Tournament
Tournament
Tournament | |
---|---|
Cost | 4 |
Type | [[Action]] |
Set/Expansion | Cornucopia |
Illustrator | [[]] |
+1 Action Each player may reveal a Province from his hand. |
Contents |
FAQ
Official FAQ
First you get +1 Action. Then each player, including you, may reveal a Province card from his hand. Then, if you revealed a Province, discard that card, and you gain a Prize of your choice, or a Duchy, putting whatever card you took on top of your deck. If there were no cards in your deck, it becomes the only card in your deck. There are five Prizes, set out at the start of the game; see Preparation. You can only take a Prize from the Prize pile. You can take any Prize from the Prize pile; you do not have to take the top one. You can take a Duchy instead, whether or not the Prizes have run out. You can opt to take a Duchy even if the Duchy pile is empty, or a Prize even if no Prizes are left; in these cases you gain nothing. After gaining your card or not, if no other player revealed a Province, you draw a card and get +$1 . So this card will play out one of four ways:
- if you do not reveal a Province and no-one else does either, you will get +1 Action +1 Card +$1;
- if you reveal a Province and no one else does, you will gain a Prize or a Duchy and draw it, as well as get +1 Action +$1;
- if you reveal a Province and so does someone else, you will get +1 Action and gain a Prize or a Duchy, which will be on top of your deck;
- if you do not reveal a Province but someone else does, you will just get +1 Action.
When you gain a Prize, take whichever remaining Prize you want. You can look through the Prizes that players have not gained yet whenever you want.
Other Rules clarifications
Strategy Article
Synergies/Combos
Antisynergies
Trivia
Secret History
It had a certain charm, but was a dud for some people. The problem was, a lot of the time, it was Smithy. It just didn't play differently enough from Smithy to be interesting. So it left Prosperity and was consigned to the limbo of promising ideas to work on later.
When I started working on Cornucopia, I tried it again, as something that fit the hand theme. The dull part was the card-drawing, so I had to replace that. The version I tried cost $5, and was, "Each player may reveal a Province card from his hand. If you do, gain a Treasure. If no-one else does, gain an Action card." It's fun to just say "gain an Action card," no qualifiers, but it doesn't work. We played one game with this and Possession. I got six Possessions and lost. Possession was typically not as good as Workshop, as everyone crammed their decks full of VP cards. Another insane thing was using it to gain copies of itself and Golems, then using the Golems to dig it up and do this more. You would have turns where you gained a pile of cards and then played them all. Anyway these games are fun once, but that's that. I killed the card again.
So a while later, I was working on the set, and realized I could push variety by actually adding more cards to the game. I had cards that cared if you had variety, and some cards helped you get that variety, but nothing increased the total amount of variety possible.
The first thing to try was a Black Market variant. Black Market came up a lot as a card that was cool with this expansion. Why not make a new one? And I could fix all of the problems Black Market had. Instead of buying a card in your Action phase, it would gain you a card directly. Instead of having to build a Black Market Deck, it would just come with one pre-built. Then that deck could be new cards, which was nice too, especially for a small expansion, although it could only be five cards, because that's how much space there was.
Tournament's province-revealing mechanic was perfect for this. And so it came to pass. I made a Black Market variant, that came with the cards you gained from it, that gained you the cards directly, via revealing a Province. There were still some things to work out though.
You got your Prize for revealing Province yourself, so that it wouldn't happen right away, and it went on your deck, so you'd draw it before the game was over. What did you get if they didn't stop you? At first it was a Silver, which was obviously bad. Steve Wampler suggested that it be something involving drawing a card, so that you'd get your Prize that turn if you had Province and no-one else did. I went with Peddler - +1 Action +1 Card +$1. That had the problem though of, if someone revealed Province, you didn't get +1 Action, and couldn't play another card. You'd have turns where you stared at your hand, deciding whether or not to risk playing Tournament. That was no fun, so, you always get the +1 Action.
Another thing was the booby prize. Originally it was Silver. That was unimpressive, but was there for a bit before turning into Duchy.