The Future of Secret Message

Secret Message is an action card in A Taste for the King. You may remember the previous post covering changes to Secret Message. Secret Message allows a player to ignore the effect of a Poison card with the trade off being they can no longer continue their turn. This can be used on either the first revealed poison or the second. This gives the player a level of strategy as they may prefer to save the dish that would be discarded by the first poison or favour trying to get more dishes further into the turn. The card has a second action. This allows the vengeful King who would have received the poison to send it onto the next player.

During the change the number of cards affected by Secret Message was increased from the top 3 cards (1 hand) and 1 card to the top 6 cards (2 hands) and 1 card. In other words the poison card can be placed by the current player somewhere in the top 7 cards which increased from the top 4 cards. However, people still feel that Secret Message is a bit too complicated, it has steps that need to be resolved and it’s a little hard to parse so I’m looking to fix this.

Comparison of the previous revision to Secret Message.

One suggestion, which is the current implementation, is to have Secret Message keep its first half (not suffering a poison and ending your turn) but instead of shuffling the poison into the deck you mark a card that you would like to poison, if this card is revealed during the next turn, it is discarded as if poisoned. My main issue with this is that I need at least 1 extra card to track this poison and I may need one extra card on TOP to act as a placeholder poison for the case of tracking how many poisons a player has encountered in a turn (if they encounter two with no andidote then they die, ending their turn). I could have the player who triggered Secret Message KEEP the poison, replacing the discarded card with it, however if this marked poisoned card is not revealed and is discarded instead, the player whose turn it is will essentially have 1 less poison in the deck to contend with, which is not really the intention.

I do wonder if the card that is marked (a full menu) could have a dual purpose where it is inserted on the table where the discarded dish was, flipping it over to reveal a poison. I think this could work but I would have to make sure that the poisoned side of the card is easily identifiable so that it doesn’t get shuffled into the deck at the end of the turn.

Other suggestions have been to make it so that Secret Message doesn’t end your turn but just allows you to weather a single poison, taking your turn from a 2 poison death to a 3 poison death, however I suspect in the long run this will prove to be too powerful. I think forcing a player to end their turn increases an element of strategy. During testing, I did find that not ending the turn on triggering Secret Message didn’t make the game much easier as almost immediately another poison came out, ending the player’s turn. However, this was a very limited run of tests and I suspect on average, players could continue much further into the turn, 3+ hands after the card is triggered. I suspect the current run of results is just down to sheer dumb luck but I am happy to test this further.

Another suggestion, that I’m looking at, is splitting Secret Message into two cards. The first would allow you to survive one extra poison, probably ending your turn. The other would allow you to poison a dish in another player’s turn. I’m not sure this is needed, as I think the current implemention of Secret Message should be simple enough. However, if this turns out not to be the case and I can find the extra card slot in the component count I am happy to try them as two separate cards. I would probably find the extra card from either removing Diplomatic Gift which so far, in testing, doesn’t trigger often enough and may be too confusing to use or by replacing the Glutton card with a meeple or similar token. This would not increase the cost of the game significantly and would give me one extra card in the deck.

Ultimately, the card needs more testing in its current state. If it works as intended, being simpler and more fun to play, then great. Otherwise, I’m happy to look at the listed suggestions. I may even replace Diplomatic Gift with a card that allows you to poison other players at the end of your turn (or ending your turn) for that extra vindictive play.

If you would like to play test the game in its current state, feel free to join the official Drentsoft Games Discord server or hit me up during a Twitch stream and we can test it. In fact bring some friends and we can try to break it with as many people as possible!

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