Dahlgaard’s Gifts

Two optional variants: Magician Powers and Duel of Magicians.

Magician Powers

The Magician Powers variant adds three decks of Power cards with Fame thresholds 1, 16 and 36. It requires the Dark Alley and is not recommended with Dawn of Technology.

At setup, shuffle each Power deck. Each player receives four Powers of each color, keeps eight after discarding four, and begins with three Shards instead of one. At the start of an Assignment phase, each player may learn up to one Power. To place a Power, its highlighted slot must be open, the card must allow that slot, and the player must meet its Fame threshold (or pay the difference in Coins). A new Power replaces any Power already in that slot.

Place Shards on the player board’s Power slots from bottom to top. A slot opens when all its Shard symbols are filled. Spend Shards from the top down; spending a Shard from a Power slot returns that Power to the player’s hand. Unlike the base rules, Shards do not score Fame at the end of a Magician Powers game.

Duel of Magicians

This optional variant is designed to make a two-player game more varied. Use the Turn Setup cards and the special Performance cards with neutral Trick markers. At setup, create a face-up deck of seven Turn Setup cards, or five if playing without the Dark Alley. After rolling the Downtown dice, reveal the next card and cover the locations and Theater weekdays it shows with unused player-color disks. The visible next card lets players anticipate the following layout.

The printed gray markers on Duel performance cards can form links. Resolve those links using the normal Trick Link rules. Other core rules remain in effect unless the variant states otherwise.

Sources

Dahlgaard’s Gifts official rulesheet. Its Magician Powers and Duel variants are separate; they are not both required in every Anniversary Edition game.