King's Court
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File:KingsCourtDigital.jpg|Digital version for [[Dominion Online]] | File:KingsCourtDigital.jpg|Digital version for [[Dominion Online]] | ||
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Revision as of 16:40, 24 August 2016
King's Court | |
---|---|
Info | |
Cost | |
Type(s) | Action |
Kingdom card? | Yes |
Set | Prosperity |
Illustrator(s) | Dennis Lohausen |
Card text | |
You may choose an Action card in your hand. Play it three times. |
King's Court is an Action card from Prosperity. When played, it gives you the opportunity to play another Action card from your hand three times, like a better Throne Room. A few King's Courts can supercharge any engine and, with +Buy, enable huge game-ending turns.
Contents |
FAQ
Official FAQ
- This is similar to Throne Room (from Dominion), but plays the Action thrice rather than twice.
- You pick another Action card in your hand, play it, play it again, and play it a third time.
- This does not use up any extra Actions you were allowed to play due to cards like Worker's Village - King's Court itself uses up one Action and that is it.
- You cannot play any other cards in between resolving the King's Court-ed Action card multiple times, unless that Action card specifically tells you to (such as King's Court itself does).
- If you King's Court a King's Court, you will play three different Actions after that, playing each one of them three times - you do not play one Action nine times.
- If you King's Court a card that gives you +1 Action, such as Grand Market, you will end up with 3 Actions left afterwards, not the 1 Action you would have if you just played three Grand Markets.
- With cards that have multiple modes like Nobles the mode does not have to remain the same each time the card is played.
Other Rules clarifications
- You may play King's Court without actually using its ability: playing another Action three times is optional. (This is not the case for Throne Room.) However, if you do use King's Court's ability, you must play the chosen Action three times; you can't stop after one or two.
Strategy Article
King's Court is probably the card that gives the very most forceful push in the direction of engines, and may be the single most powerful card in the game, cost notwithstanding; its potential competition probably lies between Champion and Teacher.
Other superlatives King's Court is in the running for are the highest potential damage for relationships, the highest resign rate, the most complained about on the Forum (although it seems like we have eventually gotten over it), and the card that costs the most; sure, Bank and Forge cost , but do they do it the same way? Dubious.
The underlying theme here is that King's Court breaks Dominion, on a fundamental level. It is transcendent over its slightly grimier compatriots, Throne Room et al., in that it allows more plays of an action than cards that you have. This sort of thing allows a chain such as, with three Highways in play, KC-KC-Workshop to gain Workshop, Market, and KC, play Market to draw them again, and then play KC to repeat. This is tied in to the high resign rate—many games with gaining during the action phase can have one superhuge KC turn wherein some three-pile ending will eventually reveal itself, and well, why would you let your wretched opponent, she who somehow hit twice in spite of barely getting economy, go through with it?
Indeed, that is the paradox of King's Court—well, I have to get to somehow, and usually I like to use Silver for that, but Silver is useless to me, sorta, after I get King's Courts. The advice here is, try really, really hard to use something other than Silver to get to . As in, buy Chancellor over Silver and don't look back. Silver is great to get the first King's Court, Chancellor is great for the second, third, fourth and fifth ones.
King's Court is at its most powerful with any payload card that you can benefit from playing a lot, especially ones that compound on themselves. King's Court comes to mind for that. But, well, you do need to play something with it, and perhaps the prime example is Bridge. King's Court and Bridge are made for each other—King's Court needs something to play a bunch, and Bridge gets increasingly better each sequential time you play one. But really, you don't need to think of King's Court as a combo card: its favorite card to play is King's Court, and it will always be there when King's Court is there. As long as there is an action card with at least one of money, draw, buys, or attacks, King's Court is worth considering. The real question, thus, is generally which thing you want King's Court to play a lot of. There are some boards where it is a pretty obvious choice, like, say, Bridge, but there are some boards that you just look at and you have no idea where to start. The advice for these boards is to have already gotten a lot of practice with the endgame engine scenario, and to just be good at evaluating which things like to be played a lot, more so than others.
The few types of boards where King's Court loses its appeal are usually those without any +Buys (King's Court will take a few seconds to hit, and if it can't get more than one Province a turn then one should just opt for early consistency), ones where there are no cards that give even +1 action, since it is necessary to draw two King's Courts in hand to get anything going, which is not impossible but definitely much less consistent, and ones where there is plenty of junk around and little way to get rid of it, since King's Court is an expensive Confusion when it doesn't have something else to play. That said, in this game from the championship match of Season 12 of the Dominion League, Stef beats Mic Q, turn 31, in a King's Court superduperturn, and that board had all those issues.
Here is a graph detailing the strength of King's Court as a function of how many of them you have.
The y-axis is on a log scale, I should have mentioned that. Having a lot of King's Courts is pretty good.
In spite of all I have typed, at some point it has likely become clear that the Court just doesn't have much all-encompassing advice. Although there is luck associated with buying it and lining it up with actions early on, in the King's Court, the better player will quite often emerge the victor. This is because King's Court games force many times more decisions, both strategical and tactical, and they do so in a very different framework than the average game; in order to win a King's Court game one must thoroughly understand what the transposed goals are and have a rigorous approach to the potential payload. Happy hunting!
Synergies/Combos
- Combo: King's Court and Bridge
- Wharf
- Any source of +Buy, to make use of huge King's Court turns
- Colony games, where even without +Buy an engine will beat Big Money
- any engine
- Scheme
- Pirate Ship
- Torturer: Absolutely devastates an opponent's turn or clogs them with curses or both.
- Saboteur: example t17
- Unbounded desire for wealth and power
Antisynergies
- Mountebank's junk makes it difficult to connect King's Court with good actions. Of course, the first player to King's Court a Mountebank will probably be able to keep doing it more often than the guy on the other side...
- Games with no +Buy
- rushes
Alternate versions
Digital version for Dominion Online
German Version by HiG
Trivia
In other languages
- Czech: Královský dvůr
- Dutch: Koningshof
- Translation error : omitted "You may"
- Finnish: Kuninkaan Hovi
- Translation error : omitted "You may"
- French: Cour du Roi
- German: Königshof
- HiG error : omitted "You may"
- Italian: Corte (lit. court)
- Japanese: 宮廷 (pron. kyūtei, lit. imperial court)
- Polish: Rada królewska (lit. royal council)
- Spanish: Corte Real
Secret History