Overpay
Overpaying is a mechanic in the Guilds expansion. Some cards allow the player to spend more coins than their cost when buying them, for additional effects. Such cards have a "+" added to their cost symbol. Cards having an overpay effect are:
- Stonemason, which allows you to gain 2 Actions each costing the amount you overpaid.
- Farrier, which allows you to increase your handsize for the next turn by the amount you overpaid.
- Doctor, which allows you for each you overpaid to look at the top card of your deck; and you can choose to trash it, discard it, or put it back.
- Infirmary, which allows you to draw and optionally trash from your hand a number of cards equal to the amount you overpaid.
- Masterpiece, which allows you to gain a silver for each you overpaid.
- Herald, which allows you for each you overpaid to look through your discard pile and put a card from it on top of your deck.
Doctor and Masterpiece were removed for the second edition of Guilds & Cornucopia.
FAQ
Official FAQ (2023)
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 only meaningful with Stonemason.
- 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.
- Players can only overpay for a card when buying it, not when gaining it some other way.
- Overpaying itself happens when a card is bought; however "overpay" abilities happen when the card is gained, and are timed with other such abilities.
- The "+" is just a reminder; a card with a "+" in its cost still has its normal cost for all purposes. For example, Infirmary costs , so it can be the card set aside for Ferryman.
- Reducing the costs of cards via cards like Renown does not make overpaying cheaper; for example if you had and two Renowns in play and bought Farrier, Farrier would cost , and overpaying with your would still only give you +5 Cards at end of turn.
Deprecated official FAQ (2021) |
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Gallery
Kingdom cards
Removed cards
Trivia
Secret History
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.
Retrospective
These days I am not fond of how wordy the overpay cards are, except for Masterpiece. It's not impossible to avoid that, to have a single-line vanilla top, but. An Event with a variable cost would be better since it doesn't have to also say what the card does. Of course an Event with +Buy is already like this.
2022 Rewording
Overpay needed to resolve at the same time as when-gain abilities. But the payment had to be when you pay for the card, so it is. It remains the one when-buy trigger, but all you do then is spend more; the ability happens with when-gain abilities. And then the text is a little simpler too, though just due to sending you to the rulebook (that doesn't exist yet).
Additional comments
In general Dominion leans towards putting stuff on the cards, not in the rulebook. For all games I like putting stuff on the cards, but sometimes something is very common and easy to remember and it will save a lot of space to put it in the rulebook. Or it may feel like it's really the game and not the card. There are also corner cases that don't really come up; those don't like to be explained on cards. And some stuff just has no hope of fitting on the cards.
Overpay is now very rulebook-y - with no rulebook yet - but that's a result of needing to work with what was there (I don't know what it would look like if I were making the set from scratch today; I haven't put in that work).