Board Game Arena

I was in a game today where I had one card in hand (Clothing) and I wanted to get rid of it without melding it (it would have covered my Sailing). My opponent had Oars, so keeping Clothing in my hand was a bit of a liability - I wanted to use my already-melded Tools to return Clothing to the deck (using the first dogma effect), but I wasn't sure if Tools was implemented properly, and didn't want to chance it (since there's no Undo, and if it didn't work, I'd be stuck with the Clothing liability).

My memory of this site's implementation for Tools is that it's possible you're not given the option of returning cards from your hand if your hand has fewer than three. I checked with BGG, where it was (in my opinion, properly) ruled that you can return fewer than three (if you have fewer than three), though obviously you don't get the reward of melding a 3 card (since you failed to return three, even though you tried).

Can anyone confirm if this is true? If so, I can write a bug report. But I don't want to waste the dev's time if it isn't actually bugged - Tools is fiddly enough that I could be mis-remembering how it works on BGA.

If you think you've found a bug, please do report it and I will investigate!

Yeah, this is a bug: it skips the dogma if you don't have 3 cards, even though it is legal to return fewer if you have only 1-2 cards. Make a report and I'll thumb it.

Which BGG thread are you talking about? By looking at the code, I can tell that the person who originally implemented the game on BGA made it behave this was very intentionally.

Thanks everyone! I've implemented a fix and this will be released in our next batch of game updates.

Note that Tools can be a little fiddly--without an undo, it can be easy to accidentally return cards for dogma 1 when you actually want to skip dogma 1 and return a 3 for dogma 2. Say you have only two cards in hand and one is an Age 3 card--it is easy to forget to skip the first dogma and hang on to the 3 for the second.

Last year, I added a warning when a player tries to return a 3 as their first card in the first part of the effect (because that usually indicates they meant to return it as part of the second effect).