
• Coin tokens can only be removed from a player's Coffers in that player's Buy Phase (or when instructed by a card such as Butcher); they cannot be used when buying a card via the promotional card Black Market.

Overpay

• Some cards can be "overpaid" for. The costs for these cards have a "+" next to the coin symbol. A player may pay any additional amount for such a card, and then gets an effect based on how much extra was paid.
• Potions (from Dominion: Alchemy) may be used in overpaid amounts if desired, although this is not always meaningful.
• Debt (from Dominion: Empires) cannot be overpaid.
• Players may choose not to overpay, even if they have extra coins, but cannot choose to overpay ; to overpay, a player has to actually pay more than the cost.
• The coins used to overpay are gone after spending them to overpay; they cannot be then used to buy something else.
• Overpaying happens when a card is bought, which is before it is gained.
• Players can only overpay for a card when buying it, not when gaining it some other way.
• The "+" is just a reminder; a card with "+" in the cost still has its normal cost for all purposes. For example if a player plays Haggler (from Dominion: Hinterlands), then buys Masterpiece, overpaying, Haggler will still gain them a card costing less than , the cost of Masterpiece. Similarly, Masterpiece could be the Bane card for Young Witch, since it costs .
• Reducing the costs of cards via Bridge (from Dominion: Intrigue) does not interact with overpay; for example, if you play five Bridges and have total to spend, Herald would cost , but if you bought one the most you could overpay for it would still be .

Flavor text

Jobs, everyone’s worried about jobs. Whatever happened to tilling the fields in obscurity? The economy is just a trick, like stealing someone's nose, but lately people seem to have seen through it, like when you realize someone hasn’t really stolen your nose. So now everyone’s joining a guild, learning a craft, and working on a masterpiece - a painting so beautiful it blinds you, or a cheese grater so amazing that you never eat cheese again. The only people left tilling the fields are the ones doing it ironically. The guilds cover everything - ironic tilling, butchering, baking, candlestick making, shoemaking, cheesemaking, cheese destruction. Your advisor is convinced that somehow, control of the stonecutters is key to world domination. Very well. You will have stone handled so expertly that the world trembles before you.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Rio Grande Games

Cards gallery

Kingdom cards

Sort by NameSort by Cost

Impact

Guilds is well-liked, but given its small size and the fact that it is the eighth expansion, the odds of even just one Guilds card being in any random Kingdom are low, making its impact rather minimal. However, the Coffers and overpay mechanics give Guilds a rather unique flavor, and even just one card from this set in a Kingdom can broaden a player's strategic options significantly.

Big Money

In general, the Coffers mechanic replaces Big Money strategies in games in which it is present, as can now be kept separate from your deck, but Guilds does offer these cards:

• Masterpiece - literally gives you a pile of money (Silvers) when overpaid for
• Soothsayer - one of three cards in the game that directly gives you Gold without conditions, the others being Bandit and Skulk

Engines

Since Coin token cards can remove the need for buying Treasures, those cards in general help with engines.

• Stonemason - allows you to pick up multiple engine pieces at once (particularly with Border Village), and is a decent trasher
• Doctor - one of the best trashers in the game, it can trim your deck down for a perfect engine
• Advisor - in certain decks, can be an engine unto itself
• Herald - it requires high Action density, but when it has it, it excels
• Journeyman - one of the best terminal draw cards in the game

Metagame and complexity of strategy

Coffers and the overpay mechanic add further layers to Dominion strategy. Most Guilds cards are also quite complicated, not just in terms of what they do or how much text they have, but in how to play (or buy) them effectively.

• Advisor requires your deck to be constructed in a certain way
• Doctor, Herald and Journeyman require the player to have an intimate knowledge of their deck in order to be played most effectively
• Baker completely changes the opening two turns, allowing for a completely different game of Dominion

Theme

All names of Guilds cards have something to do with jobs. Most simply describe a job; apart from them, a Masterpiece is the pinnacle of someone's career, and a Plaza is typically surrounded by shops or businesses.

• 5 cards produce Coffers: Candlestick Maker, Plaza, Baker, Butcher, Merchant Guild
• 4 cards can be overpaid for: Stonemason, Doctor, Masterpiece, Herald
• 2 naming cards: Doctor, Journeyman
• 4 cards depict bald people: Advisor, Taxman, Butcher, Soothsayer

Trivia

Official box art.

Guilds is notable in that its first edition rulebook exclusively used feminine pronouns; this was in contrast to all previous rulebooks, and all official cards (prior to the second edition), which exclusively used masculine pronouns, before changing to the neutral "they" after the release of Empires. It is also the only set with a curser that does not match any of its main themes. During development, the set's placeholder name was Tokens.

The first spoiler was unintentionally revealed by the release of a Dominion Set Generator by playtester Wei-Hwa Huang on 7th of December, 2012. It was revealed that this expansion would have 13 cards and the abbreviations of all cards and their cost were visible. The abbreviations were of names of the cards from early in development that had been shifted one letter down in the alphabet to hide their meaning.

The cards were available on Dominion Online a few days before the physical expansion was released.

In other languages

• Dutch: De Gilden
• Finnish: Killat
• French: Guildes
• German: Die Gilden
• Japanese: ギルド (pron. girudo)
• Korean: 길드를 위하여 (pron. gildeuleul wihayeo)
• Russian: Гильдии (pron. gil'dii)

Development timetable

I started working on Guilds in July 2010. The last change to Guilds cards was February 2011. I was working on the rulebook in November 2012. Dark Ages was going to come out afterwards and was finished later card-wise.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.

Secret History

Right around when Prosperity was due, the powers-that-be decided that they wanted small expansions too. Products that seemed more expansion-like than these giant game-sized expansions I was doing. The ideal time to do one would be next, and so Prosperity got pushed back, and Alchemy came out in its stead. I got Alchemy by breaking off a thematic chunk from a large set, and eventually reshaped the remains of that large set into Cornucopia.

I had two large expansions left after Prosperity, so this left me one small expansion short. I had to make one more small expansion to go in between Hinterlands and the last large expansion. Well I didn't have to, but you know. It was expected. So I made one. Guilds is thus the only expansion with no roots in Dominion as it existed prior to the main game being published. As it happens, the Base Cards product came out instead of Guilds, and then Dark Ages came out so we'd have a large expansion that year, so now the last expansion to be made is also the last to come out.

On my list of possible future mechanical themes, "tokens" was the easiest-sounding, so I went with that. There are a bunch of things you can do with tokens. My initial idea was to use them as money you could hang onto for later. This was simple and meant that any one card that used the tokens was useful by itself; there was no reason for anyone to insist on more than one token-involving card in the game at once, thus avoiding an issue that Alchemy had. The initial idea worked out and so there it is.

To supplement the tokens, I added the overpay cards. Overpay was a natural extension of the when-gain cards in Hinterlands, and was a good match for the tokens, since you could save up tokens for a big overpay. Two sub-themes is plenty for a small expansion, but I also flirted with a "name a card" sub-theme. In the end there's just a hint of it.

Before picking the tokens and overpay themes, I considered revisiting duration cards. I asked Jay what he thought, and he said that something new would be better than more of an old thing. Some of you are reading this and wishing I'd gone with the duration cards, but man, I have no regrets there, I am pleased with what Guilds offers up instead.

When I first made cards for this set, I hadn't picked out flavor for the set. So I gave some cards silly names, including Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker. It turned out people really liked those names, so that ended up determining the set theme. There's a lesson there for all of us.

Outtakes:

I tried overpay for coin tokens, that was pretty obvious. It was predictably crazy. Another overpay card was a VP card that was a twist on Island - shuffle all but 2 cards per $1 overpaid from discard to deck. That direction hadn't worked out in Hinterlands and still didn't here. I had a Village for $2 with a penalty, and per $2 you overpaid, you got another one. Foosh, a pile of Villages. It sounded good but was not exciting enough. Stonemason does a better job there.

What about granting overpay to other cards, so to speak? There was a Village with, while this is in play, when you buy an action card, you may pay $2 for another copy of that card. I liked it, but there was only so much space, and again, I had Stonemason.

I tried +$1, take a coin token per card the player to your right gained on their previous turn. Then I flipped it - take a coin token, get +$1 per card they gained. Both were too random in an unfun way. I also tried +$1, take two coin tokens, everyone else gets a coin token. As is sometimes the case with such cards, people just did not want to hand out presents to the other players. And I tried +1 buy, discard cards for coin tokens.

For the name-a-card sub-theme that I didn't so much end up with, I had a Cellar version of Journeyman, also from Dark Ages. You named two cards, discarded two cards, and drew two you didn't name, with +1 action. It was fine, it was totally fine. A little more memory-rewarding than some players like but whatever. But again, there's only so much space, it did not make the cut.

There is a card with a long history that had its last stand trying to get into this set. Once, the main set had a card, look at your top four, put one in your hand, discard the rest. I dropped it from the main set for being too boring. It resurfaced in Prosperity with +1 Action, and well it was crazy powerful. It cost $4 and I thought it might work out kind of like Throne Room, but it was way better. It really wanted to cost $4, so I tried several versions of it with different tweaks before giving up on it. Then I brought it back in other sets a few times and tried to get a good one. The version in Guilds was +1 action, could only get actions, but played the action it got. Anyway I did Herald instead, hooray.

For a bit I kind of wanted a new action-victory card, and tried +1 Action, reveal a card from your hand for the corresponding Ironworks bonus, 2 VP, for $4. It was fine but I mostly just liked that it was an action-victory card.

Walled Village is an outtake from this set. As a village you can keep around until you need it, it sort of fits in with the coin tokens. I couldn't actually give you something like action tokens because that would have been another kind of token to include. I also couldn't put coin tokens on piles, because Trade Route ate up that space.

Two cards used Spoils, which I stole briefly from Dark Ages but then gave back to it. Wandering Minstrel got worked on some here before moving to Dark Ages.

I hope this has been informative!

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Guilds cards

Recommended sets of 10

Guilds & Dominion

Arts and Crafts [images]
	Laboratory			Cellar			Workshop			Festival			Moneylender
	Stonemason			Advisor			Baker			Journeyman			Merchant Guild

Clean Living [images]
	Bandit			Militia			Moneylender			Gardens			Village
	Butcher			Baker			Candlestick Maker			Doctor			Soothsayer

Gilding the Lily [images]
	Library			Merchant			Remodel			Market			Sentry
	Plaza			Masterpiece			Candlestick Maker			Taxman			Herald

Guilds & Intrigue

Name That Card [images]
	Baker			Doctor			Plaza			Advisor			Masterpiece
	Courtyard			Harem			Nobles			Replace			Wishing Well

Tricks of the Trade [images]
	Stonemason			Herald			Soothsayer			Journeyman			Butcher
	Conspirator			Masquerade			Mill			Nobles			Secret Passage

Decisions, Decisions [images]
	Merchant Guild			Candlestick Maker			Masterpiece			Taxman			Butcher
	Bridge			Pawn			Mining Village			Upgrade			Duke

Guilds & Seaside

Island Builder [images]
	Island			Native Village			Salvager			Sea Chart			Treasury
	Advisor			Baker			Merchant Guild			Plaza			Stonemason

Guilds & Alchemy

Illuminati [images]
	Butcher			Herald			Masterpiece			Merchant Guild			Stonemason
	Apprentice			Golem			Philosopher's Stone			Scrying Pool			University
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Potion

Tonics & Toxins [images]
	Baker			Candlestick Maker			Doctor			Plaza			Soothsayer
	Alchemist			Familiar			Herbalist			Transmute			Vineyard
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Potion

Guilds & Prosperity

Quarrymen [images]
	Charlatan			City			Expand			Grand Market			Quarry
	Baker			Merchant Guild			Soothsayer			Stonemason			Taxman
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Platinum			Colony

Guilds & Cornucopia

Misfortune [images]
	Advisor			Candlestick Maker			Doctor			Fairgrounds			Farming Village
	Fortune Teller			Horse Traders			Jester			Soothsayer			Taxman

Baking Contest [images]
	Baker			Farming Village			Harvest			Herald			Journeyman
	Masterpiece			Menagerie			Remake			Stonemason			Tournament

Guilds & Hinterlands

Exchanges [images]
	Butcher			Herald			Masterpiece			Soothsayer			Stonemason
	Border Village			Cauldron			Develop			Stables			Trader

Guilds & Dark Ages

Stoneground [images]
	Hunting Grounds			Ironmonger			Procession			Marauder			Rogue
	Advisor			Baker			Candlestick Maker			Plaza			Stonemason
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Ruins			Shelters

Class Struggle [images]
	Feodum			Fortress			Knights			Market Square			Poor House
	Butcher			Doctor			Journeyman			Merchant Guild			Taxman
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Shelters

Guilds & Adventures

Spendthrift [images]
	Artificer			Gear			Magpie			Miser			Storyteller
	Doctor			Masterpiece			Merchant Guild			Soothsayer			Stonemason
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Lost Arts

Queen of Tan [images]
	Coin of the Realm			Duplicate			Guide			Ratcatcher			Royal Carriage
	Advisor			Butcher			Candlestick Maker			Herald			Journeyman
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Pathfinding			Save

Guilds & Empires

Cash Flow [images]
	Castles			City Quarter			Engineer			Gladiator			Royal Blacksmith
	Baker			Butcher			Doctor			Herald			Soothsayer
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Baths			Mountain Pass

Cornucopia/Guilds & Nocturne

The Endless Fair [images]
	Devil's Workshop			Exorcist			Monastery			Pixie			Shepherd
	Baker			Fairgrounds			Farming Village			Fortune Teller			Merchant Guild
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Boons

Happy Chaos [images]
	Blessed Village			Changeling			Fool			Faithful Hound			Sacred Grove
	Doctor			Harvest			Herald			Jester			Masterpiece
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Boons

Cornucopia/Guilds & Renaissance

Combo Corner [images]
	Ducat			Experiment			Hideout			Sculptor			Seer
	Herald			Horn of Plenty			Horse Traders			Jester			Stonemason
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Canal

Filling the Coffers [images]
	Priest			Recruiter			Spices			Swashbuckler			Treasurer
	Baker			Butcher			Menagerie			Merchant Guild			Plaza
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	City Gate			Star Chart

Cornucopia/Guilds & Menagerie

Living in Exile [images]
	Gatekeeper			Hostelry			Livery			Scrap			Stockpile
	Fairgrounds			Hamlet			Jester			Journeyman			Taxman
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Enclave			Way of the Mule

Thrill of the Hunt [images]
	Black Cat			Bounty Hunter			Camel Train			Mastermind			Village Green
	Butcher			Horse Traders			Hunting Party			Menagerie			Tournament
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Pursue			Way of the Rat

Cornucopia/Guilds & Allies

Huge Collections [images]
	Clashes			Contract			Forts			Galleria			Sentinel
	Advisor			Fairgrounds			Hunting Party			Menagerie			Plaza
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Woodworkers' Guild

Forest Scouts [images]
	Augurs			Emissary			Innkeeper			Royal Galley			Sentinel
	Baker			Candlestick Maker			Farming Village			Jester			Journeyman
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Forest Dwellers

Cornucopia/Guilds & Plunder

Of Heralds and Hunters [images]
	Cabin Boy			Flagship			Fortune Hunter			Pendant			Pickaxe
	Doctor			Fairgrounds			Herald			Soothsayer			Stonemason
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Trait for Fortune Hunter Inspiring

Through the Swamp [images]
	Cage			Pilgrim			Swamp Shacks			Taskmaster			Tools
	Baker			Hamlet			Horn of Plenty			Menagerie			Merchant Guild
Landscapes and Additional Cards
	Trait for Pilgrim Patient			Journey