How to Play Trickerion: Dahlgaard’s Gifts add-on/expansion

Ladies and gentlemen: it is i! The Astounding…ly Adequate Ryan! And for my first trick, i’m going to get rid of this other glove. i have no idea where the first one got to. Second trick: let’s talk about Trickerion: Dahlgaard’s Gifts, which isn’t quite an expansion to Trickerion: Legends of Illusion. It’s labelled “Add-on Pack.” A more full expansion is coming later. But Trickerion was a Kickstarter game, and what i’m told is that this was actually part of the base game, but they kinda peeled it out because Trickerion got a little bit… overstuffed, you might say. There’s a lot going on in the game. So this add-on pack – if you bought the full Deluxe/Collector’s Edition – whatever it was – with all the bells and whistles, you got this stuff in there. If you didn’t, this product is available separately at retail. So let me take a look at what’s in the box, and let me teach you how to play. But if you don’t know what’s up with Trickerion, you can check out my Trickerion: Legends of Illusion How to Play video – link up here, link at the end of the video, link down in the description. Ah! Let’s take a look at Dahlgaard’s Gifts.

First off, you get some component upgrades. So this big Trickerion shard replaces the flat token that you get for tracking the rounds in the base game.

And then you get these little wooden magician tokens, which are absolutely great, and a big improvement to the boring cylinders that come with the base game, BUT, you only get one per player. You could really use two per player – one on the turn order track, and one to mark your fame points in the theatre. So you have to make the gut-wrenching decision about where these little dudes are gonna go.

Okay, so on to the meat of what’s in the box. Dahlgaard’s Gifts is split into two modules: Duel of Magicians, and Magician Powers. i’ll show you what each one does separately.

If you own Trickerion and you don’t have Dahlgaard’s Gifts, you may have noticed that the Dark Alley side of your player boarda have these expansion slots down the side of them. That’s a little tease that basically forces you to buy Dahlgaard’s Gifts, because if you’re like me, you can’t stand having expansion slots without the stuff to go in them.

These slots are for the new Magician Powers. That’s a deck of 90 cards separated into the familiar level 1, level 2 and level 3 categories, with a fame threshold of 1, 16, and 36, respectively. Off the top of the game, everyone gets 12 of these cards. You have to keep 8, and return 4 of them to the box.

The cards are text-heavy and complicated, and they require a good working knowledge of how the game goes. And you can only use Magician Powers when you play on the expanded Dark Alley side of the board. For this reason, i don’t recommend busting out this add-on with players who are brand new to the game, because, in addition to all the decisions they already have to make off the top of the game without knowing what the heck is going on – their magician, their magic school, their starting trick, their components, their specialist – PLUS all the special assignment card nonsense going on in the Dark Alley – they have to sift through the abilities on TWELVE different cards and discard four off the top of the game! These cards are for advanced play only… or i dunno, if you’ve got a few friends who are really board game-savvy friends and they’ve got four or five hours to kill, you know – giv’r. Just chuck em all in.

Each Magician Power has a key that shows you which of the four expansion slots it fits in. So this card can’t go here, and this card can’t go here, but this card can go either here or here. You can learn a new magician power at the beginning of every Assignment Phase, where you’re programming where your workers will go… so you can learn one new Magician Power every round, at a maximum.

To learn a power, the appropriate slot has to be activated with Trickerion shards. You get three off the top of the game, and they stack from the bottom up the side of your board, like this. Any new shards you earn get added progressively up the track. If you reach the top, any excess shards just accumulate here. When you spend shards, you take them from here first, and then straight down the line from top to bottom.

But if you spend shards to the point where the Magician Powers slots are no longer juiced up, you lose those learned powers, and they go back in your hand. If you want to learn a new Magician Power during the Assignment Phase and there’s already a card in the slot you want to use, you have to take that card back into your hand first before learning the new power.

So what do the powers do? Well, they’re generally nuts. And they get progressively more nuts as the fame threshold increases. Let’s look at a couple:

Clandestine Work – level 1 – fame threshold 1: Whenever any of your workers remains idle (so you’ve flipped over that worker’s assignment card), you immediately receive money from the supply equal to twice its wage.

Public Relations – level 2 – fame threshold 16: Whenever you place a worker on a Location, you may forfeit any number of the received action points before taking Action(s). If you do, you gain money or fame equal to the number of action points forfeited this way.

Grand Finale – level 3 – fame threshold 36: If you perform this turn, you may perform an additional Performance card at the end of the Performance phase.

Wowsers! Oh my God – THERE’S my other glove.

So there are a couple of scoring differences when you’re using Magician Powers. Because you’re playing on the Dark Alley side of the board, you don’t get points for any specialists or apprentices you’ve hired. The instruction manual reminds us that if you have all the components that a 36-point trick requires, even if you’ve never even prepped or performed that trick, you score the meta point bonus at the bottom of the trick card. And, special for this module only, you no longer score a point for each of your Trickerion shards at the end of the game. So if it’s the last round, and you’ve got extra shards, get spending! Dahlgaard’s Gifts comes with 25 extra shards to make sure you won’t run out.

The other module in the box is called Duel of Magicians, which is a set of cards that make 2-player Trickerion a little more interesting. You get 12 new performance cards, and 12 turn setup cards.

You build your performance deck using the new cards with the Duel of Magicians symbol on them. They have grey dummy trick markers on them, which simulate a more crowded performance in a game with a higher player count. This makes it easier for you and your opponent to set up trick links.

In a normal 2-player game of Trickerion, you block off the +1 action point spaces with the unused character discs in order to approximate the kind of scarcity you’d encounter in a game with more players. But that setup is static. The new turn setup cards you get with Dahlgaard’s Gifts go face up next to the board. Use 5 of them in a regular game, and 7 for a Dark Alley game – that’s one card per round. Every round, after you roll the Downtown dice, you slide the top card next to the deck, and block off the spaces marked on that card. The cards are face-up so that you can always plan your strategy one turn in advance. Every round, the blocked-off spaces move, keeping you and your opponent on your toes.

Finally, Dahlgaard’s Gifts gives you 8 new Special Assignment cards for the Dark Alley expansion. Here’s what they do:

If you Take No Risks, you can set one of the Downtown dice to whatever you want, and roll another, before you take your Downtown action. If you intrude, you can piggyback an occupied slot.

In Market Row, you can use the Early Bird card to jump the queue and place a worker in Market Row before anyone else gets to take a turn. Or, use this Black Market card to buy up to 3 Trickerion shards for 2 bucks apiece.

In your own Workshop, the Magic of Diversity card gives you bonuses depending on the symbol marker of the trick you prepare, while the Double Duty card lets you move a worker you’ve already used to a different non-theatre space and take extra actions.

In the Theatre, Paid Audience lets you ignore Thursday’s crummy yield modifier. Or, you can get Sunday’s better yield modifier, even if you perform on Saturday. The Festival of Magic card forces all tricks on all performance cards to get performed at the end of the round.

And that’s the sum total of what you get with Dahlgaard’s Gifts! Now gaze upon me with tremulous delight as i magically… disappear!

Ladies and gentlemen: it is i! The Astounding…ly Adequate Ryan! And for my first trick, i’m going to get rid of this other glove. i have no idea where the first one got to. Second trick: let’s talk about Trickerion: Dahlgaard’s Gifts, which isn’t quite an expansion to Trickerion: Legends of Illusion. It’s labelled “Add-on Pack.” A more full expansion is coming later. But Trickerion was a Kickstarter game, and what i’m told is that this was actually part of the base game, but they kinda peeled it out because Trickerion got a little bit… overstuffed, you might say. There’s a lot going on in the game. So this add-on pack – if you bought the full Deluxe/Collector’s Edition – whatever it was – with all the bells and whistles, you got this stuff in there. If you didn’t, this product is available separately at retail. So let me take a look at what’s in the box, and let me teach you how to play. But if you don’t know what’s up with Trickerion, you can check out my Trickerion: Legends of Illusion How to Play video – link up here, link at the end of the video, link down in the description. Ah! Let’s take a look at Dahlgaard’s Gifts.

First off, you get some component upgrades. So this big Trickerion shard replaces the flat token that you get for tracking the rounds in the base game.

And then you get these little wooden magician tokens, which are absolutely great, and a big improvement to the boring cylinders that come with the base game, BUT, you only get one per player. You could really use two per player – one on the turn order track, and one to mark your fame points in the theatre. So you have to make the gut-wrenching decision about where these little dudes are gonna go.

Okay, so on to the meat of what’s in the box. Dahlgaard’s Gifts is split into two modules: Duel of Magicians, and Magician Powers. i’ll show you what each one does separately.

If you own Trickerion and you don’t have Dahlgaard’s Gifts, you may have noticed that the Dark Alley side of your player boarda have these expansion slots down the side of them. That’s a little tease that basically forces you to buy Dahlgaard’s Gifts, because if you’re like me, you can’t stand having expansion slots without the stuff to go in them.

These slots are for the new Magician Powers. That’s a deck of 90 cards separated into the familiar level 1, level 2 and level 3 categories, with a fame threshold of 1, 16, and 36, respectively. Off the top of the game, everyone gets 12 of these cards. You have to keep 8, and return 4 of them to the box.

The cards are text-heavy and complicated, and they require a good working knowledge of how the game goes. And you can only use Magician Powers when you play on the expanded Dark Alley side of the board. For this reason, i don’t recommend busting out this add-on with players who are brand new to the game, because, in addition to all the decisions they already have to make off the top of the game without knowing what the heck is going on – their magician, their magic school, their starting trick, their components, their specialist – PLUS all the special assignment card nonsense going on in the Dark Alley – they have to sift through the abilities on TWELVE different cards and discard four off the top of the game! These cards are for advanced play only… or i dunno, if you’ve got a few friends who are really board game-savvy friends and they’ve got four or five hours to kill, you know – giv’r. Just chuck em all in.

Each Magician Power has a key that shows you which of the four expansion slots it fits in. So this card can’t go here, and this card can’t go here, but this card can go either here or here. You can learn a new magician power at the beginning of every Assignment Phase, where you’re programming where your workers will go… so you can learn one new Magician Power every round, at a maximum.

To learn a power, the appropriate slot has to be activated with Trickerion shards. You get three off the top of the game, and they stack from the bottom up the side of your board, like this. Any new shards you earn get added progressively up the track. If you reach the top, any excess shards just accumulate here. When you spend shards, you take them from here first, and then straight down the line from top to bottom.

But if you spend shards to the point where the Magician Powers slots are no longer juiced up, you lose those learned powers, and they go back in your hand. If you want to learn a new Magician Power during the Assignment Phase and there’s already a card in the slot you want to use, you have to take that card back into your hand first before learning the new power.

So what do the powers do? Well, they’re generally nuts. And they get progressively more nuts as the fame threshold increases. Let’s look at a couple:

Clandestine Work – level 1 – fame threshold 1: Whenever any of your workers remains idle (so you’ve flipped over that worker’s assignment card), you immediately receive money from the supply equal to twice its wage.

Public Relations – level 2 – fame threshold 16: Whenever you place a worker on a Location, you may forfeit any number of the received action points before taking Action(s). If you do, you gain money or fame equal to the number of action points forfeited this way.

Grand Finale – level 3 – fame threshold 36: If you perform this turn, you may perform an additional Performance card at the end of the Performance phase.

Wowsers! Oh my God – THERE’S my other glove.

So there are a couple of scoring differences when you’re using Magician Powers. Because you’re playing on the Dark Alley side of the board, you don’t get points for any specialists or apprentices you’ve hired. The instruction manual reminds us that if you have all the components that a 36-point trick requires, even if you’ve never even prepped or performed that trick, you score the meta point bonus at the bottom of the trick card. And, special for this module only, you no longer score a point for each of your Trickerion shards at the end of the game. So if it’s the last round, and you’ve got extra shards, get spending! Dahlgaard’s Gifts comes with 25 extra shards to make sure you won’t run out.

The other module in the box is called Duel of Magicians, which is a set of cards that make 2-player Trickerion a little more interesting. You get 12 new performance cards, and 12 turn setup cards.

You build your performance deck using the new cards with the Duel of Magicians symbol on them. They have grey dummy trick markers on them, which simulate a more crowded performance in a game with a higher player count. This makes it easier for you and your opponent to set up trick links.

In a normal 2-player game of Trickerion, you block off the +1 action point spaces with the unused character discs in order to approximate the kind of scarcity you’d encounter in a game with more players. But that setup is static. The new turn setup cards you get with Dahlgaard’s Gifts go face up next to the board. Use 5 of them in a regular game, and 7 for a Dark Alley game – that’s one card per round. Every round, after you roll the Downtown dice, you slide the top card next to the deck, and block off the spaces marked on that card. The cards are face-up so that you can always plan your strategy one turn in advance. Every round, the blocked-off spaces move, keeping you and your opponent on your toes.

Finally, Dahlgaard’s Gifts gives you 8 new Special Assignment cards for the Dark Alley expansion. Here’s what they do:

If you Take No Risks, you can set one of the Downtown dice to whatever you want, and roll another, before you take your Downtown action. If you intrude, you can piggyback an occupied slot.

In Market Row, you can use the Early Bird card to jump the queue and place a worker in Market Row before anyone else gets to take a turn. Or, use this Black Market card to buy up to 3 Trickerion shards for 2 bucks apiece.

In your own Workshop, the Magic of Diversity card gives you bonuses depending on the symbol marker of the trick you prepare, while the Double Duty card lets you move a worker you’ve already used to a different non-theatre space and take extra actions.

In the Theatre, Paid Audience lets you ignore Thursday’s crummy yield modifier. Or, you can get Sunday’s better yield modifier, even if you perform on Saturday. The Festival of Magic card forces all tricks on all performance cards to get performed at the end of the round.

And that’s the sum total of what you get with Dahlgaard’s Gifts! Now gaze upon me with tremulous delight as i magically… disappear!