Spell Ring Artifact Rules

[lestodante]

Damn! Seems I asked the same question 3 years ago and already forgot. I am getting old...

[HispaZargon]

Hahaha... well, it demonstrates that your thoughts are solid through time

Jokes appart, it is rare that this kind of questions had not been already discussed in the Inn, so I checked, but who knows, it is always good to revisit them, maybe new questions and opinions appear.

[Bareheaded Warrior]

Well, I have always played with the Spell Ring exactly as you play (the ring allows its user to cast a second time one of his spells that has been already cast during the running quest and in a different turn than current one).

Nevertheless, your doubt is logical due to the looking vagueness of the text written in the card. However, if we attend to the usual wording used by MB in other North American HeroQuest cards, if the Spell Ring could allow up to 3 total uses of a spell instead of 2, I would bet the wording should have been something like the following: "... to cast one spell two extra times ..." or "... to cast one spell two more times ...", and it is not.

Additionally, the last sentence in the card also suggests me that using the ring eliminates the posibility of casting, in the usual way, the spell you have selected because 'you have taken one of your spells to store it inside the ring', so now you can only cast it by using the Spell Ring since it is the only place where the spell can stay. That's how I think they wanted to interpretate it, it is not the unique place where the spells are officially treated as 'objects' from rules point of view... so I guess the easier interpretation is probably the correct one.

Then, in my humble opinion I think we are playing it correctly.

I agree with the first statement "the ring allows its user to cast a second time one of his spells that has been already cast during the running quest and in a different turn than current one" and the second in that the spell can be cast twice only, i.e. one extra time than normal, but the third statement is interesting.

If you have only a limited number of 'slots', 9 in the case of the Wizard, in which you pre-load spells between Quests and prior to the Quest "you have taken one of your spells to store it inside the ring' then logic would dictate that you now have a spare slot and can pre-load another spell. As I don't think that was the intention, might it be simpler just to state that the Spell Ring "allows you to retain/restore one spell card that you have cast and would normally discard for use one more time only" and scrap the idea that you have to select the spell up-front because whilst the Wizard may be clairvoyant I'm not sure that it is fair to assume the player is, so how would they have any idea at the start of the Quest which spell they wanted to cast a second time, it seems an unnecessary and frustrating restriction.

Alternatively, if you wished to boost the ring a little more, you could just state that the wearer rolls a combat dice each time they have cast a spell and if they roll a they get to keep the spell card and use it again...