Dominion Strategy Forum

Dominion => The Bible of Donald X. => Topic started by: theory on June 17, 2011, 08:51:56 pm

Title: Reaction timings and revealing multiple Reactions
Post by: theory on June 17, 2011, 08:51:56 pm
Source (http://boardgamegeek.com/article/3608070#3608070)


Quote from: Donald X.
In general you can't have things happen simultaneously in games that have rules on cards that interact. There are very specific things you can do simultaneously, but that's it; otherwise you are just asking for trouble. With Reactions, the options were 1) reveal all of them, then pick an order and resolve them in that order, or 2) reveal and resolve them one at a time. As you know we went with #2.
Another factor is, it should be clear what happens from looking at the cards and knowing the basic rules. The intention is that the FAQ is useless. It's just there to get you to the answer faster and easier; the answer is already there in the general rules and card text.

If you Secret Chamber into a Moat, we don't know if you had that Moat in your hand already or what. So the sensible thing is to let you play that Moat - and that certainly seemed like what people would want to do. That then further applies to a second use of Secret Chamber.

From the rules and the card text, nothing prevents you from using a single Moat or Secret Chamber multiple times. It just isn't normally useful to do so. I knew that going this route meant that reactions couldn't be cumulative; or rather, reactions that do cumulative things have to also include a cost of some sort, rather than just "reveal this." This was no surprise, and those hypothetical future reactions have had this covered for a while.


I worried about whether or not we should have a "you can't lock up the game doing nothing" rule. What if I want to just Secret Chamber over and over, shuffling the top cards? In the end I decided that that's just like if I sit there refusing to decide what to buy. You don't get to just waste everyone's time doing nothing; that's a general rule in all games without timers. In a tournament, I would treat it as stalling.