I'm creating a Rules FAQ for this game:

http://www.ofb.net/~whuang/gp/phoenicia-rulesfaq.txt

As more questions and corrections come up I will add them to
the FAQ linked above. The current set of questions and answers
are below, but be warned they are subject to change:

MONEY AND STORAGE
-----------------

Q: When are storage and treasury limits applied?


A: They are applied at the end of 1c. (Buy any tools and
adjust treasury), and also at 2d. (Apply storage and treasury
limits). 1c is applied to the player taking the current
turn, while 2d applies to all players. Both are mandatory.

Q: Are storage and treasury limits always applied at the end of
1c. (Buy any tools and adjust treasury), or only when a player
has turned in one production card in exchange for disks?


A: They are always applied at the end of 1c, regardless of
whether a player has exchanged a card for disks.

Q: When is it permitted to convert a production card into
disks without spending it?


A: During 1c. (Buy any tools and adjust treasury), you may
convert *one* card voluntarily on your turn. That is the
only case where you can *voluntarily* convert a card to coins.
However, note that if you exceed your storage limit (for cards)
at the end of 1 (Player Turns) or during 2d, there is a *forced*
conversion of your excess cards to coins (which will usually
exceed your treasury limits, and then be further discarded).

Q: Can you convert four disks to a card during 1 (Player Turns)?


A: No.

Q: When is it permitted to convert 4 disks into a production card?


A: Only at the end of 2c. (Deal production cards). The rules say
you must convert if you have more than four disks, but this is
incorrect. It should say that you must convert if you have
*four or more* disks. For example, if you have exactly four
disks, you must convert those four disks to a production card,
even if doing so would make you exceed your storage limit.

Q: If I have 8 or more disks after production, do I only convert
one set of 4 disks to a card, or may I convert two sets of 4
to one card each? Or is such conversion mandatory?


A: You *must* convert sets of 4 disks to cards as much as you
are able to, even if this would put you over your storage
limit. For example, if you have an income of 10 and 6 disks
in your treasury, after step 2c you should have 4 cards.
(When you exceed your storage limit in step 2d, however, you
would receive disks for the card that you discarded, so this
is almost never a disadvantage.)

Q: The money deck in the game has 60 cards, but the instruction
booklet says 40. Which is correct?


A: As designed, the game had 40 cards (8 fours, 24 fives, and
8 sixes), but 20 cards (4 fours, 12 fives, and 4 sixes) were
later added. Playing with the 60 card deck tends to make
the later parts of the game a bit more chaotic, as a large
hand tends to have a wider possible range. Play with
whichever is comfortable for your group.

Q: What happens if the storehouse tokens run out?


A: The number of storehouse tokens is unlimited. Just keep
track of it in some other way.

Q: If using the preset production cards, should they be
shuffled back in?


A: No.

Q: In what order do players receive production cards?


A: If it makes a difference (such as when the deck is likely
to be reshuffled), start at the Overlord and go clockwise.

Q: If a player is over their storage limit during step 2c.
(Deal production cards) and must discard, does the discarding
happen before or after the next player receives their production?
(This could make a difference if there is a reshuffle involved.)


A: All production cards are dealt out (2c) before any storage
limits are checked (2d).

Q: Improved Storage displays only 4 storehouse icons. If a
player already has more than 2 storehouses when a Granary
is purchased, does the Granary provide 2 more storehouses,
or does it only increase the number of storehouses to 4?


A: It provides 2 more storehouses. The icons on the Improved
Storage is only a reminder that the player should have at
least 4 storehouses.

Q: Do players produce on the last turn, for purposes of tie-breaking?


A: No. Production is in step 2c, but victory is checked in 2a.
There is no production on the last turn, because the game is
already over.

Q: The examples under 2c talk about "a production of 6." Does
that mean 6 cards or 6 disks? How can it be 6 disks when
the disks seem to range from 0 to 3?


A: "A production of 6" means that the production disk is on
space 6 of the track, which is labeled with 1 card and 2
disks. This is because the production will be equal to
6 disks, of which 4 will definitely be converted to cards.

Q: Why are there production symbols on the spaces after 32?
Wouldn't the game have ended before they are reached?


A: It is possible for production to go beyond 32 before anyone has
reached 32 VPs. The scoring track keeps track of VPs (with the
tall pieces) and production (with the flat pieces). The game
only ends if someone reaches 32 VP. Reaching 32 production
doesn't do anything special.


AUCTIONS
--------

Q: Are unauctioned cards ever discarded?


A: No; they stay available for auctions in future turns.


CARD ABILITIES
--------------

Q: If a set of development cards runs out in 2b (Add development
cards), is the next set immediately used, or are they delayed
until next turn?


A: The next set is immediately used.

Q: Can multiple cards of the same type be purchased by the same
player?


A: Yes.

Q: When are the Advanced side of the tiles used?


A: When a player gets a second Tracker, they upgrade their
Improved Hunting to Advanced Hunting. When a player gets
a second Smelter, they upgrade their Improved Mining to
Advanced Mining.

Q: What does the icon of an amphora (jar) with a plus sign on it
mean (it's on the Smelter card)?

A: It is a reminder to check if your production has increased due
to the effect of workers on Mining becoming more prodcutive;
and if so, to update your production token on the track accordingly.

Q: Oh. Then why isn't that icon on the Tracker card?

A: It should be; it got left off as a misprint.

Q: Does purchase of a second Prospector provide Improved Mining?


A: No. However, it does provide a second -1 discount towards
Smelters, which are the development cards that provide
Improved/Advanced Mining.

Q: Does purchase of a Smelter provide Improved Mining immediately,
even without a Prospector ?


A: Yes.

Q: I have Mining and obtain Improved Mining (by buying a Smelter).
What happens after adjusting production, storehouses, and VPs for the
Smelter and taking the Improved Mining tile?


A: Any workers in Mining are transferred to Improved Mining (at no
cost), which may result in increased production, and then the Mining
tile is discarded. If any tools were present on the Mining tile
(this is a rare occurrence), these would also be transferred to
Improved Mining.

Q: Do you need a Dyer to buy a Dye House?

A: No; the only limitation on purchasing cards is winning the auction.
(This question gets asked about the Dyer a lot because it appears
that the Dyer has no other function.)

Q: Is there any Improved Farming or Clothmaking?


A: No. Purchasing extra Dye Houses does not confer any extra
abilities beyond the increased production, storehouse, and VPs.

Q: Is there any Advanced Storage?


A: No. Purchasing a second Granary does not provide anything beyond
the two extra storehouses and the VPs.

Q: Are discounts used up after being applied?


A: No; they can be used again on multiple purchases. This makes
them very powerful. The note in the rules about removing
reminder cubes is to address running out of game components;
there is no in-game limit on the cubes.

Q: Does the Shipyard discount apply to just one of Ships, Trade Fleets,
or Ports? Or does it apply to all of them?


A: It applies to all of them.

Q: When purchasing VPs (from the City Center bonus tile), is the
limit on VP purchase a per-turn limit or a limit over the
entire game?


A: It is a limit on the entire game. The tile is not "cleared"
between turns.


WORKERS
-------

Q: Is it allowed to shift a worker to a less costly activity, or
"unemploy" a worker back to the Training Ground?


A: No.

Q: Is it allowed to shift more than one worker a turn to a more
costly activity?


A: Yes, it certainly is. You may shift any number of workers.
The workers do not all have to come from the same activity, and
their destinations do not need to be the same activity either.

Q: Can I choose freely which workers from an activity move?


A: No. When placing workers, you must place them on the lowest-numbered
available space; and when promoting workers, you must remove them
from the highest-numbered available space.

VICTORY
-------

Q: When calculating the sum of production cards and disks for the
purpose of tie-breaking a victory, should the cards be
counted by their numerical values, or is it just the number
of cards?


A: Use the numerical values on the cards.

Why don't you create a file containing everything?
You can upload the file oon BGG for everyone needs the FAQ



Bye

Two reasons:

(1) This way, I can edit the post to keep the FAQ up-to-date.
(2) I already submitted it (an older version) yesterday, but it
hasn't been approved yet.

to you for taking the time to make this FAQ available to us.

to the publisher for making a final draft of the rules which requires this FAQ.

I still want to play the game though.

I think that there is an error in your FAQ:



But Tom, the designer, says,



So you are also allowed to convert cards to coins after recieving production, in phase 2c.

I also think that the prohibition on converting more than one card in phase 1c is not really a restriction. It's just that it would never be useful to convert a second card. Converting two cards to coins would produce at least 8 coins, requiring the discard of at least 2 coins. The only gain from converting this second card would be the purchase of an additional card, providing a gain of at most 2 additional wealth. So converting a second card cannot gain, and will sometimes lose.

I believe that the rules end up having the same consequences as the simpler rule that one may convert cards to coins at any time, and this may have been the intention.

It's a special case - only if you have too many cards. It exists, but isn't general permission to do this at that time.

Do you have a source for the "without considering" part?



It's a very small effect.

I think the first of those is the right approach to FAQ lists. The one I maintain (for another game) I haven't uploaded at all. But I have put a link to it in the Links section.

I think the meaning of the storehouse icon on the Clothmaker tile would be a good addition. (I don't think I missed it in the FAQ - but if I did it wouldn't be the first time I've missed something this weekend.)

This answer is correct. Perhaps, the FAQ could be improved by adding the word "voluntary" before "convert".

If you start allowing people to convert cards to coins at any time, then they try to do so in the middle of receiving production, resulting in an infinite loop...

I've edited the FAQ to cover Andy Latto's question about converting cards to coins.

(And I mention that here in case anyone is reading the messages down here and is confused at the "continuity errors" in the thread.)

Christopher, I'd be happy to discuss the sources I have over private e-mail.

In the current version of the FAQ, you say:



Can you justify the "almost"? in this sentence? I can think of no circumstance in which it would be a disadvantage. Thus, all the places in which you emphasize that you *must* do something are potentially confusing, since they sound like they put some constraint on the player, while they are just in fact telling the player to do something they would always do even if it were optional. Similarly, the emphasis on the fact that you can only voluntarily convert *one* card to coins seems misplaced; even if it were legal to convert two cards, there would be no circumstance in which it would be desirable to do so, since it would involve the loss of at least 2 coins, and at most two coins can be gained from the additional card purchase this might allow.

I had previously thought that there would be no substansive change to the game if you were allowed to convert a card into coins at any time, provided of course that the distribution of production cards is regarded as atomic, so that one can convert cards to coins before recieving cards, or after recieving cards, but not in between receiving cards and receiving additional cards. However, I now believe there is one situation where this would cause a very slight change in the game. Suppose you have a card that could be converted into coins, and doing so would cause the loss of one coin, but the additional coins would allow the purchase of an additional card, thereby possibly gaining back the lost coin and the additional coin. With the rules as they are, you must decide whether to take this gamble at the conclusion of your own turn. If you could sell cards at any time, you could defer that decision until after all the auctions are concluded, just before you recieve production cards. (If you wanted to force the decision to be made without knowledge of what development cards would be available next turn, you could accomplish this by switching the order of phases 2b and 2c).

Personally, I feel that any disadvantages of this rule change are outweighed by the resulting simplicity (it would eliminate 3 questions from the FAQ).

If you were allowed to convert cards to coins at any time, no one would ever hold a 4 card unless there were no 5s or 6s in the deck - if you have a 4, turn it into 4 coins, which turn into a card. Eventually you get a 5 or a 6 and stop the process.

Personally, I don't think it's at all confusing to have rules that require an action that's always a good idea even if it were optional. I think most games have such rules. E.g., in Puerto Rico, when you sell a good you must take money equal to its value. Would the rules really be less confusing if they were written to say that you may choose whether or not to take money when you sell a good??

Dan says:



Apparently you didn't understand what I meant when I said:



In my proposed rule set, at some point, after converting as many cards as you like to coins, you recieve cards, paying as many coins as appropriate to add to your production. If after doing so, you have a four card, you can immediately turn it into four coins if you want to. But you can't then buy a card with those four coins; you have already recieved your production for this turn, and you can no more say "I have 4 coins; give me another card now" than you can say "I have production of 8 give me two more coins now".

That is, you cannot change cards into coins during the process



only before or after this deal occurs.

Does this make sense?
b

I don't have the rules handy right now, but I bet that they say something like "you take money when you sell a good". I agree that it would unnecessarily complicate the rules if it instead said that you may choose whether or not to take money. But I also think that if the rules said "you *must* take the full amount of money when you sell a good", and "you *must* take *all* of the bribes on a role you choose", that many people (though probably not you, David, since you're very good at taking things literally) would find this confusing as well; they would think, from the emphasis on the fact that it is a requirement that you take all the money, that this was being emphasized to indicate that you have to take all the money even if you don't want to, and that would have people searching the rules to find the (nonexistent) circumstances when they would not want to.

I confess that I see little value in catering to such a "problem".

By making a requirement, not an option, to convert sets of four coins into a card during production, you are eliminating a 99%+ non-decision. There are weird corner cases involving card-counting near the end of the deck where you might choose not to turn four coins for a card during production if you knew the card you would get is a "4" and you would rather another player got that card instead. I don't want players to waste time thinking about this (and, yes, I know some who would) or to introduce other questions, like do I get to look at the cards I got before deciding to turn in my cards for coins, etc. Therefore, you must turn in sets of four coins for cards during production.

Questions:

1.) I assume the 5 cubes (forget what they are called) you use to mark your discounts on the main board are not limited to 5? You can still buy advances that give discounts and you still get the discounts after the 5th.

2.) The victory track only goes to 40+ (not looking at the board right now, maybe it was 42+, I forget), but I assume you can go higher, or do you max out and have to use tie breaker if multiple people max out?

I do agree the rules aren't the best, but having played Scepter of Zavandor helped some!

It's not my knowing that's the point. I would take the view that, as a matter of fairness, such a statement, which reads as reflecting badly on someone unnamed (and I don't know who), if not able to be backed up by a publicly attributable source, perhaps ought not to be in the FAQ list. (I'm referring to the "without considering" part, not that such a change was made, which is clear.)

I would take the view that the mere existence of a FAQ already reflects badly on someone unnamed, so some extra bad reflection is probably not a big problem.

I think the "without considering" basically removes doubt from the
FAQ reader's mind about whether the addition was intentional, and puts
the responsibility on whether the readers trust me or not.

If the unnamed maligned party would like to contact me and set the record straight, I'd be happy to change the FAQ, but at the moment it is what I believe to be true.

Without adding IMO before the "without considering" it makes the whole FAQ read like it's your opinion as opposed to just that one sentence. When I read that sentence it made the rest of the FAQ have less credibility.

The number of discount cubes provided is not a limit (this is in the rules, near the end).

The track is not intended to be a limit. I have seen games where one player exceeded 40 VPs, but I have never seen one where two players did.

In any event, the track was supposed to wrap around if needed: the space marked "40+" (after the "40" space) was to be turned into a "41+" space, allowing players to continue using the "2, 3..." spaces that the track begins with if they were ever needed...

IMHO, that lessened credibility is the attitude you should take towards all fan-created FAQs. I'm clearly not the publisher or the designer, so I don't have any vested interest in making sure that the BGG community is playing by the correct rules; I'm providing and maintaining the FAQ out of charity and because I want to see the game do well despite its less-than-stellar rules. But I don't have any accountability or responsibility, so you should decide on your own whether you're going to trust me or not.

Guess what, maybe the reason the whole FAQ reads like my opinion is because the whole FAQ is my opinion! But hopefully most of my opinions also match those of the designer's.

If you want to go ahead and think that maybe the person who added 20 cards to the deck knew how it was going to affect gameplay, go ahead and think that. If you want to feel that my reluctance to name name publically means that the answers to the other questions are wrong, you can go ahead and think that too. It's a game -- you purchased it, you get to play the game however you want.

I don't think this is a very constructive attitude. The last thing we need is four different "FAQs" because the various FAQ authors all feel inclined to express their own contrary opinions. So to the extent that your goal is to make a constructive contribution to the community, I do think you have an obligation to try to make your FAQ reflective of, at least, what the community thinks, rather than just what you think.

There's a separate debate here as to whether the rules of a game should
be decided by "the community" versus "the designer" versus "the publisher", but I see your general point here.

I certainly agree with you that it would not be a constructive contribution if I stated things in the FAQ that I believed but were contrary to my sources. But this isn't the case here. The answers in the FAQ are, as far as I know, correct. But that doesn't mean they aren't my opinions, and I see no reason to disguise that. As long as they stay my opinions, it means that mistakes reflect badly on me, and not on the designer or publisher -- and that is my intent.

If I were the publisher, yes, I feel that I should write the FAQ as if
it were gospel, and here's how everything should be, and there aren't
any sources because I am the source. But I'm not the publisher, and I don't think it's constructive to act like the FAQ isn't my personal interpretation of what's correct and what's not (based on primary and secondary research).

Also, having four different FAQs is a much smaller problem than having no FAQ at all. If a more authoritative FAQ would like to show up, I would be perfectly happy to withdraw mine, if that makes you feel better.