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This came up on BGG and lots of people had opinions about it but nobody could cite a specific rule, so I thought it might be worth posting here in hopes of getting an official clarification. This is a fairly minor, fairly technical question without much actual affect on the game, but I think it's worth doing right and playing as intended.

The 200 card Blue Fish says:


As I said it doesn't make a huge difference one way or another, but I'd like to know.

A related question that came up during the conversation:

Do you resolve all of a consequence box before moving on to cards it draws, or do you resolve them as soon as you draw it/choose them as a hunt result, and then go back and resolve the rest of the text box that sent you there?

As I see it, the discarded card from the bloody state let's act like the card never showed up.

Nothing in the rule will give you the right answer, but in a logical way, if the fish aren't there anymore you cannot take benefit from theym being here :).

I've heard that flavor argument already. It makes sense, but as is the way of flavor arguments, an equally good one can be made going the other direction. That's why I'm not looking for any more flavor arguments -- everybody has their own opinion about flavor, only an argument based on game rules or a clarification from SP will put this (or any!) question properly to rest.

(In this case, a flavor counter-argument could be: It doesn't discard the other Blue Fish. So, it isn't like each Blue Fish represents a single fish that you caught and if there are two you can catch two. Rather, any day when you see two or more Blue Fish in your fishing check results is a day when Blue Fish are extremely plentiful. Perhaps they've come to the shallows to spawn or something. Anyway, they're everywhere. If you fish for them you can catch twice as many as you normally would and still let half of them or more go back to the deck. In that case, my blood in the water spooking a few individual Blue Fish doesn't really matter -- it's still a Plentiful Blue Fish day, I was going to let a bunch of Blue Fish get away no matter what, who cares if some of them get spooked?)

[Incidentally, if it did make you discard both Blue Fish, there would be no question. Obviously you can't discard a fish that's already been discarded. But I don't see any obvious reason why you wouldn't be able to count one. Other things that remove revealed cards from results are explicit about things like their stars not counting for successes, which suggests that, absent that rule telling you not to, you count things on revealed cards as they're revealed regardless of what might happen to them next...]

I asked the author (Bruno):

As a rule of thumbs, when you have two possible way to resolve something, always chose the worst for you, aren't you doomed or not ?

Or... Wait for an answer from the SP

Very surprised by the SP answer. It makes the bloody state useless in those cases. Very not their habit to be mercyfull with the player

Thanks! Much appreciated.






With or without this rule Bloody has about the same impact. If you draw only 1 hunt result, and it isn't a predator, you lose it. If you draw only 2 hunt results, and either is a predator, you're going to have to fight a predator. If you draw 3 or more, you can discard one and still have a choice of 2, so unless you draw a bunch of predators at once it usually just lets you discard Empty Handed and other low-quality non-predator results from the results deck.

Basically, it doesn't make all your hunt attempts uniformly worse. It ruins your cheap/easy/unprepared hunting options so badly you're basically forced to expend resources to get large numbers of successes, but it doesn't continue to punish you once you do. This is mostly consistent with that, the blue fish bonus mostly happens when you're drawing a lot of fishing results.

It is pretty rare to see a ruling come down on the side of making the game easier though.

Not really the same impact.

If you draw 2 cards and they are blue fishes then you still take 4 001, bloody or not.
Just surprised though that they are being nice with us but guess this is because fishing is harder than hunting.

My thoughts about this: the rules state to always finish one action completely before starting another one. So I think the correct order when successfully hunting is:

1. Activate the hunt success consequence by drawing X hunt cards
   
2. Discard non-predator if bloody, choose one hunt result and return the others.
   
3. Banish the hunting card and replace it with the golden one (if applicable), this completes the hunt action.
   
4. Only then look at the hunt result and fight the predator / take meat / etc.
   

In practice, we usually deal with the hunt result before finishing the hunting card consequence, but technically it's not the right order.

I think you're probably right about that, which would also provide a 'reason' why discarded cards count for Blue Fish, if anybody was looking for one: any other Blue Fish cards have already been returned by the time Blue Fish checked if they were revealed, so if they needed to "still be revealed" Blue Fish's ability would do nothing.

Thematically, I imagine the reason for the bloody affect to occur is because predators can smell the blood, more likely to find you, and frighten away non-predator animals.

When fishing, fish don't smell your blood, because they are in the water. So it wouldn't make thematic sense for bloody to have an affect in this case (except when you draw a bear)