by andylatto
SPBTooL wrote:
Saying you are buying a card and picking up the card are both the same action and part of the same change in game state. If you say you are going to play a card but before you grab it I say I'm playing this card in response, Which is not triggered by you buying cards, do you then get to say you are not going to buy that card then? While your group may choose to play that way that is not the way rules should work.
If I was going to play that whichever action happens first matters (which I don't; I allow either in response to the other), then I agree with you 100% that it should be when you say "I buy this card" or "I play this card" that matters, not when the card hits the table, or you physically put the card in front of you.
But that is't going to get rid of ambiguity and the need for many house rules.
For example, you certainly can't say "I'm buying this card" at the start of your turn, before you roll the dice (well, you can say it, but it won't count as having bought the card); buying cards happens at the end of your turn, not the beginning. So when is the earliest you can say this and have it count as buying the card? Suppose you are outside of Tokyo, and have at least one claw in your roll. Then it's not time to buy cards until the die roll part of the turn is complete, and that includes your opponent in Tokyo's decision as to whether to leave. So you can't say you're buying the card until he says whether he's leaving Tokyo, right? And suppose someone has some optional power that can be used in processing the die roll (they take damage, and they have a card that lets them roll a die and maybe heal, for example) then you can't say you're buying the card until they have rolled the die, right?)
What you are doing and what Scott keeps trying to do is inserting additional and, arbitrary in length, wait times for someone to play an action that, specifically with Scott, undoes an already completed game state that is player activated and not allowed by the card with a change in game state. By doing this you are diminishing the value of decisions buy giving one choice a guarantied fail safe action and/or pushing players into a hurry up and call out my action before the other player does.
This seems to be exactly the opposite of the actual situation. With the rules I play by, you never have to hurry up and call out actions; since the effect of buy-then-play is exactly the same as the effect of play-then-buy, neither player ever has to rush, because there are no "who got there first" issues.
But if you play that it matters whether the card is played before or after the card is bought, then an alert player with the card, who doesn't want to reveal he has the card until absolutely necessary, can carefully watch the dice, and try to play the card as soon as the dice land, if the dice result would otherwise allow the player to buy the card and win. Regardless of what the publisher says, I'd rather not play that way, and playing that way doesn't fit with the way King of Tokyo feels to me.
In your card example, you got lucky getting that secondary card to purchase. The other player got unlucky because they had a card that, if they chose to play it earlier, would have kept you from winning. The odds were in their favor so they chose not to play the card and lost. By allowing the card to be played after the games state makes the decision moot. Nobody will ever choose to play the card because it is guaranteed to work as a magic undo.
You seem to be assuming that in my buy-the-newly-revealed-card example, that the player whose turn it is sees the card more quickly, and says "I buy that card too" before the person with the evolution card sees the card that gets revealed, realizes that the other player can win by buying the card, and says "I play this evolution card". But suppose it happens the other way around, and "I play this evolution card" gets said before "I buy that card too"? Now by your rules he doesn't win, right? So there's an advantage to whichever player can read the card and deduce its consequences fastest, and therefore it's important to reveal the card in a way that lets everyone read it at the same speed, and so forth, and that's the kind of interaction I'd rather avoid.
I'm not sure why you see it the 20:star: ends as causing more issues. I see at as firming them down. Unless a card specifies it can be done when another game state is in affect or it affects a time past, it is applied when it is played. No magic time travel or reverse stacking. You cannot undo 20:star: or heal after death.
That's one way to play, and may be what the publisher has said, but it will lead to race conditions, where the first person to see what face a die has landed on, or what card is turned up, will get an advantage, and there is sometimes a focus on reacting quickly, and that's not the way I prefer to play.
Here's another example where I think the "whoever calls it out first" rules can lead to undesireable timing issues. Let's say you make your third roll, of two dice, and one lands on a 3, giving you 3 3's and enough points to win by buying the card, but the other die is still spinning. Now the person with the evolution card can play it while the dice are still spinning, since that can be played at any time, while you can't buy the card yet, because the die roll phase hasn't ended. But if you had rolled the dice and they had both landed at the same time, you might have been able to say "I buy this card and win" before he says "I play this card". So under your rules, it can improve your chances to win if you are able to roll dice in such a way that they all land at once, rather than having some land and some keep spinning. I'd rather not have that kind of skill matter in King of Tokyo, so I would rather pay rules where that skill doesn't matter, regardless of what the publisher or a literal reading of the rules says.