Boon
Boons, introduced in Nocturne, are small bonuses that may be useful to the player receiving them. They are bestowed by Fate cards.
The pile of Boons is shuffled, and when a Fate card instructs you to receive a Boon, you draw the next one and get whatever bonus it tells you, and return it to the Boon discard pile when you've resolved it. Druid is an exception; it selects three Boons at the beginning of the game and gives access to only those three. When the Boon pile is exhausted, the discarded Boons are reshuffled.
Boons are not "cards"; any text referring to a "card" does not apply to Boons. However, for reference, the Boon effects are printed on cards in a landscape orientation with golden frames.
Contents |
List of Boons
- The Earth's Gift
- The Field's Gift
- The Flame's Gift
- The Forest's Gift
- The Moon's Gift
- The Mountain's Gift
- The River's Gift
- The Sea's Gift
- The Sky's Gift
- The Sun's Gift
- The Swamp's Gift
- The Wind's Gift
Official Rules
- Boons are a face-down deck of cards that are revealed as needed.
- The phrase "receive a Boon" means, turn over the top Boon, and follow the instructions on it.
- If the Boons deck is empty, first shuffle the discarded Boons to reform the deck; you may also do this any time all Boons are in their discard pile.
- Received Boons normally go to the Boons discard pile, but three (The Field's Gift, The Forest's Gift, and The River's Gift) go in front of a player until that turn's Clean-up.
Preparation
- If any Kingdom cards being used have the Fate type, shuffle the Boons and put them near the Supply, and put the Will-o'-Wisp pile near the Supply also.
Trivia
While Boons were still part of Empires, they were named after Roman deities.
In other languages
- French: Aubaine
- Russian: Благодеяние (pron. blagodyeyaniye)
Preview
Nocturne has Boons. It's a deck of 12 landscape-style cards that give small beneficial effects. You play a card that says "receive a Boon" or some such, and turn over the top Boon and see what you get. You shuffle the cards when needed, they don't run out.
Secret History
The idea was to have 12 different ones, and there were always 12. At first there were two copies of each, in the end there's one. Some Boons went the distance while others were tweaked or replaced; I'll get to that. What you can do with a mechanic varies with the rest of the set; in Empires one Boon gave +1 , and here one gives you a Will-o'-Wisp.
Originally the top Boon was revealed; you'd know what was coming up. One day Matt Engel suggested having a choice of 3, and initially I liked that, and for a while it worked like that. One day I tried a card that gave you a random one, and I liked it a lot better, and in the end I switched it back to random only you don't even get to know what's coming. It's much faster; there's no first player advantage; it takes less table space.
A big issue with Boons was making sure they didn't make the game too slow. There were cards that gave +Cards and gave you a Boon; they did not work out. The cantrip that gave you a Boon is gone. Even the Treasure only gives you a Boon half the time (in multiples).
The goal was always to have 12 Boons that were reasonably close in power level. Obv. they vary with the circumstance. They also wanted to be simple, you do not want to spend a while poring over them. Because of Idol, it seemed bad if any were just dead in the Buy phase. It would have been nice to have them all work for the other players for Sacred Grove, but that was too much to ask. Too much I say.
Empires had had +1 ; this set got a Will-o'-Wisp. There were several versions of Sky, trying to be hard enough but not too hard. The Moon's Gift started out also letting you flip your deck; it lost that when you got to choose your Boon, then didn't get it back somehow. I tried different versions of the basic +'s, trying to get the best mix and then to also keep Idol happy.
There was a Remodel, it was too good. There was discard X cards, gain a card for X+, also strong. There was "each other player gains a Copper"; it wasn't great to have an Attack in there. I tried out a Bridge and a twist on Bridge. I tried "+, put a card from your hand on your deck" and a Haven. I tried "draw up to 6." In Empires some tried gaining a copy of a card.
At one point when you could choose your Boon from 3, it started to seem bad that Boons people didn't want would pile up. A few Boons tried to fix that, refresh Boons somehow. One replaced the Boons and then gave you a random one.