Event

Tactic. Trick.

Cost: 1.

Rogue

Parley. Choose an enemy at your location and play a Weapon asset from your hand, reducing its cost by 1. You may then take a fight action with that weapon against the chosen enemy, using instead of the skill indicated.

"You'd have made a pretty good cowboy."
Carlos Palma Cruchaga
The Feast of Hemlock Vale Investigator Expansion #70.
False Surrender

FAQs

No faqs yet for this card.

Reviews

This is a really good card for anyone fighting with bows, swords, or Mauser-style guns. (With automatics it probably gets outshined by Sleight of Hand

You spend 1 card, 1 action, and the normal resource cost of your weapon to put the weapon into play and make an attack with it. That works out to making this basically read "0 cost, fast: gain a bonus action" as long as you draw it before you need to play your weapon, which is already pretty good. The going rate for bonus actions tends to be 2 resources, and while most are less situational than this one, 0 is a lot better than 2.

But it's more than just a bonus action card. It

  • Lets you keep your weapon in hand until you need it, without fearing attacks of opportunity, and still spend a full turn fighting with it without warning
  • Changes the test to agility
  • Is a tactic and trick event
  • and a play/parley/activate/fight action

In your level 0 deck the first bullet point is probably the most important. Low-XP investigators are slow to set up and struggle to find everything they need. Lacking good tutoring and burst economy they often must make awkward choices about what to prioritize putting into play. Engine cards like Leo or Lone Wolf generate more value the sooner you get them down, and Lockpicks only gives you 1 investigate per turn, so putting off getting your weapons down is often tempting, but dangerous. This gives you an extra turn or two to set up.

As you start upgrading though, you'll find this has so many good interactions that it almost accidentally accumulates bonus value. You can make this fast with Chuck, Roland, Alessandra, Farsight, and so on. You can turn a resource profit with Sleuth or Crafty. You can find it with Friends or Plan or Bewitching. You can use it with Fine Clothes to set up Exploit Weakness, and so on.

Why is it particularly good with the Mauser in your opinion? That gives you +1 combat (or +2 at 2 XP), which does not help you, because FS tests agility instead. — Susumu · 361
It's not really that it is particularly good with Mauser, but that Sleight of Hand is pretty bad with Mauser. As such this becomes possibly the best way to cheat Mauser into play. Although many Mauser players can also do well with I'll Take That — OrionAnderson · 60
For many people with green access, agility and combat+1 will be very similar tests. Also I must confess I have always without thinking about it treated fight/evade/iinvestigate actions on assets as though they said "+X skill value" rather than +X combat/will/intellect/agility — OrionAnderson · 60
Oh, included the bit about all the action tags it has but forgot to mention that this makes triggering Haste dead simple. — OrionAnderson · 60
Do we get the Fine Cloth -2 difficulty bonus for the fight part of this action ? — Ayoross · 1
If Dexter cheats Sword Cane into play with this, can you then sub your Willpower for Agility for the attack? — blackchance · 7