Curse
| Curse | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Info | |
| Cost |
 |
| Type(s) | Curse |
| Kingdom card? | No |
| Set |
Base |
| Illustrator(s) | Claus Stephan |
| Card text | |
-1  | |
A Curse is a dead card originating from the Base set that costs 
and gives the player –1 
. Curses are usually gained from an opponent's curser, but they are always in the supply whether or not the particular kingdom actually has a curser. Having Curses in your deck is harmful for many reasons: the –1 VP reduces your score, of course, but more significant in many games is the fact that any hand with Curses in it has fewer useful cards and therefore less flexibility and power, and that with a larger deck, you see your more powerful cards less often.
There are a very few situations in which adding one or more Curses to your deck can be beneficial. In decks with powerful engines, it is possible to use Ambassador to distribute Curses to your opponents if you have a Curse in your deck yourself. Gaining a Curse is sometimes necessary to increase the value of Fairgrounds, which counts the number of differently named cards in your deck. Sometimes, a player with a large lead and ample +Buy will try to buy out the Curses in order to accelerate the endgame by creating a three-pile ending.
A common beginner mistake is to assume that because Curses are always in the Supply, buying them must be good for something (besides the above rare cases), so therefore a purchased Curse must be able to insert itself into an opponent's deck "all by itself", either on-purchase (like the effect of Ill-Gotten Gains) or during one's turn (as with Ambassador). Obviously, this is not true, and would render Curse-giving cards nearly useless.
FAQ
Official FAQ
Other Rules clarifications
- The number of Curses in the Supply is 10 for each player beyond the first -- 10 for two players, 20 for three players, 30 for four players, and so on.
- Curses are always in the supply, even when there is no card which explicitly mentions them.
- Curse isn't a Victory card, even though (like most Victory cards) it is a dead card that affects your score.
Cards that interact with Curse
Direct Interaction
- All cursers
- Embargo causes Curses to be gained when a certain card is bought
- Rabble and Fortune Teller leave Curses on top of opponent's decks, if found
- Vagrant draws Curses if they are revealed
Indirect Interaction
- Most trashers, sifters, and deck inspectors
- Masquerade and Ambassador can give your own Curses to an opponent
- Ironworks and Ironmonger get no bonus from gaining or revealing a Curse, respectively
- Menagerie, Harvest and Fairgrounds all benefit from the variety added by a Curse, though usually not enough to warrant buying one
- Advisor and Envoy are made worse by the presence of Curses
Trivia
Curse is the only card type that applies to only one card in the game.
In other languages
- Czech: Kletba
- Dutch: Vloek
- French: Malédiction
- German: Fluch
- Hungarian: Átok
- Italian: Maledizione
- Japanese: 呪い (pron. noroi)
- Norwegian: Forbannelse
- Polish: Klątwa
- Romanian: Blestem
- Russian: Проклятие (pron. proklyatiye)
- Spanish: Maldición
Secret History
Pre-development, you could get Curses from the trash. Also treasures. I forgot all about that when doing that BGN interview; this is another change Valerie and Dale made. They changed it to, once trashed, gone forever. My original thought was, I would have an infinite pile of Silvers if I could, but it's a physical game so what can you do. Getting them from the trash stretched out the supply just slightly. But it's simpler not to, nice to have those piles count towards the end condition, and man getting hit 10 times with Witch (the maximum if there's no Moat) is plenty.
The total number of Curses also changed. For a while there were 45. You could really get Cursed bad. Also you didn't always vary the pile size with the number of players. That's there of course to stop Witch from getting ridiculous with 2 players (or from being negligible with 4, if you fix it for 2).
