The Orient

Orient cards add special purchase and payment effects to the development-card market.

Setup and market

Shuffle the Orient cards into three level decks. Reveal two Orient cards beside each corresponding base-game row, leaving the four base cards in place. When an Orient card is bought or removed, replace it from its own level deck.

Special cards

Orient cards are purchased from their own three decks. Their effects add five kinds of options: discard the card during a purchase for two temporary wild gold (both must be spent in that purchase); attach a card to one of your bonus cards so it copies that color; gain a free card from the specified lower-level row; take a second bonus of one color while still counting as one card for other rules; or discard two owned cards of a shown color to acquire the card. Level-two effects can grant a free level-one card; a separate level-three effect can grant a free level-two card. Free cards are not purchases and do not trigger purchase powers.

Resolve the effect

Resolve an immediate purple effect once, when the Orient card is purchased. If discarding cards makes you lose a previously met bonus threshold, you keep any noble or Trading Post tiles already claimed. Before drawing replacements, choose any card association required by the new card. Strongholds cannot be used to take a protected card through a free-card effect.