Sorry. I've been playing for a while now and I've searched this forum and studied a range of cards, but...

It's Friday and the bottle of wine has only one function and that is to prevent child services being called. If, like Adaptability, the wine allowed me to understand Gonk that would be briliant. But no.

Can someone please explain why I wouldn't be wasting points to play Gonk? What is its purpose beyond wasting an action?

Simple version first: is the wine telling you that the shield token you put on Gonk is coming off your ship? Because it's not. It comes from the supply, and you then can use it to recover a shield on your ship after you take damage.

If the wine wasn't telling you that, here's the longer version.

In most games, you have an action in the first round that doesn't really matter because nobody's shooting anybody yet. Put a shield on Gonk then.

Even if that's the only time you use the "bank a shield" version of Gonk, you've now got a shield token you can recover later with an action. If you've blown through the initial joust and don't think you're going to get shot at this turn, go ahead and recover a shield!

It doesn't fit in every list, and there are certainly ways to use it that are less than efficient, but it's not a terrible card.

Aaaah. Hahaha! The wine WAS telling me that the shield token was coming off Gonk. Bloody wine.

Thank you so much... it all makes sense now.

Simple version first: is the wine telling you that the shield token you put on Gonk is coming off your ship? Because it's not. It comes from the supply, and you then can use it to recover a shield on your ship after you take damage.

Aaaah. Hahaha! The wine WAS telling me that the shield token was coming off Gonk. Bloody wine.

Thank you so much... it all makes sense now.

Simple version first: is the wine telling you that the shield token you put on Gonk is coming off your ship? Because it's not. It comes from the supply, and you then can use it to recover a shield on your ship after you take damage.

The wine was right about that, you do take a shield off Gonk.

You can put a token on Gonk from outside the game, or take one off him/it and put it on your ship. As Digitalbusker says, put a shield token on Gonk on the first turn. If you have a slow start you can put a stack on Gonk and then recover that many (one at a time). If you have a slow game, you can add and remove more throughout.

It might not be helping that there are half as many tokens on Gonk than you think there are!

Cheers

Aaaah. Hahaha! The wine WAS telling me that the shield token was coming off Gonk. Bloody wine.

By which I meant that "The wine WAS telling me that the shield token was coming off the ship first". Got it. Thanks