Traveller
Traveller is a card type introduced in Adventures; cards of this type are marked with a lightened arrow behind their card text. Travellers can, when discarded from play, be exchanged for other cards that are not in the Supply; thus a cheap card bought early becomes an expensive card given enough time.
List of Travellers
The ends of each Traveller line, Champion and Teacher, are not Travellers themselves.
Official Rules
- Adventures has Traveller cards. These cards have an arrow over the text box to remind players of their ability to upgrade into another card.
- When a player discards a Traveller from play, they may exchange it for the card indicated; they return the card being exchanged to its pile, take the card they are exchanging it for, and put that card into their discard pile.
- For example when exchanging Peasant for Soldier, they put Peasant back into its pile and take a Soldier and put it into their discard pile.
- Exchanging is not trashing or gaining, and so does not trigger abilities like Travelling Fair's.
- It is optional.
- It only happens when the card is discarded from play; discarding it from hand, such as due to not playing it, will not trigger it.
- It only happens if the card being exchanged for has any copies available; if there are no Soldiers in the pile, Peasant cannot be exchanged at that time.
- If multiple cards do something when discarded from play, the player picks the order; for example, with no Soldiers left in the pile, a player with Peasant and Soldier in play could first exchange Soldier for Fugitive, then exchange Peasant for that Soldier.
- Page and Peasant are Kingdom cards that are Travellers.
- Page is exchanged for Treasure Hunter, which is exchanged for Warrior, which is exchanged for Hero, which is exchanged for Champion;
Peasant is exchanged for Soldier, which is exchanged for Fugitive, which is exchanged for Disciple, which is exchanged for Teacher. - Champion and Teacher are not Travellers; they cannot be exchanged for anything.
- Page and Peasant can be bought or otherwise gained when being used in a game, but the other cards cannot, they are not in the Supply.
- When a non-Supply pile is empty, that does not count as an empty pile for the game ending condition or for cards like City (from Prosperity).
Preparation
- If Page or Peasant is being used in a game, take the cards that they upgrade into (for Page: Treasure Hunter, Warrior, Hero, and Champion; for Peasant: Soldier, Fugitive, Disciple, and Teacher) and put them near the Supply.
- They can be in a single pile or multiple piles, depending on player preferences and table space.
Other rules clarifications
- Exchanging must happen both ways; there must be somewhere for the discarding card to return to. If a Traveller is bought using Black Market, there is no pile to return it to and therefore it cannot be exchanged.
- Travellers in the trash, even though they are not from the Supply, may be gained by Graverobber or Rogue if they have the right cost.
- If a Traveller is played using a Way, or subject to the attack of Enchantress, that doesn't stop you from exchanging it when you discard it from play.
Deprecated rules clarifications (2015 2019) |
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Gallery
End cards of Traveller line
Trivia
In other languages
- Dutch: Reiziger
- Finnish: Matkaaja
- French: Itinérant (lit. travelling)
- German: Reisender
- Russian: Путешественник (pron. putyeshyestvyennik)
Spelling
Secret History
But one day it came up for some reason, and I thought, hmmmm. I could simulate that in a physical card, by having piles of unique cards. You start out with say +1 Card +1 Action for Village wasn't just Village here, it was a thing you picked to upgrade into, then upgraded away from later. You have to stop eventually and I figured four piles was enough. So you got a Peasant, and he turned into a Worker, then a Craftsman, then an Artisan, then a Master. And mostly they were vanilla cards, they had to be simple for multiple reasons.
. When you play it (wait, when you discard it from play), you upgrade it into your choice of cards from the pile, which are all worth about . They wouldn't need to be adding +1 of something each time, but at the same time they could mostly be vanilla cards.I tried it and it was fun. It had issues though. Originally you got to pick the upgrade. You'd play three of these guys at different levels and then stare at the options. Oh man. So painful with less-frequent Dominion players. So I changed it to, we shuffle the piles, there's no choice. If you had to take the top one and put yours back on the bottom, it was kind of clumsy resolving it. If you put yours back on top, you would have slow decisions again, based on the order you upgraded guys. The upgrade thing was cool but the cards themselves were not too exciting. You would build this deck where they were a lot of your village/+buy/+cards, they did it all, and you would never know what your cards did and it would slow down games. It had seemed so cool, but was it really worth preserving?
I decided to make it a fixed four cards. You could learn them much faster; they could be more exciting although they still couldn't be too wordy, since the upgrading part took space. It still seemed like a cool thing, so I did two sequences: one is just a hero getting better, while the other tells a little story. They took up a lot of space in the set so I didn't make a third. The new version was way better, all problems solved, hooray. I picked names for the cards first, then picked abilities to go with the names, then polished them and in some cases replaced them as we tested them.Relevant outtakes
Development history
For the Page line, I liked the idea of having just one attack (and one in the other in the obvious Soldier slot). The names thus had to work with not being attacks despite being names that might otherwise go on attack cards. One thing was to have a Moat, but that had to go on the top, since the under-the-line space was reserved for upgrading. So, there's an attack, a Moat, and two treasure-gainers, which also fits with the names. Your Hero fights, but doesn't fight the other players.
For the Peasant line, things were more of a mystery. Soldier wanted to attack and Teacher wanted to hand out tokens. Fugitive and Disciple did not suggest as much in terms of what they would do. At one point the Fugitive went on the Tavern mat; that was cute, he hid out in the Tavern. That was part of trying to make Teacher harder to go nuts with, but was very wordy.
It was natural to look at old ideas to see if some of them would work; I mean I needed 8 extra cards. Fugitive in particular was a card I was resigned to never doing, but I could just do it here with no issues. Treasure Hunter you know about. It had been in Hinterlands, it was pretty cool there, what with Haggler and Border Village and so on. Disciple tried another classic dead card, but didn't keep it. Hero tried something new simple & exciting, that would be dangerous on a regular card. Champion was a Moat variant, then Moated from anywhere. Teacher was new. Soldier and Warrior were just very simple attacks using the tokens (at first). Attacks are hard and that was an easy way to get terse new ones.
There were things that weren't a reason why a card showed up, but which then seemed nice, and made it less likely that that card would leave. It was cute that Page and Treasure Hunter were +1 Action while Peasant and Soldier weren't. It was cute that Peasant was the +'s not on Page, but it didn't start that way. It was cute that Champion was a duration and Teacher a reserve; neither started that way. It was cute that Soldier gave the -1 card token and Warrior gave the - token, while Soldier gave + and Warrior gave +2 Cards.
I liked the idea of trying to have each step be worth stopping on sometimes, but it was clear you would usually want to push to the top with your first Page/Peasant. I do think it ended up where every step is worth stopping on sometimes, except Page (and yes even then but way less often). You don't stop on Fugitive that often, but I have done it. You stop on Soldier, Warrior, and Disciple all the time; and then sometimes there's a combo for Treasure Hunter or Hero (or you don't need Champion).
Retrospective on exchanging
Why is exchanging not gaining?