Steward's Quandary

The cheap extra buys that Hamlet provides might make it the most undervalued card in this game. Farming village is, of course, crucial as well.

Torturer Counter-strategies. This started as an attempt to counter the awesome power of Torturer, but ended up being quite interesting in its own right. We had noticed that when Torturer is in the supply, it tends to dominate play — you pretty much need to buy some, or you're toast. So we added other cards to counter its power:

• Courtyard, Steward, Hamlet, and Nobles all give you the ability to replace the cards Torturer has removed from your hand (and some of them are also action multipliers that help you build action/draw engines).
• Horse Traders gives you a card that can dodge the Torturer, and its extra draw gives you at least a chance to start up your action/draw engine.

One of the unexpected but interesting outcomes was the frequency of agonizing dilemmas we encountered during play. The Steward gives you a choice of 3 different actions, Nobles gives you a choice of 2 different actions, Courtyard makes you choose a card to put back on top of your deck, Hamlet makes you choose twice whether or not to discard a card for (for an extra action and/or buy), Horse Traders makes you decide which two cards to discard, etc.

3 players, fun game. We used shelters from Dark ages. Necropolis was helpful at first. Very cool!