brisingre's profile

I gotchu. You sure it's not just stuck to 282 or 284, or maybe misfiled as 294 or something? Maybe accidentally left in the satchel and journal binder from a previous run? Truly missing cards are very rare, "lost" cards are something most people run into every few sessions I think.

This is an often-overlooked rule with crafting in general:

The item can be built into the inventory of any character involved in the action.

People also forget they can cooperate on actions for discounts. It's easy to think of them as a special thing rather than think of them as being actions, and forget about involved characters, I think.

Anyway, character items are no exception. The only restriction on them is which character can keep them in their hand.

A very similar discussion just came up with Anjika's ability, yes.

In that case, Bruno said that her ability isn't intended to be able to discard a card and then get the same card back -- but he also confirmed that that was how it worked under the rules, that the card you discard to pay the cost is indeed in the discard when you pick cards from the discard, and that it would require errata to fix.

So, in this case, I think it's clear. The will cards are in the discard when you shuffle cards away, and are eligible to be chosen. Anjika will likely be receiving errata because, although unintentional in her case, this is how it works, and in her case it's potentially a balance problem. But you shouldn't read any more into that ruling than that -- cost/benefit clauses are not an exception to the golden rule of "do the things in the order the card says to do them." In fact, they are one of its purest examples.

Contrast with the Restful Sleep advanced skill, which is never included in it's own randomly-choose-from-discard because it isn't discarded until after you randomly choose and shuffle away the cards it heals.

In this case, it is a very minor distinction one way or another. If it's unintentional that the will cards are included in the shuffle, there would be no reason to errata that. It doesn't really make sense to worry about intent (and then potentially complicate the game with special-case rulings) for something like this. The rules say to do things in the order they are written on the card, this ability says discard will cards, then shuffle some cards back, it's simple. No reason to go down a rabbit hole just because they overlooked a combo on Anjika that uses this same golden timing rule -- it probably got overlooked because they're so used to it "just working", they made it all the way to their 11th expansion before it caused it's first "real" problem, after all...

I'd say nothing happens. You are correct that that wording does not really properly define what should happen.

(Roots is not the only way this can happen, there's blue-backed cards in just the black box with this same undefined behavior.)

It is the second printing that had the screw ups. First edition is fine in that respect.

Glad you found the upgrade pack -- it was going to be a pain to track down and a lot of the changes in that pack were originally gamebreaking to various degrees (mostly boxes with the wrong numbers on terrain cards.)

A first edition that hasn't had the upgrade pack will be missing a few dividers (Character skills, 051, a couple others I think?)

A 'true' second edition might be identifiable from mismatched backs between the named curses and the action deck, or by cards miscut by a couple mm. Sometimes these are sold with just the cards, because people got the 2.5 printing for free. Anything without a box on ebay is probably this.

A reprinted second edition (2.5th edition?) that is new in shrink will have a sticker identifying it as such. Sometimes you see just the reprinted cards for sale without the rest of the game, in smaller white box. A 2nd edition with the 2.5 cards integrated into it is pretty much only identifiable from a 2nd edition that hasn't by looking for those printing problems, which not every 2nd edition had.

It will be more difficult to tell a first edition with the upgrade included from a second or 2.5 edition. I do not know if you'll be able to get the upgrade pack anywhere unfortunately -- they're not the kind of thing likely to be flipped on ebay, I think your best bet is to hope that SP has some in a closet still.

I've seen some fairly convincing speculation that the official sleeves are made by Paladin. They have exactly the same packaging.

https://paladinsleeves.com/product/owain/

I don't think that's a mistake.

Most beneficial fog cards that can be either discarded or banished give a bigger benefit when you banish them, but the Repentance cards are mostly like this.

If this is more problematic than all the other combos that exist, it is only because it's accessible from the very beginning of the run. Infinite durability is a more limited and less useful output than most of them -- many of the others give you unlimited cards back from the discard, unlimited XP, let you buy all the advanced skills... Really game-breaking stuff. If this is getting nerfed and Dark Side isn't, it can only be because Dark Side requires a lot of setup, whileas this is just sort of laying on the ground, it's just something Anjika does with no setup at all.

Requiring you find a specific advanced skill to set it up brings it down to the level of, for example, the Scholar/Terracokus combo, which requires a specific Botany card before you can use it.

Shuffle then draw.

Most of those are for different curses. Not really a spoiler -- there's 12 curses and most of them utilize at least one so, it's safe to say you only care about a few of them and won't be able to get access to the rest this run.

If a curse requires you to use on a card you can only see once, like the contents of a treasure chest, it will always be a on a clue card you had from the beginning of the run, and it will always say "you must" rather than "you may." There are plenty of banners that you get during the game rather than from your clue cards, but the cards you use them on are cards you can visit more than once. The idea is that you can find the place to use the banner, see that you need a banner, go get the banners, and then come back and use them. A good relatively spoiler-free example of this is

They avoid using banners you find in game on cards you only see once, at least on curse-required content, presumably because of exactly this soft lock issue. If there was a lock you could only touch once, and a key you might not find before seeing it, the game becomes unwinnable if you happen to find the lock before the key. There wouldn't even be a way to communicate to the player that they'd lost, short of printing "If there is a clue card called "The Voracious Goddess" in your satchel and journal, your adventure ends here" on the non-banner-redirected outcome of the lock. SP's solution was simple -- no locks you can only touch once, at least, none in front of curse required content.

When it says to take a numbered card it means to take a random card of that number -- a random green if it exists, otherwise a random gold.


You don't necessarily have to take the 150s out and shuffle them every time, though. When I take a 150 I just grab one from somewhere in the 150s, and when I return one I just jam it anywhere in the 150s. I give them a good shuffle every so often, mostly when I'm drawing or returning large numbers at once, just because that's when it feels most natural to shuffle them. This is not quite as random as shuffling them every time but for a co-op game I think it's perfectly sufficient.

You should probably shuffle everything for a while if you're just getting started, I don't know if the 150s come out of the shrink wrap in a random-ish order or if they have, e.g. all the empty handeds clumped together, and I wouldn't want to risk it.

There are few if any ways to softlock 7C such that a curse can't be completed. I don't think there's any way to render Goddess unbeatable, at least, not without accidentally breaking a rule. Specifically, if you forget to apply your banner when a card says you must, you can put VG in an unwinnable state. (Depending which redirect you missed -- some will render VG unwinnable forever, others you can fix by saving the game.)

That is my preferred fix also.

This seems like it might be intentional just because it wouldn't have been hard to fix. But it could have been missed, I don't know.

You have solved the puzzle and found the idol!

Remember is perhaps the best card in the action deck, because it is so versatile. There's a bunch of candidates for what might be the most powerful card -- Valiant Hearts, Bolas, Walking Stick, etc -- but usually Remember can give you back more than one of those cards, among dozens of other options. And if Remember can be a Walking Stick or something else, it's strictly better than Walking Stick.

Think is pretty much garbage. Taking cards out of the action deck with it (marginally) shortens your lifeline, so using it just to keep the best card out of 7, and especially using it to discard curses, isn't great. It's best when you're looking for a specific card from the action deck, but it's very unreliable even then, and it is quickly overshadowed by much more reliable ways to search the action deck.

Remember has many combos but Think isn't really one of them. Remembering a Think can be useful if the card you really wanted to Remember is in the action deck, although this is very unreliable because Think is very unreliable and as such it is often a waste of the Remember. Likewise, if all you have is a Think and the card you need is in the discard, there's a decent chance Think will hit a remember. (Actually, this chance is usually better than the chance of getting a specific card from the action deck off of Think -- you can hit any of 3 Remembers, most cards only have 1 or 2 copies.)

That's all those two cards really do as a combo. Remember can reach into the action deck (at the cost of engaging Think's random mechanics) and Think can sometimes reach into the discard pile (at no particular cost.) They don't loop, or put cards back in the action deck, or generate anything useful like XP or Notes.

I think you might have misread Think. If it drew 7 cards from the discard, put one in your hand and the rest back into the action deck, you'd have a combo. You could Think, hope you hit a Remember, get back 6 cards either way, and then (hopefully) Remember your Think and do it again. But Think draws the 7 cards from the deck. Think taking Remember, Remembering Think, and Thinking again is occasionally useful when your first Think found a Remember but not the card you were looking for, and sometimes you can hit more remembers and go more cycles, but it doesn't generate any real benefits.

If you want to recur an action card repeatedly instead of eating, there's a few candidates. Restful Sleep is a good one, or I think the doc has one. If you Restful Sleep and get back a Remember, especially if your deck was almost empty, you're set up to draw into Remember, Remember Restful Sleep, and do it again. If you want to break it open more than that, you're going to need a more repeatable source of recursion. Several exist.

Most of the places that let you buy advanced skills let you buy as many times as you like, although most places you have to do a small action each time. So it's not really possible to get way too much XP and not be able to spend it all -- if XP's piling up it is because you haven't been somewhere you can spend it yet, and when you find somewhere you can dump a whole lot of it.

The total cost of all advanced skills is in the hundreds, although there are some you are probably better off without.

It is not especially important to go out of your way to pursue XP. Buying advanced skills isn't really like eating food -- you don't need them. There are only two or three that I consider indispensable, and as it happens, they're all cheap. You can get the three cards I'm currently picturing for (I think) 11 XP, and that's if you have to pay full price. Anything except those few cards is just a cool option -- some of them are very nice, some are basically useless, but nothing is critical. Even the few I really like aren't really critical -- you can get by without just fine with no advanced skills at all.

XP comes in at a pretty decent rate even if you don't go to much effort to collect it. You can if you want to, but it's just a Thing To Do, kind of like Examine the Notes, it isn't an immediate part of your survival like hunting for food. There's one curse that features an XP grind pretty significantly, obviously, it's more important there.


As has been said in this thread, you don't have to touch the advanced skill pile until you're instructed to by a card. However, it is important to note that you are allowed to. The exploration and adventure decks are supposed to be unknown, you're not supposed to look through them, but if you want to go through the advanced skills and see what your options there are, you can do that whenever.

Just the next game, I'm pretty sure.

I'd pay for a printed errata pack.

Please don't nerf Anjika though, at least, not that hard. Getting rid of the War Paint loop is fine, but taking away the ability to drop stealth cards from her inventory takes away nearly everything interesting about her. It's what allows her to function as a hybrid stealth/aggressiveness character -- with the proposed change she's aggressiveness-only and extremely flat.