When I learned Ars Mysteriorum at the Gathering, Dale Yu described the recipe book as a three-dimensional grid in which you receive stipends based upon the cards you have looking across the grid, up the grid, and straight down into the grid.

He explained that if you have duplicate sets when looking at the Master's Sets or Princes' Combinations, you score for all possible sets. For example, a set of 1 Gold and 1 Jade pays 1FL; a set of 2 Gold and 1 Jade also pays 1FL; a set of 2 Gold and 2 Jade, on the other hand, pays 2FL.

Looking over the rules, however, I don't see any support for this interpretation. Both sections of the rules state that "the stipend is for the entire collection, not each recipe card in the collection." I would interpret this statement to mean that it doesn't matter how many Gold, Jade, and so on you possess; you count each of them only once.

Alan Ernstein was at GoF, so perhaps he was teaching the stipend section this way, but a clarification on scoring would be nice. Alan, are you here?

Well, it DOES matter how many cards of a type you have, but only for scoring that type of card (the "into the grid" view). It doesn't matter for scoring the horizontal or vertical sets. I was taught the game by Alan and Kurt and am therefore fairly sure I have this right.

Thanks, Dan. I'll go with your first-hand experience over Dale's since I don't know how he learned the game and since your opinion matches up with what the rules state. I thought Dale's explanation was kind of bizarre...

If I understand your question, Dale's interpretation of the scoring is correct. A recipe card may only score once in each category, and Dale's example is right out of the rulebook. The statement "the stipend is for the entire collection" is there because players wanted the payoff to be for each card used in the collection. So here are some more examples:

Your collection consists of 1 Gold, 2 Serpentine, and 3 Jade. Your Scoring is:

Duplicate Items: 1 Gold pays 1FL; 2 Serpentine pays a total of 2FL (not 2FL for each card), and 3 Jade pays a total of 5FL. Total for Duplicate Items is 8FL

Princes' Combinations: 1 Gold and any number of Jade cards pay 1FL since the Gold may only be used once in each category. There is no scoring for the Serpentine. Total for Princes' Combinations is 1FL.

Masters' Sets: 1 Jade and 1 Serpentine score 1FL. The second Jade and the second Serpentine score 1FL. The Gold and the third Jade do not score in this category. Total for Masters' Sets is 2FL.

Grand Total is 11FL.

I hope that this helps. I will be at Origins Friday through Sunday anyone has other questions or wants a demo of the game. Find us through the kind folks at the GMT booth.