What kinds of cards are we going to have in Cones of Dunshire? We only see one card used in game, a teal “Spirit Card”, but there are plenty more cards we can see in the various scenes (and in promotional material).

This image shows us the Gencon version of Cones of Dunshire. It is surprisingly similar to the Published version, leading me to believe that Mayfair Games made both versions. On a side note, we can see in this version both the central cone and the cone of decision, which heavily implies that the Published version did have the Cone of Decision, but we just couldn’t see it. We can see the four decks colored visible in the Prototype, and three more new decks.

The four colored decks are the Dragon, Mountain, Lava Worm, and Castle decks, although the Castle is a guess as in all the material I’ve seen I’ve been unable to find a good shot of it.

The three new decks are tricky. The first, with the black cone and grey background, is our Trivia deck. The Black cone with the golden border in the middle is the Decision deck, which is easily visible in this image:

The last deck, which looks solid grey, is never shown in any high-res capacity. Looks like we’ll have some wiggle room.

Okay, so what decks are mentioned in the audio? The Trivia cards, but we already have that accounted for. We also have Spirit cards, Agriculture cards, and Action cards. We also see Ben Wyatt holding a teal card when he holds up an Action card:

That teal deck is seen next to the large green cone, and if we look for the deck next to the large green cone in the Gencon version, we see that deck is called the Dragon deck. So the Dragon deck holds Action cards? Confusing, but kinda perfect. So if the Dragon holds action cards, what do the other four decks hold? We have Spirit cards and Agriculture cards, so lets put those with the red and blue decks respectively. That leaves the yellow Mountain deck. The Gryzzl employee’s Shaman plays a “Toiber spell”, and we never see a card played, but we can posture that we just didn’t see if happen. Let’s make the yellow deck hold spell cards.

That leaves one deck left. The solid grey deck. Honestly I have no idea what it should or could be, so let’s leave it open in case we need an extra deck later in development.

So we have these decks:

Mountain deck spell cards

Castle deck agriculture cards

Dragon deck action cards

Lava Worm deck spirit cards

Trivia deck trivia cards

Decision deck decision cards?

Unknown deck



But what do each of these decks do? We won’t do all of them right now, as some (such as the trivia cards) are tied to other features we will address later. But which can we solve now?

Spell Cards:

What do we know about spells? We know they are played by minis (such as the Shaman), and they have various effects (such as stealing all the resource gems from a prosperity tile). We also know that the Wizard can use Cathartic Freeze, which sounds fairly spell-like. But can we limit a deck to have only certain cards usable by certain characters? That wouldn’t be fun, to draw a card and then learn that you can’t use it at all. What if instead there was a list of spells which had a base use, and then each mini had one or two spells that did something else, more powerful, if they had them. That would add an interesting dynamic to trading. It’s not a great mechanic, because all it does is add more memorization for the players, but honestly I’m okay with that. It’s Cones, it’s not supposed to be a good game. It’s supposed to be a crazy game. So each spell card has a name, and an effect, and that effect is played on a player or a hex.

Agriculture Cards:

In the Rulebook we have this when it comes to Agriculture Cards: There are 15 Harvest, 20 Irrigation, 5 Famine. These names are so evocative, you can already tell what each does. Famine destroys your yield, irrigation increases it, and harvest lets you score it. But what is a yield? Where are the farms? My thought is that they are tied to another line from Ben,

“Oh my god, the Maverick should be able to trade lumber for agriculture credits!”

When we went over Resources in an earlier episode, I had forgotten we already had some resources determined. We need some sort of lumber, and some sort of “agriculture credit”. Perhaps Agriculture Credits can be a player’s representation of how much food they are producing. They are placed on tiles adjacent to a city (called a farm tile), and an agriculture card effects one farm tile of your choice. There can be a chart detailing how many agriculture credits you get for each card. Something like this:

- Harvest Adjustment (play immediately) During each harvest you can update the size of your city based on the size of your yield, according to this table: size 1: 0-2 credits size 2: 3-10 credits size 3: 11-20 credits size 4: <20 credits during each harvest you can also move credits from one farm to another, but you cannot move credits from one city to another. during a harvest decrease the credit count per farm by the size of its city. - Irrigation Bonus (play whenever) During each irrigation you gain 5 irrigation points, which can be spent on farms as such according to this table: 1 irrigation point: 1 credit 2 irrigation points: 3 credits 3 irrigation points: 5 credits 4 irrigation points: 7 credits 5 irrigation points: 10 credits 6 irrigation points: 15 credits 7 irrigation points: 21 credits 8 irrigation points: 30 credits You can play multiple irrigation cards at the same time to stack points, but no farm may have more then 8 points spent on it. When you add credits, you do not update city size. - Famine (play immediately) When a Famine card is played, your largest farm has all its credits removed. If there is another farm adjacent to the largest farm, roll a d10. On a 7 or higher, the famine has spread and you must remove all of its credits too. You must roll for farms adjacent to spread farms too, but the chance for spread is increased to an 9 or higher.

This will, of course, need some tweaks for balance, but it’s a good start. Something else I noticed, the Rulebook says there are 60 Agriculture cards, but the different types and their counts only adds up to 40 (20 + 15 + 5). I don’t know what to make of this at the moment. Maybe some Agriculture cards don’t do anything? They’re just a wash? Lets go with that for now.

Action Cards:

What is an action? This is the one kind of card we do see used, but Ben never shows its face, he just plays it. This implies that action cards have one shared use. We also decided that each of the faces on a die, 1-20, are going to apply do a different action the player can perform. Perhaps an action card lets the player make an action out of sequence? Like they can take any numbered die to perform any action, but they expend the action card in the process? That could work, but it would be nice if they actually had something on their face. What could be another use for them? It should be something completely out of left field. What if the cards were also puzzle pieces that formed pictures? If you could construct one of the images, you got some sort of bonus? It’s dumb but kinda fun, exactly what we need.

Spirit Cards:

This is another kind of card we see in the rules. There are 40 of them, 20 positive, 10 negative, 10 chaotic. From that alone, they sound a lot like spells. How do we differentiate the two? Well, you hold on to spells in your hand, so maybe these are played immediately? What if they were almost like Chance cards from Monopoly, but with one key difference: you choose if you want to draw one. To add another layer onto it, perhaps the backs of the cards tell the player if they are about to draw a positive or negative spirit card. That way players will want to draw the positive ones, but players will want to force another player to draw the negative ones. That seems fun, but having a bunch of free bonuses with knowing when a spirit card will help you is a tad overpowered. The chaotic cards can fix that. They look like positive cards but don’t necessarily help you. They’re not as bad as negative cards, but they’re something the player wants to avoid.

Trivia Cards:

We’ll talk about this more when we go over the Challenge Play, but essentially, trivia cards are going to ask a question about the state of the game, which the player who drew the card must answer correctly without looking at the board (they must close their eyes and have the question read to them). Is anyone ever going to answer a trivia question correctly? Probably not, but damn if that isn’t the point.

Decision Cards:

What decision is there to make? This obviously has to do with the Cone of Decision, hell, it’s even in the center of the board where the cone should be. So lets break this down. We have two states for the cone, with and without the golden sheath. In the Vulture article we read, the creators said it was supposed to represent day and night in Dunshire, and the player who controlled the Cone of Decision could choose whether to plunge the world into darkness or start a new day. So that’s the eponymous “Decision”, but what do we need a full set of cards for? Well, obviously making that choice should come with upsides and downsides, right? Bonuses and Nonuses. So let’s have each card give a bonus for whether Dunshire is in day or in night. The player who controls the Cone of Decision draws a number of decision cards based on what stage of civilization they are in, and then chooses whether to have the cone be in day or night. My question is whether these bonuses should apply to all players or just the person controlling the Cone of Decision (called from now on the “Duke of Dunshire”. Why not have a mix of both? Some cards are “Global conditions”, while others are “Duke conditions”. There we go.

There we go, that’s all the decks we can cover at this point in time. I feel like we’re making some great progress, but are focusing on things that are fairly volatile and subject to change. I still don’t know what the core gameplay loop for this game is. We have how to win, and we have how to operate various systems, but we haven’t combined the two. I think that might be because we haven’t looked at the systems that actually net the player cones. So next time, we’ll look at one of those and iron it out.