Baker

Baker
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Guilds
Illustrator(s)	Lynell Ingram
Card text
+1 Card +1 Action +1 Coffers Setup: Each player gets +1 Coffers.

Baker is an Action card from Guilds. It is a cantrip that gives the player a Coffers token. A notable feature of Baker is its setup: every player starts the game with a Coffers token, which can change players' opening buys.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• You draw a card, get +1 Action, and add a token to your Coffers mat.
• In games using this card, each player starts the game with a token on their Coffers.
• This includes games using the promotional card Black Market in which Baker is in the Black Market deck.

Strategy

Baker is a peddler variant that gives you a Coffers. It is useful in both money strategies and engines. In the former, it is a strong purchase at that helps you to smooth the pricepoints you hit: in particular, a small supply of coffers will help to ensure that your deck will reliably hit to buy a Province each turn in the endgame, rather than hitting .

Engines will also tend to benefit from adding one or two Bakers as supplementary payload, as a small quantity of Coffers will similarly help to smooth pricepoints between turns or spike a high pricepoint when needed. However, Baker may nonetheless remain ungained due to its high opportunity cost, as Kingdoms will often have Actions with even stronger effects at the same pricepoint that engines will value more.

Amassing Bakers will rarely be the best source of primary payload. A deck that banks up large quantities of Coffers between turns will scale up much more slowly than one that re-invests most of its money each turn by buying cards, and a deck that adds Bakers with intent to spend the Coffers every turn will also scale up slowly due to the inefficiency of adding payload of at a time for each. As a cantrip, it is most useful as payload in Kingdoms with very limited draw, where one will be highly averse to adding additional stop cards such as Gold to the deck.

Baker’s setup instructions greatly affect the opening, giving players the option to open /, /, or even / (on a / opening split). In particular, this means that players can always afford a card before the first shuffle.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Card +1 Action Take a Coin token. Setup: Each player takes a Coin token.	Guilds	June 2013
		+1 Card +1 Action +1 Coffers Setup: Each player gets +1 Coffers.	Guilds & Cornucopia (2017 printing)	March 2018
		+1 Card +1 Action +1 Coffers Setup: Each player gets +1 Coffers.	Cornucopia & Guilds (Second Edition)	March 2024

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Bakker
Finnish	Leipuri
French	Boulanger			+1 Carte +1 Action +1 Coffre Mise en place : pour tous les joueurs, +1 Coffre.
German	Bäcker			+1 Karte +1 Aktion Nimm eine Münze. Spielvorbereitung: Zu Spielbeginn erhält jeder Spieler eine Münze.	(2013)
	Bäcker			+1 Karte +1 Aktion +1 Taler Spielvorbereitung: Jeder Spieler erhält +1 Taler.	(2019)
Japanese	パン屋 (pron. pan-ya, lit. bakery)			+1 カードを引く +1 アクション コイントークン1枚を得る。準備:プレイヤーは全員、コイントークン1枚を得る。
Korean	제빵사 (pron. jeppangsa)
Polish	Piekarz				Although Polish version is not released, this name is referred to in Polish Dominion 2E rulebook.
Russian	Пекарь (pron. pyekar')

Trivia

Official card art.

Preview

Casimir III, greatest of the Polish kings, came into power in 1333. He took a country in ruins, and brought prosperity to it, while doubling its size, in part by claiming the Duchy of Halicz. Since I am previewing Dominion cards though, that's all pretty irrelevant.

Guilds is the 8th Dominion expansion. Man. That's a bunch of expansions. People always ask about a 9th expansion, and I always say, well who knows, but there are good reasons for stopping. You can go read them in some other thread, I am busy previewing a card here, I will get to it any second now. Guilds itself only exists because I needed a small expansion to go in-between Hinterlands and Dark Ages. Base Cards ended up showing up there instead, but I'd already made Guilds, so why not release it.

Guilds has two main mechanics, as you can see in the terse sentences that accompany the flavor paragraph. One of them is coin tokens. And here today is a card that uses them.

The coin tokens are those metal things in Seaside and Prosperity. Guilds has cards that give you some, and then they're yours, they don't belong to some Pirates or anything. The significance of a coin token is, in your buy phase, before buying cards, you can cash in any number of coin tokens for + each. That's it, that's all there is to know. They're money you can spend later. The turn you play Baker, you get a coin token; you can cash it in that turn, but you can also hold onto it.

Guilds is the most skill-based expansion, and coin tokens are a big part of that. There you are with some turn; you could buy a card for , or maybe a cheaper one. There are a certain number of options. Coin tokens increase your options; with just one coin token, you can now consider cashing it in and getting a card for instead.

Baker has another special twist, which is, it gives players a coin token at the start of the game. You only get one coin token then, not one per Baker in the pile, why is anyone even asking that. You get the coin token even though no-one has a Baker yet and possibly no-one will end up buying one. It's a free sample.

That starting coin token drastically shakes up the opening two turns. You can get a and a no matter what your starting draw is. If you got /, you also have the option of /; if you got /, you have the option of /. You can also save that coin token for later and live with your draw.

That's the preview, I'm here all week.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Guilds Previews

Secret History

Originally it didn't have the setup part. It was just a very basic coin token card. When I thought of the setup thing, I realized that whatever card I put it on might sometimes not be bought, such that that starting coin token was all the card did. I decided that was okay though, and to just put the ability on something simple and likely to be bought.

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

Why put the setup clause on Baker?

I wanted a card that made players start with a coin token. The idea wasn't that all games with coin tokens would have you start with one, the idea was that some of them would. That kind of variety is like a premise of the game. The card wanted to be a simple one that used coin tokens - simple to fit the text, involving coin tokens so that it felt less tacked on. Butcher had too much text, and Plaza did too at the time (it let you pay a coin token to draw a card). Merchant Guild already had a dividing line. It could have been Candlestick Maker instead. It's Baker.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Baker questions