Royal Carriage

Royal Carriage
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Reserve
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Adventures
Illustrator(s)	Kelli Stakenas
Card text
+1 Action Put this on your Tavern mat. After you play an Action card, if it's still in play, you may call this, to replay that Action.

Royal Carriage is an Action–Reserve card from Adventures. It is a Throne Room variant that can be saved on your Tavern mat until you have an Action card that you want to play twice.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• When you play this, you get +1 Action and put it on your Tavern mat. It stays on your mat until you call it, directly after resolving a played Action card that is still in play.
• Royal Carriage cannot respond to Actions that are no longer in play, such as a Reserve card that was put on the Tavern mat, or a card that trashed itself (like a Raze used to trash itself).
• When called, Royal Carriage causes you to replay the card you just played.
• You can call multiple Royal Carriages to replay the same Action multiple times (provided the Action is still in play).
• You completely resolve the Action before deciding whether or not to use Royal Carriage on it.
• If you use Royal Carriage to replay a Duration card, Royal Carriage will stay in play until the Duration card is discarded from play, to track the fact that the Duration card has been played twice.

Other rules clarifications

• With Duration cards, you call Royal Carriage after resolving the Duration card's on-play effects; you don't wait for the next turn. The same applies to other cards that have delayed effects, such as Scheme.
• You can't call a Royal Carriage to replay a called Reserve card, even though the Reserve card is in play after you call it.
• Royal Carriage can be called on a Crown or Coronet played during your Buy phase, and on a Werewolf played during your Night phase.
• You can also call Royal Carriage on a card you play on another player's turn (e.g. Caravan Guard or Falconer). If it's a Duration, Royal Carriage will stay in play; otherwise you will discard the Royal Carriage during that player's Clean-up.
• If a card you play leaves and then immediately returns to your play area (e.g. you play a Transmogrify at the start of your turn with Piazza and then immediately call the Transmogrify), you can't call Royal Carriage on it.
• If an Action card, such as Disciple, plays a Royal Carriage, you can immediately (after completely resolving Disciple) call the Royal Carriage to replay the Disciple.
• If an Action plays another Action (such as a Sauna that plays an Avanto), you will call Royal Carriages in the opposite order of when they were played. So you can't call Royal Carriage on Sauna before Avanto. If you call a Royal Carriage on Sauna, you can no longer call Royal Carriage on Avanto.
• If an Action is in play, and you replay it with a Royal Carriage to remove it from play (e.g. you replay a Tragic Hero and it trashes itself, then you can no longer call other Royal Carriages on it.
• If you have 3 Favors, play an Underling, and then replay it with Royal Carriage, League of Shopkeepers will trigger twice, and you can get + from it.

Strategy

As a Throne Room variant, Royal Carriage allows you to flexibly replay other Action cards to generate draw, terminal space, or payload. However, the fact that you call it rather than play it in order to do this is a constraint that makes it somewhat more difficult to use; most importantly, it is slightly less effective as a village because you cannot use a Royal Carriage on another Royal Carriage. As a tradeoff, Royal Carriage can offer a boost in reliability by being available to call at any opportune moment, and it is significantly more effective at amplifying particular cards. Because Royal Carriage’s effectiveness is dependent on other good cards being present in your deck, it is usually best added in the midgame or later, and can be skippable in Kingdoms where stronger or cheaper villages are available.

Using Royal Carriage as your primary village can involve some complex decisions with respect to play order and deck composition. Its primary weakness is that it cannot be chained in the way that most other Throne Room variants can. As a result, it generally provides less total terminal space: while two colliding Throne Rooms can play two terminals twice (for four total terminal plays), two Royal Carriages can only play a single terminal three times. This creates an additional limitation in the interaction with terminal draw: chained Throne Rooms can play the terminal draw card first, followed by a non-terminal card, to leave you with remaining Actions, but calling Royal Carriages on terminal draw at the start of your turn will only draw cards dead. Thus, if you are reliant on Royal Carriage for terminal space, you will often need to find a non-terminal card (preferably a cantrip or non-terminal draw) at the start of your turn while also having a Royal Carriage on your Tavern mat. Leaving a copy or two of Royal Carriage on the mat at the end of your turn increases the chances that you can execute this move.

Royal Carriage’s Reserve nature creates some other important differences compared to other Throne Room variants.

• Because it can be called on a later turn than the one on which it is played, Royal Carriage does not need to collide with an Action card in order to have any value, which makes it still usable in cases where full deck control has not been or will not be established. Additionally, Royal Carriages can be left on your Tavern mat to improve your odds of a good start to a future turn, both by providing a village effect and acting as an additional copy of your target added to your hand. For example, if your primary draw card is Laboratory, every Royal Carriage you are able to save for a future turn is effectively another copy of Laboratory. It is worth noting, however, that saving Royal Carriages for a future turn often means trading off the opportunity to replay some payload on your current turn.
• Importantly, you can also call multiple Royal Carriages on the same Action card. This can be helpful with cards that are difficult to gain in bulk (e.g. Princess or Disciple), and is particularly useful when amplifying terminal payload that scales non-linearly, as you only need a single copy of that card alongside multiple Royal Carriages to pull off a megaturn. Bridge is the strongest example of this, to the point that it can work as a monolithic combo, while similar cards such as Merchant Guild can work to a lesser extent.
• Unlike most other Throne Room variants, Royal Carriage requires its target to be in play rather than targeting and playing a card from your hand. This means that it is significantly less effective with many one-shots, most notably Horse which is a strong target for other Throne Room variants. Rarely, however, you may be able to take advantage of this distinction, for example with a Black Cat played on an opponent’s turn.

Deciding when you should call Royal Carriage, and if so, how many, is somewhat situation dependent. In general, it’s a good idea to play them as early in your turn as possible in order to have the option to call them available, and to call them as late as you reasonably can (i.e., after drawing as much as possible) in order to maximize the information available to you. In terms of picking a target, like most Throne Room variants you’ll want to use your Royal Carriages for whatever effect best helps your current turn. Early in your turn, this will usually mean replaying a draw card or non-terminal to get just enough terminal space, though deck tracking and knowing how much draw and terminal space you have without using a Royal Carriage may allow you to save it for later in the turn. When deciding whether to call Royal Carriage on your payload cards towards the end of your turn, it's important to consider how much you'll need them at the start of your next turn: if your deck control is relatively strong, you might call them all, but saving some on the Tavern mat is generally a good idea if you are dependent on Royal Carriage to help you draw.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Action Put this on your Tavern mat. Directly after resolving an Action, if it's still in play, you may call this, to replay that Action.	Adventures	April 2015
		+1 Action Put this on your Tavern mat. Directly after you finish playing an Action card, if it's still in play, you may call this, to replay that Action.	Adventures (2016 printing)	August 2017
		+1 Action Put this on your Tavern mat. After you play an Action card, if it's still in play, you may call this, to replay that Action.	Adventures (2022 printing)

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Koninklijke koets			+1 Actie Leg deze kaart op je Herbergtableau. Je mag deze kaart direct na het spelen van een actie oproepen om die actie nogmaals te spelen (mits deze nog in het spel in).	(2015)
Finnish	Kuninkaalliset vaunut
French	Cortège royal (lit. royal procession)
German	Königliche Kutsche			+1 Aktion Lege diese Karte auf dein Wirtshaustableau. Sofort nachdem du eine Aktionskarte ausgeführt hast, die danach noch im Spiel ist, darfst du diese Karte von deinem Tableau aufrufen. Wenn du das tust: Führe die Aktion noch einmal aus.	(2015)
	Königliche Kutsche			+1 Aktion Lege diese Karte auf dein Wirtshaustableau. Nachdem du eine Aktionskarte gespielt hast, darfst du, wenn jene Aktionskarte noch im Spiel ist, diese Karte aufrufen, um jene Aktionskarte noch einmal zu spielen.	(Nachdruck 2021)
Japanese	御料車 (pron. goryō-sha, lit. official state car)			+1 アクション これをあなたの酒場マットの上に置く。 アクションカード1枚の使用を解決した直後、それが場に残っている場合、再度使用するために、これを呼び出してもよい。
Russian	Королевская Карета (pron. korolyevskaya karyeta)

Trivia

Royal Carriage can be called during your Buy phase for Crown or Coronet, and during your Night phase for Werewolf, making it the only Throne Room variant that can be used on a Night card, and the only Throne Room variant that can be used in three different phases.

Official card art.

Secret History

A Dark Ages outtake. We always liked it, but it needed a mat. It has a mat here and well that's pretty much the story. I briefly had a bad wording that could let you go infinite, and fixing it made it even more like the Dark Ages version.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of Dominion: Adventures