Delve

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Delve
Info
Cost
Type	Event
Set	Empires
Illustrator(s)	Mark Poole
Event text
+1 Buy Gain a Silver.

Delve is an Event from Empires. Its presence in a game essentially makes Silver cheaper and not require a Buy to buy.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• Each purchase of Delve gives you back the Buy you used on it.
• For example, if you have , you can Delve, then Delve, then buy a card for .

Strategy

Delve can get you 3 Silvers in the opening, giving you significantly better odds of hitting 5, 6, and 5 twice on turns 3 and 4 than most other openings. This is especially relevant in games where you can use the extra Silvers profitably later, either via trash for benefit or because the board is weak and Silver is likely to remain an above-median card in your deck into the endgame. Delve is fast enough that it can occasionally enable a money strategy to beat a weak engine, but don't let it trick you into not building a deck if there's a deck to be built.

Delve is notably strong with Feodum, and can sometimes even be played as a monolithic strategy. This has been benchmarked as follows:

   Turn 11: 0 piles, ~27-30 VP
   Turn 13-14: 1 pile, ~50 VP
   Turn 23-24: 3 piles, ~115 VP
   Tip: Start greening on turn 6

Synergies

• Money strategies
• Feodum

Antisynergies

• Strong engines (especially with virtual money)
• Prosperity games, especially with Platinum and Colony
• Bandit Fort

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Buy. Gain a Silver.	Empires	June 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text
Dutch	Delven			+1 Aanschaf Pak een Zilver	(2016)
Finnish	Kaivanto (lit. excavation)
French	Trouée (lit. gap)			+1 Achat. Recevez un Argent.
German	Erforschen (lit. to explore)			+1 Kauf Nimm ein Silber.
Japanese	掘進 (pron. kusshin, lit. excavation)			+1 購入。銀貨1枚を獲得する。
Polish	Zejście (lit. descent)
Russian	Шурф (pron. shurf, lit. pit)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

This was an idea from Adventures that I never got around to trying there. It's the only one of those I tried, and it worked great.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Empires Cards

Comparison with (buying) Silver

The main problem with Silver-with-a-bonus for (for games where people want Silver and aren't gaining it with a Silver-gainer) is that the pile just automatically empties. It's also not great that then you have that bonus in your deck, but didn't care about it at all, weren't making a decision there. Delve has neither issue; it hits the Silver pile rather than a new 10-card pile, and those Silvers have no other abilities.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, is royal seal underrated?