Confusion about stacking card abilities

[jjm298]

My question involves one very specific scenario that my friends and I encountered while playing munchkin, and it may never come up again so I apologize in advance. The rules in Munchkin say that we resolve each card played before we take into account cards played afterwards. This led to confusion about cards played in response to other cards played. My example is this:

Player 1 is a level 9 cleric that has the wand of dowsing. He plays it so that he can draw divine intervention from the discard pile and win the game. Player 2, in response to seeing the wand of dowsing played and realizing player 1's plan, curses player 1 to lose his class.

My question is this: is the wand of dowsing card resolved first and the divine intervention played before the curse takes effect or does the curse take effect before the wand card is resolved. I suppose a third option is that the wand resolves allowing the player to draw divine intervention, then the curse resolves before divine intervention is played from the hand. I am just confused about how the cards stack. Also, if we are wrong in assuming the wand of dowsing can remove a card from either stack then I am an idiot, but I still believe my example could clarify our broader confusion about how cards stack.

[Brf]

In this post http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...53&postcount=7 Andrew states that the player playing Wand of Dowsing must be allowed to complete his action of drawing the card before another can be played.

In that particular thread he also stated, several posts later, that you could theoretically play a card between the "draw" and the "play", but that would not apply in this case, since DI is played immediately when it is drawn.

[Clipper]

Yeah, if somebody knows what card they want from the discard piles, then you must let Wand of Dowsing complete. The way I understand the rulings is that if they don't declare they want to get a particular card and instead started looking through the piles to choose the best card, then it would be OK to play the Curse then. This is so the dumpster diving type actions don't stall the game.

It's almost always dangerous to have a Level 9 Cleric at the table.

[RevBob]

Originally Posted by Clipper

Yeah, if somebody knows what card they want from the discard piles, then you must let Wand of Dowsing complete. The way I understand the rulings is that if they don't declare they want to get a particular card and instead started looking through the piles to choose the best card, then it would be OK to play the Curse then. This is so the dumpster diving type actions don't stall the game.

While that may work fine as a house rule to streamline play, the rules as written don't allow that sort of parallel processing. It doesn't matter whether the guy knows what he wants from the discards; he has to make his selection before the Wand play is considered complete. Only at that point does the game "unlock" to let the curse be played. Andrew's ruling, as cited above, is quite clear on that point.

Now, if he was dithering over whether to use the Wand to begin with, that's a whole different story; he hasn't done anything, so there's no need to wait for him to make up his mind. But once he plays it, ya gotta wait.

[Clipper]

Originally Posted by RevBob

While that may work fine as a house rule to streamline play, the rules as written don't allow that sort of parallel processing. It doesn't matter whether the guy knows what he wants from the discards; he has to make his selection before the Wand play is considered complete. Only at that point does the game "unlock" to let the curse be played. Andrew's ruling, as cited above, is quite clear on that point.

Now, if he was dithering over whether to use the Wand to begin with, that's a whole different story; he hasn't done anything, so there's no need to wait for him to make up his mind. But once he plays it, ya gotta wait.

On the contrary, cards that have a dumpster diving effect where you will spend a long time looking through the discards and you don't have a card in mind have been ruled to resolve when you start to look through the discards. Andrew also backed this up recently by saying that during the reasonable time period at the end of combat, knowing the card you want to get means the others have to wait with these types of abilities, while the game can continue otherwise. This still works with Andrew's other ruling you reference, if we consider that to be a case of knowing which card you wanted to get when you started dumpster diving.

[Andrew Hackard]

The only time the rules talk about timing at all is during combat. In all other cases, a card must be allowed to fully resolve (unless a canceler such as Wishing Ring is played) before another card takes effect.

[Clipper]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

The only time the rules talk about timing at all is during combat. In all other cases, a card must be allowed to fully resolve (unless a canceler such as Wishing Ring is played) before another card takes effect.

This seems to directly contradict the post I linked earlier. However, this discussion is also massively sidetracking this thread, so I created a new thread in the main forum to highlight the contradictions.

[Blazinjsin]

For some reason Reap The Whirlwind always shows up around the same time as Wand Of Dowsing and usually makes for a nice long fishing expedition