brisingre's profile

I think "You may discard this to apply the following effect" makes it pretty clear that you have to discard it if you want to get the effect. The word "to" is critical here, and is easily overlooked.

The reason it says may instead of must is:

A lot of cards say "You may discard this during the results step of an action to apply the following effect:" If that said "You must discard this during the results step of an action to apply the following effect:" it would mean you had to use it the first results step you could, or at least, it would be interpreted to mean that. Cards that you can discard at any time to apply their effect don't really have that same confusion (one wouldn't be tempted to interpret "You must discard this to apply the following effect:" as meaning one must use the card immediately) but it is better to be consistent between cards. If they had used two different words they would be interpreted as having two different meanings, after all -- surely if some cards said "may" and others said "must" we'd all be making threads about what's the difference between may and must.

Thanks for your thoughts!

It took me a second to realize that you'd answered by the order they appear on the card and not based on the numbers on the map, but once I realized that: All your answers are correct, even the one you said you only had 4/10 confidence about. This means you should have the info you need to solve the hidden number.

Your hidden number guesses are good, especially the first one. You are correct that you're looking for only 3 cards (out of the 9 with numbers). You are very close!

Very impressive!

This is true, more or less.

Still, as a completionist, having some expansions that are tough to find is much different from being unexpandable. That would be a dealbreaker for me, on this edition. I'm sure there's plenty out there who won't be bothered by this.

To be clear: I have my KS copy and I'm not complaining. I just think it's an odd choice.

the thing I was calling important. There's a whole curse you can't even start (as far as I know) without the goat.

There's a bunch of smaller interactions with the goat too, but I don't think breaking them will break anything important.

But, an expansion with a curse that you can't play because you're missing a card from the base game is incompatible in my book.

Rereleased in a significantly reduced form.

-No minis
-No Dark Chest curse
-No Lovecraft or Frankenstein, the game's strongest and (arguably) most interesting characters.
-Missing over a hundred cards in the black box, including a lot of fan favorites like the goat.
-Roughly 12% of black box content is missing overall.
-Most expansions not reprinted
-Only 2 trays means it will be a pretty tight fit even with just the 2 expansions that are being reprinted. If you managed to track down the others you'd have nowhere to put them.
-Iffy compatibility with Flying Roots and Fear the Devourers because classic only has standees and those only have minis.
-Incompatible with WGUMCD, because the goat becomes important


I'm kinda surprised they think something like this is worth releasing, if I had missed out I would definitely still be looking for an ebay copy, I would not consider this an acceptable replacement after seeing all the kickstarter stuff.

I'd advise against this change.

1. It guts a bunch of other, fair uses of Anjika's ability. Being able to discard cards from your inventory is as significant a source of power in character abilities as what the ability actually does. Having a keyword you can keep alive indefinitely is huge, and characters that don't have that (Fogg & Passepartout, most notably) it's a noticeable loss.

2. The new ability discourages Anjika from ever building stealth cards. Stealth has a bit of a problem in this game. It's commonly perceived to be the weakest keyword, most people rarely if ever build stealth stacks. The original version of her ability encourages you to build stealth cards into your inventory for durability and keep them around for a little bit saving them for her ability. The result of this is that you actually have and use some stealth cards. The new ability makes her discard them from hand, which instead of giving her a reason to use Stealth cards, doubles down on Stealth's identity as something you shouldn't use by giving you a good alternative thing to do with them.

3. Compared to other infinite combos (Terracokus/Scholar, Dark Side, save abuses, arguably even regular old infinite rests) this is pretty weak and narrow. It's simple and requires relatively little setup, which is in it's favor, but it's infinite durability on Anjika's own stacks, which have to have aggressiveness or stealth toppers and empty space. Other combos can get you infinite durability on every stack in the whole party, regardless of keyword, while also getting infinite XP, all advanced skills, all notes, and cards back from the discard. This is low on the totem pole as far as really gamebreaking things you can do in this game.

4. You can't patch all those things without significant effort and collateral damage, but patching this while not patching Dark Side and everything else sets a bad precedent. It is easy, right now, to say "Infinites exist. Lots of busted stuff exists, it's up to you to police yourself." If you patch some of them, it strongly implies that anything that isn't patched is an intentional and desirable part of the game. Confirming that this trick is not an intended part of the ability is good enough.

5. It contributes to the fun of the game that there are combos to discover, broadly speaking. As players explore they are looking for cards and strategies to make themselves more powerful, it is best that there are some good ones to discover -- even if, in the end, they have to decide not to use some of them.

6. This change makes Anjika even more of a one trick pony. She's decently flexible right now, in spite of being on relatively few icons -- she's encouraged to build both Stealth and Aggressiveness, she's got her bottomless stack on an an easy-to-hybridize keyword (stealth) or if you take advantage of this infinite combo both stealth and aggressiveness, she makes really good use of Protective cover, she has an infinite supply of Bolas and some mediocre hunt stuff. I feel like the proposed change just makes her a Bolas-bot.



The only good reason I can think of to patch this combo when so many others exist is that it's low hanging fruit. Dark Side combo's full of elaborate loops, it relies on some technical rules knowledge and an infinite rest spot and a bunch of things. Terracokus combo makes you find a specific botany card. They require a good bit of discovery. This one just needs a literal mind and a resource.



If we're talking rewordings to fix this: HikariSunshine's works, I think, but I have a better one:

"You may discard 1 card with the keyword stealth from your hand or inventory to choose a different card with the keyword aggressiveness in the Discard Pile and add it to your hand."

This is just her existing ability with "1" changed to "a different".

I should preface this by saying that you should absolutely play 7C however you like. The best answer I've ever seen for how to make rulings (on any 7c rules question) was to simply choose whichever ruling made the situation cooler in the moment, like you would in D&D. If you're not into this tech, don't use it, don't allow it at your table. Playing by The Rules isn't really the best way per se. But that's not really who I am. I'm a rules lawyer, I like to talk about The Rules, and I'm gonna do it some more.


Things don't always break down neatly into "2 steps" and "1 step" like that. The rule about doing as much of an ability as you can isn't that formal, it isn't, like, if a sentence tells you to do something impossible, ignore exactly that one sentence. It's more of a guiding principle/golden rule type thing, and it requires some interpretation. My interpretation is that it definitely applies to cost:effect clauses, at least insofar as you can pay costs without being able to use the benefit. Trying to rule the other way turns into a real muddy mess real fast, because "being able to use the benefit" is quite ill-defined.

-Lovecraft: Does he need to draw at least one curse to use his ability? Can he only use it if it turns a success into a failure or otherwise affects the results? It doesn't require a target, in your terminology -- can you use it and say "look at all 0 stars I got from these 0 curses" just to free up space in your serenity stack?
-Frankenstein: Does he need to have one of his face cards to get back to use his ability? If he can't and lovecraft can, why? Is it because his ability "targets" a specific card? Because that's a Magic thing, this game doesn't have that rule. It also doesn't have a stack. You wish it did, but here we are.
-Mary: If Lovecraft can't use his ability for no reason, why can Mary? Obviously, she needs to be able to use her ability without knowing whether it will work to use it at all. But there are plenty of circumstances where it can be known that it will not be able able to help you. Can Mary use her ability if the deck doesn't have any 7's left?
-Perhaps most absurdly, many effects in this game have you take cards you've never seen before by number. You have no way of knowing, when you use the ability, whether you'll be able to use the effect. Arguably just by taking the card you've used the effect of your action, of course, but the point is, things like missing targets don't fizzle whole actions or make them illegal to take. Things like missing targets fail in situ and recover as immediately as possible.

(If you would like to think of things in steps, Pay the cost, Get the effect is much more obviously and formally 2 steps than most -- you pay the cost, then you get the effect. Most of the time what would count as 2 steps vs 1 step comes down to an interpretation of commas and periods, this one has clear rules-important gameplay steps. In my opinion, that's about as explicit as anything gets without formally referring to the steps of an action.)



I'm only like 90% sure that rewrite actually is the same in meaning. By listing the cost after the action, the timing on it becomes confusing, because the cost still has to be paid before you can get back the card. There's a reason costs are always listed first, and this wording (somewhat misleadingly?) suggests that it requires an aggressiveness card to bring back to initiate the action. (I'm pretty sure even with this wording it does not, but it's far more ambiguous here than with the original.) I think my stance is that this reworded ability would still work in the same way I describe Anjika's ability working, but if it said that it would certainly be much less clear.

So, by this interpretation, no, you could not pick up an aggro card and then discard it to pay for it's own cost. The cost still happens first, even if it's printed second -- the new wording of the card doesn't actually change the order those things happen. You can still pay the cost without a target, you can still find targets that weren't in the discard before you paid the cost. I'd be much less confident in this position if your wording were the actual wording, but it would still be my position. (It is fortunate that SP did a pretty good job of not messing around with more complicated timings like this. There are certainly exceptions to "everything just happens in the order it's printed on the card" but they did a good job of keeping it simple.)

Both the original wording and your rewording have something making it very clear that the cost must be paid in order to get back the thing. "To" in the original, "By" in the rewrite. So you're not getting the aggressiveness card for nothing if you have no stealth cards to discard. Without those words you could. (If it said "Discard a card with the keyword stealth from you inventory and return a card with the keyword aggressiveness from the discard to you hand." for example.)



There seems to be a natural impulse upon discovering tricks like this to think they're cheats and want to fix them. That's a fine impulse, you should play with as much or as little scumminess as makes you happy. You don't need a rules reason to do it, and you shouldn't look for one, because you usually won't find one. The rules aren't that tight. There's a lot of infinite combos and stuff. This tech is very good but it's honestly nothing compared to what's out there, once you start looking for tricks they're rampant. All the really busted stuff works under the rules, often much less ambiguously than this. As you discover them, you will have to police yourself a bit, decide how much to use, which tricks make the game more fun, which ones make it boring, maybe make some house rules. That has to be the attitude though -- the rules are pretty loose and a lot of stuff like this definitely works under the rules, but you don't have to allow it if you don't want to. Trying to find rules against them will not usually work out great, but you don't need a rule against them to take them out of your game. Just saying "that doesn't make sense so you can't do it" should probably be good enough, assuming your group's all on the same page.

Don't look before picking.

Do keep track of which option goes where though -- Tribal stool's an important part of the map.

That's a reasonable take, but:

There's no rules support for the notion of things requiring targets in this game. When an effect tells you to do something you can't do, you just do as much of the effect as you can.

For example, if an effect tells you to return your Tired state and return a card with the Vigilance keyword from the discard from your hand:

-You still get the Vigilance card back even if you aren't Tired.
-You can still drop your Tired even if there are no Vigilance cards in the discard.
-You can take the action, or draw the card, or otherwise activate the effect even if you can't do either part of it. You just do nothing.

So I'm pretty much sure you don't have to have an aggressiveness card to target at all. You can use the ability just to discard stealth cards, to free up space in a stack or whatever. You don't need a target to use the ability.

That wouldn't automatically mean that the card you discarded is a valid card to get back, but I think the wording on Anjika's ability is clear. First you discard the card, then you choose something to get back. You pay the cost, then you choose the target. And the card you discarded will be in the discard pile when you choose the target.

Slightly weird? Perhaps. Certainly not the most gamebreaking thing you can do in this game. (Not even close.) But, I think, unambiguous under the rules.

Can't see the card either.

"Advanced Skill cards with the keyword [whatever] now cost 2 fewer experience points (they cannot cost less than 1.)"

Pretty sure you just do things in the order it says to do them. This game doesn't have any concept of requiring a target to use an ability or anything. There's no intermediate "being-discarded" zone the card you discard sits in for the rest of the ability where it can't see itself. As I see it, you can loop it forever with just one card. It's weird but I think it works.

Sidequest discounts work with all kinds of skill-buying effects.

Definitely still interested in feedback, thank you!

All 10 point to real places, and if you don't know them pretty well this is probably impossible.

Top to bottom is a good guess, but, incorrect.

It is far less complex than anything involving the numbers of cards found at each location.

You played correctly.

You can turn in Still Standing whenever you meet the requirement. It isn't an action and doesn't take any time.

You meet that requirement for a couple whole phases between resolving Valiant Hearts in Results and then dropping it in Consequences. That's plenty of time to turn in Still Standing.

Even if you took the tired during Consequences, and taking and dropping the state happened "all at once" you would have a chance, I think. You get to choose the order of simultaneous consequences like that, and meeting the requirement even momentarily is good enough for Still Standing.

This was a good question. The timing rules for non- or are pretty much nonexistent in the rulebook, but my understanding is that abilities without boxes and without rules text specifying what phase(s) they can be used in can be used literally at any time. (This is stuff like Frankenstein's ability as well as the abilities on Side Quests.)

Exciting! I'll have to update the unofficial!

Interesting.

A good bit of stuff has changed from the kickstarter I think.

Glad it's not missing!

If you have a new copy of the game, it most likely got stuck to another card while you were filing everything away for the first time, which would mean it would be found at a slightly-wrong index somewhere near 183, probably still stuck to something. This has happened to me several times.

If it really is missing, you can contact SP from this page, they probably have an extra for you: https://the7thcontinent.seriouspoulp.com/en/about/contact

Meanwhile, since you would probably like to go North today: