Guide

Guide
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Reserve
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Adventures
Illustrator(s)	Eric J Carter
Card text
+1 Card +1 Action Put this on your Tavern mat. At the start of your turn, you may call this, to discard your hand and draw 5 cards.

Guide is a sifting Action-Reserve from Adventures. A vanilla cantrip on play, it can be called at the start of a turn to discard and replace your hand. This can allow you to recover from a handsize attack, or just to skip an unlucky draw.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• When you play this, you get +1 Card and +1 Action, and put it on your Tavern mat. It stays on your mat until you call it at the start of one of your turns.
• If multiple things can happen at the start of your turn, you can do them in any order.
• When you call Guide, it moves from the mat into play, and you discard your hand, then draw 5 cards.
• You discard it that turn with your other cards in play.

Strategy

Guide is a cantrip that gets stored on your Tavern mat until you want to discard a dud or suboptimal hand for a fresh one. Adding a Guide or two in the midgame is often an inexpensive way to boost your deck’s reliability. Guide’s relevance in a Kingdom depends on the speed of the game (more likely to be useful in longer games), the opportunity cost of getting Guide (lower with +Buy) and the probability of dudding (which, for example, is lower with good thinning, but significantly higher with many Attacks).

Guide’s most obvious use is to replace a hand containing lots of junk, which can occur for various reasons, such as a lack of thinning, junking attacks such as Witch, or the addition of Victory cards in the endgame.

Guide can also provide you with a full hand if the original one has a reduced size for any reason. This may be due to handsize attacks by your opponent; Guide is especially useful against Clerk, as you can topdeck a good card and discard the rest to draw the topdecked one with a full hand. It can also arise from your own start-of-turn effects, e.g., Ratcatcher, Cathedral, or Lost in the Woods. An especially important synergy is with Outpost, because starting an Outpost turn with a Guide on your Tavern mat allows for an extra turn with a full hand of five cards. Other than providing you with better hands, Guide also synergizes with cards than can React to being discarded, such as Tunnel; Village Green can be especially relevant, since discarding it with Guide allows you to effectively begin your turn with a hand of more than five cards.

Guide is less useful when there is a low risk of drawing useless cards (because the deck is high-quality and free of junk) and/or your hand size is never reduced at or during the beginning of your turn. Guide is unlikely to be useful if you can often expect to start your turn with an increased hand size, for example due to Way of the Squirrel or Expedition.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Card +1 Action Put this on your Tavern mat. At the start of your turn, you may call this, to discard your hand and draw 5 cards.	Adventures 1st Edition	April 2015
		+1 Card +1 Action Put this on your Tavern mat. At the start of your turn, you may call this, to discard your hand and draw 5 cards.	Adventures 2nd Edition	August 2017

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Gids			+1 Kaart +1 Actie Leg deze kaart op je Herbegtableau. Je mag deze kaart aan het begin van je beurt oproepen om je hele hand af te leggen en 5 kaarten te trekken.	(2015)
Finnish	Opas
French	Guide
German	Kundschafter (lit. scout)			+1 Karte +1 Aktion Lege diese Karte auf dein Wirtshaustableau. Zu Beginn deines Zuges darfst du diese Karte von deinem Tableau aufrufen. Wenn du das tust: Lege alle Handkarten ab und ziehe 5 Karten.	(2015)
German	Kundschafter (lit. scout)			+1 Karte +1 Aktion Lege diese Karte auf dein Wirtshaustableau. Zu Beginn deines Zuges darfst du diese Karte aufrufen, um deine Handkarten abzulegen und 5 Karten zu ziehen.	(Nachdruck 2021)
Japanese	案内人 (pron. annainin)			+1 カードを引く +1 アクション これをあなたの酒場マットの上に置く。 あなたのターンの開始時に、手札をすべて捨て5枚カードを引くために、これを呼び出してもよい。
Polish	Przewodnik				Although Polish version is not released, this name is referred to in Polish Dominion 2E rulebook.
Russian	Проводник (pron. provodnik)

Trivia

Official card art.

Preview

Guide can give you a new hand at the start of your turn. You just skip right past a bad hand, or a Militia'd hand, or a hand that doesn't have that Hero you need to upgrade. With multiple Guides on your mat, you can keep going until you run out or find that good hand.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Adventures Previews #2 - Guide, Duplicate, Coin of the Realm

Secret History

One of the first Reserve cards, just covering easy ground. Originally it gave +, but making it +1 Card +1 Action meant it not only saved a future hand from being bad, it didn't make your current hand bad either.

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

Donald X.'s opinion

It's easy to get too many of these. The first one is pretty attractive, and there you are with again. Obv. it's nice vs. Militias, though sometimes your 3 cards are better than a random 5. Sometimes you can get tricky ordering effects: call Ratcatcher to trash, call Guide for a new hand. You know.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, $3 Cost Card Rankings Bottom Half

I agree with LF that there's probably a good reason to Guide a lot early on. If your best card isn't in your hand, man, why not get to it. In Page/Peasant games, you Guide away good hands constantly, to try to upgrade faster. And of course sometimes it's a nice defense. Even a single Guide is fine. Sometimes you don't have a specific reason for Guide, it's just some nice insurance. Sometimes it's just the best thing you can get for , and you build a rockin' engine that doesn't need them, and late in the game there are three sitting in the Tavern, waiting for a dud starting hand that may never come.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Let's Discuss Adventures Cards: Guide