Taking Damage and Cure Spell


Rules Questions and Gameplay Discussion

Dark Archive

Just a clarification. My daughter is playing Lini. She fails to defeat a monster by 3 so should take 3 damage. In her hands she has a cure spell, and two other cards. Can she cast the Cure spell before taking damage thus having to only discard 2 cards? I believe the answer is yes.

Next step of the question, if her 3 cards are all Cure Spells can she cast them all? She is not casting them on a check so the one card type per check doesn't really apply, but it is all in the damage resolution step so....Again, I'm pretty sure from my reading of the rules for taking damage that she could play all three cure spells because she is not playing them to affect the check.


Superstigs wrote:

Just a clarification. My daughter is playing Lini. She fails to defeat a monster by 3 so should take 3 damage. In her hands she has a cure spell, and two other cards. Can she cast the Cure spell before taking damage thus having to only discard 2 cards? I believe the answer is yes.

Next step of the question, if her 3 cards are all Cure Spells can she cast them all? She is not casting them on a check so the one card type per check doesn't really apply, but it is all in the damage resolution step so....Again, I'm pretty sure from my reading of the rules for taking damage that she could play all three cure spells because she is not playing them to affect the check.

Short answer: no, and no.

She cannot play the first one because you can only play cards during a check that afect the check. Cure can only be played between encounters, not during them. Hawkmoon will be on shortly I'm sure (he's ALWAYS on it seems) and he can provide you with a wonderful guide he cooked up listing at what point you can play cards that can be played at any time (counterintuitively, you cannot play cards that say "any time during your turn" at any time during your turn). Cards like Cure should generally be cast before or between explores, as a basic rule of thumb.

The second question becomes moot because she can't play the cures. Anything she can play is affecting the check, and so limited to the one card rule.

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Hopefully that was clear enough. It'll get you started until someone (probably Hawkmoon) gets in here and cites paragraph and page numbers. :)


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You rang?

Here is the guide Orbis mentioned. And he was spot on in his explanation.

The reason you can't play cure is sort of two fold. First, Cure doesn't relate to taking damage. So when you are dealt damage you can only play cards that relate to that.

Rulebook v3 p9 wrote:
If a card in your hand does not specify when it can be played, you can generally play it at any time, with the exception that during an encounter you may only perform specific actions at specific times.

So Cure can be played pretty much anytime, except during an encounter.

Cure is actually mentioned as an example in the "Things to Keep in Mind" section at the end of the book.

Rulebook v3 p22 wrote:
Cards Don’t Do What They Don’t Say. Each card’s powers reference specific situations, and if you’re not in those situations, you can’t play it. If a card says it works on “a check,” you can play it on anyone’s check, but if a card says “your check,” it only works on yours. You can’t play a Cure spell to reduce the amount of damage you’re taking, because Cure isn’t about reducing damage...Each card tells you what it’s for, and you can use it only for that.

And the second thing is, you have to finish one thing before you start another. So since Cure doesn't relate to taking damage, you can play it to reduce damage. And you also can't take a "timeout" to play cure before you actually deal with the damage.

Rulebook v3 p22 wrote:
Finish One Thing Before You Start Something Else. You do many things in a specific order, and you need to finish doing each thing before you do the next thing...Don’t start a new process until you’ve finished the last one. (That said, if the game doesn’t specify an order for things, you decide the order.)

So, no Cure to deal with damage. I hope Lini survived.

Oh and if you do end up with 3 Cures in your hand, it might be a good idea to play 1 even if you only have 1 card in your discard pile, to avoid potentially having to discard them.

Happy adventuring!


Hawkmoon269 wrote:
So since Cure doesn't relate to taking damage, you can play it to reduce damage. ...

Just want to point out a minor but potentially confusing typo. The word in bold should be "can't". Probably obvious to all in the context of the rest of the post, but can't be too careful...


Oops. Yeah thanks. Typed too fast there.

Dark Archive

Right the question isn't so much about damage reduction, but more about reducing the effect upon the character. If I play a spell before damage is applied, but after the encounter occurs then I can get use out of the card since I'm discarding it anyhow. But it makes since to me that it would put a spellcasting character out of balance if they could do non encounter effects before damage was applied (Strength, Speed, Cure, Augury, etc being spells that come to mind). Putting it to the RPG "swift action and the MTG "instant spell", the thought being that you play the spell before damage is applied. I understand the rules based on Hawkmoon and Orbis, thanks both! We will correct and hope that Lini survives playing it correctly.


Yeah, making everything instant speed would be too good with how damage works. Things are never instant speed in this game, there is no "chaining."

Dark Archive

Orbis Orboros wrote:
Yeah, making everything instant speed would be too good with how damage works. Things are never instant speed in this game, there is no "chaining."

Yeah the difficulty for me mentally comes in that using the cure spell to reshuffle your discard before the damage applies sounds like it would work because it's not being used to affect damage or a check since Cure doesn't work for either of those. Thanks again for the replies. My kids and I are really enjoying the game, but want to make sure we are playing it right too (of course to some degree I look at it like an RPG in that if you're having fun then it's not too wrong.) ;)

Now on to completing our second go round of Undead Uprising. 5 Blessing left and two location with us knowing which location the villain is at.....


Did you ever play Yugioh? It's exactly like the damage step there.

If not, never mind.

Just think of everything as a sorcery, a continuous ability, or a triggered ability; I think that covers it all nicely.

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