Card Effects

Every civilization card carries three printed effects. A card sitting in your victory row may be spent on exactly one of them, after which the card leaves the game — your row shrinks, and your end score with it. The options are always the same three kinds; only their strength grows with the card's rank.

A is declared in the declare step, AFTER every meld is face up and in leader order — you can see what you are trying to beat, and so can the player after you. B is used during your own map phase, when the board in front of you is already settled. C is taken in your own map phase, at any point in it.

What a colony is — effect B

B no longer settles into ground you already hold. It founds new ground: you lay tiles, put units on them from your board, and fortify them. At most one victory card may be spent on B per turn.

The fortification coins come from the general supply, not from your own gold — B is the one place in Blink where a fortification is free.

What “add this card’s rank” means — effect A

This changes only the total the trick is judged on. It never adds cards to your meld, never puts a unit on the map, and never lets you exceed your meld-size limit. Your meld is still exactly the cards you physically played — a straight of four is four cards to spend, whatever you declared.

The bonus is virtual: when the highest total wins, your meld is worth more, so it can take a trick it would otherwise lose. The reward is tempo — you win the trick, spend your full meld, and act first — not size.

A spent victory card is gone: it leaves the game, not your hand, and it is no longer worth points in your victory row at the end. That is the whole cost. So declaring a 19 buys nineteen points of trick and gives up a card that was scoring for you.

In v0.22 this effect read “+1 / +2 cards”, because the trick went to the most cards. Under a total, one extra card was worth an average card and the wording had to change with the rule. The v0.22 version is in the variants book.

Several A effects in one trick

Nothing stops two or more players spending A in the same trick. Each applies, and the trick resolves on the modified totals — highest total wins, then most cards, then highest single rank, then earliest played, exactly as normal. Declarations go leader first and clockwise, after the reveal, so a later player sees every earlier declaration before choosing their own — answering, rather than guessing.

The production reference: the exact A / B / C each rank prints. All four suits of a rank share the same effects. A card's suit matters only for effect B's terrain requirement, and for the meld shapes the card can join.