Discussing the Interaction Between Amanita and Belladonna

A Taste for the King is as much a game about poisons as it is about delicious Medieval food! From its inception one of the core three poisons has been Belladonna (originally called Nightshade or Deadly Nightshade). This is a well known poisonous plant with small purple berries, a member of the Nightshade family. During my research I found quite a few poisons that have been known (and used since antiquity) but I tried to keep the poisons in the game period appropriate, favouring ones that could be found/used in Medieval Britain as opposed to ancient Greece or Rome. One poison jumped out to me as interesting however, and that was Amanita.

Amanita is a small poisonous mushroom, however one article stated that Belladonna, a poison in itself was actually useful as an antidote to Amanita poisoning though I can’t find any further sources on this. This seemed like a really interesting interaction to add to the game, whether true or not, potentially taking a death scenario to an “Oh phew, I’m alive!” one. The problem was I already had 3 poisons and at the time that was all the poison the game could handle due to component count limits (and a convenient “natural” balance). I didn’t want there to be a high chance of Amanita and Belladonna coming up in a turn, preferring it to be a sort of hail Mary effect, occurring maybe once or twice a game and so I couldn’t replace one of the other two core poisons with Amanita. This would also make the game almost impossible to die in so I decided to leave it as a potential poison for a future expansion to the game.

Now, if you’ve read the recent post about the current state of the game you will realise that the game has changed quite a bit since then. The component count has risen quite significantly with 54 cards in the deck rather than the original 36. Now seemed the perfect time to re-introduce Amanita to the game, along with some of the other poisons I had earmarked for expansions.

In current play testing, both cards retain their original form, the Amanita has artwork for the expansion it was part of and is the only one to mention an interaction with the other poison. Once it is certain that these cards will both remain in the game I will update them to both refer to the interaction. Now, the thing is, the originally wording states that the effect only triggers if Belladonna comes out AFTER Amanita which is technically the “real” interaction. This would make the wording on Belladonna different to that on Amanita for essentially the same effect which may come off a little confusing. It also means that the chance of the effect triggering is significantly reduced so I’m thinking, for the sake of more interesting and fun gameplay, that I will allow the effect to trigger if the cards come out in either order. In other words, if Amanita comes out first, you will be poisoned, if Belladonna comes out next, you will be “cured” and not suffer poisoning, saving the dish that would be discarded (this is the correct, if slightly naively implemented interaction) and if they come out in the other order with Belladonna on the table first, the interaction still triggers.

As stated above, while not technically correct, this would simplify the wording of both cards but would also increase the chance of the effect triggering which should make the game quite a bit more fun, essentially taking a turn from a 2 poison death to a 3 poison death. I still don’t want this to trigger too often but in play tests so far, out of maybe 15 tests I think this has only triggered once, maye twice. This has been exacerbated by the random shuffling of poisons into the deck and I do think the game could stand to have maybe 1 more of each card in the deck to increase the chance of drawing both cards in a single turn. It would be nice to even get one interaction in a single game but with the current state of shuffling poisons into the deck at the start of the game and only one of each possible, it may prove impossibly impropable.

If you would like to test how these cards work together, feel free to join the Drentsoft Games Discord server and ask to play test the game or stop by the Drentsoft Games Twitch channel and ask to play there!