Seems interesting but strong.

Maybe to balance, also add a way for burglars to deal with locked artifacts? Then both sides have something new to do and so a reason to vote for it

Note that I think “and is not the Location of an Artifact” needs to be switched to “and is not the Home of an Artifact”—otherwise you could use this to sus out where concealed artifacts are located.

I think we should try it for a round and see if Locked is going to be that much of a problem. Burglars only need to get 1 Artifact without getting caught.

Honestly, I think it’s weird that Concealed Artifacts are concealed from Guards as well. Who’s hiring these folks to guard something that they don’t know the location of?

I’m ok with a Guard trying to use Plant Decoy to discover the location of a Concealed Artifact. I very nearly added some proposed ruletext to privately inform each Guard of the Location of each Concealed Artifact, but decided against it so as not to clutter this proposal.

I think Guards automatically knowing the locations of Concealed Artifacts would make pooling a little too easy. Spending a Preparation Action to figure that out seems like a worthy cost to me, though.

because this conflicts with Kevan’s rewrite of Preparation Actions, which is already quorate.

I do like the idea in principle.

Shoot, I forgot about that. I’ll wait until there are more votes in favor or revise and then I’ll vote to revise.

If anyone has any other balancing concerns, or you agree with Clucky’s concern, add that to your vote so I know what to change. Thanks!

I don’t like this fix because I think it makes the dynasty excessively random – this works equally against any strategy the Burglars could try, rather than being targeted at the specific broken strategy, so the Distraction + Back Door + Quick strategy is still optimal, it just doesn’t work as well. (It’s also much more Guard-sided than my fix is, to the extent that I think it might give the Guards the advantage.)

I would rather resolve the problem my way because I would rather weaken a broken Burglar strategy (making the other Burglar strategies more competitive with it) rather than weaken all strategies symmetrically (meaning that the broken strategy is still probably still better than the alternatives, but now might not work).

By the way, you don’t want Burglars to be able to Plant Decoys because it would let them move an Artifact to an easily stealable Spot after the Guards had already set their Routes.

Good point. Glad I made it Guards only. I’ll be sure to keep that after the revision.

(this has to be revised no matter what due to Kevan’s change to Preparation Actions)