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1

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Subscription pricing & structure

« on: May 12, 2017, 05:09:22 pm »

Man, they're giving you, essentially, 40 bucks.  I think that's pretty much the opposite of terrible, given they never saw any of the money that went to MF.

Sure, they didn't but Jay and Donald hopefully did (unless MF/Goko screwed them over totally). Didn't Donald say that earlier purchases would be honored? They could just say to ShuffleIT, "we won't demand royalties on the expansions people already paid for in earlier incarnations of Dominion Online".

I don't play nearly enough to justify a subscription cost. I would pay the price of, say, a good full price Steam game, for a new implementation of Dominion. But it sucks to have to pay for the licenses all over again.

This business model is screaming "casual players not wanted!". Apropos steam games, my library of little-played/unplayed steam games suggests that casual-hostile pricing policies may not be the best policy.

2

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Monty Python and the Holy Grail Board

« on: September 16, 2013, 07:04:33 am »

The obvious solution with Sir Robin (and thematic, too) would be to always put him on top after shuffling. He's always first, and always first to run away.

3

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Isotropish Leaderboard (alternative to Goko Pro)

« on: August 05, 2013, 07:40:05 am »

My write-in suggestion (I'm not very invested in this so don't take it too seriously): Remi Coulom's Whole History Rating.

It's similar to TrueSkill, but instead of incremental updates to a skill and variance parameter, it calculates "the exact maximum a posteriori over the whole rating history of all players". It's more computing intensive than TrueSkill, but still fairly fast.

4

Dominion Articles / Re: Hard counters vs. soft counters

« on: October 17, 2012, 05:06:28 am »

A totally hard counter to an attack (or strategy), to me implies that the attack (or strategy) will simply never be pursued (or if it is, it will be an objectively bad choice).

But most counters are at least slightly soft. Although menagerie can make torturers help rather than hurt, if buying menageries is costly (say, no +buy, or other important 3-4 cost cards) it might be worth buying them for the +3 cards and the occasional attack that gets through.

5

Rules Questions / Re: Procession + Island

« on: October 15, 2012, 09:54:37 am »

Too bad they can't get stuff like this right.

If I were to program a Dominion application, I would define all abilities that move a card (trash it, discard it, play it, etc.) as having a defined origin as well as a destination. The origin is given either in the ability itself -- for instance your hand (Remodel) or the play area (Procession's trashing ability) -- or, and I think this only applies to triggered "when you gain" abilities like Watchtower, it's given in the ability that gained the card (it could be gained to your discard or to your deck, and this would be the origin of the "when you gain" ability). When it becomes time to actually resolve the ability, if the card isn't at its origin, it isn't moved.

I think you have to do it this thoroughly if you want it to never fail. There are just too many card combinations to try to program each each one specifically.

There's one thing that's certain, and that's that when Guilds comes out, you will have to revise your assumptions

I haven't looked at Isotropic's source code, but I did look at Keldon's Race for the Galaxy program. It's really well written C code, super-readable, elegant, extensible. But, I know he got quite a few challenges when implementing the last expansion (when I looked at it, it was at the second).

6

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Another way to break the -1 buy rule.

« on: October 10, 2012, 07:37:22 am »

It's not at all uncommon to buy a Highway with $5, even when you lack +Buy.  Unless your deck is a wreck, it's usually going to be better than a Silver, and it's not all that uncommon (though decidedly less common) to buy a Silver with $5.

If you have a lot of dead draw potential in your deck (+card but no +actions) then highway becomes worse - potentially worse than silver if there's no +buy or gainers. But a deck isn't necessarily wrecked just because it has many opportunities to draw dead.

Gainers and other care-about-cost cards is the other thing the proposed King's road helps with. A set without +buy or anything that cares about cost is quite rare, but yes, in those sets the card would be a no-brainer no-buy. On the other hand, with even a lowly workshop it becomes pretty broken. -3 cost for one cantrip is too much.

7

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Card That Name! -- Episode 2: Blood Money

« on: October 05, 2012, 08:00:36 am »

Blood money needs to involve silver somehow, in my opinion. Ideally thirty, but I know that's overkill.

Blood Money - $4
Treasure-Victory

1 Coin. Gain a silver to hand. At the end of game, this card is worth -1VP for every three silvers you have in your deck.

---

When you trash this, gain a curse.

8

Rules Questions / Re: Fun-looking Board - Ruined by the Bane (any guesses on that card?)

« on: October 04, 2012, 04:46:17 am »

Ah, the swingler, always an annoying card. Getting the governor turned into a duchy was bad, but getting your young witch hit twice, making it miss your hand, was pretty horribly unlucky too. Adding to that Megitt's early Goons, I certainly don't think I could have done any better.

9

Dominion General Discussion / Re: An Attempt at Theme Discussion

« on: October 04, 2012, 04:20:10 am »

I'm a huge fan of cooperative games like Arkham Horror and Pandemic, which have too much luck to be anything but Ameritrash.

Luck is not a disqualifier for an Eurogame. Pandemic is an eurogame, Arkham Horror isn't, because

-Cthulhu theme, -3 to Euro (the only theme less Euro I'd say is zombies)
-Complicated rules with many exceptions (in an attempt) to serve the theme, -2 to Euro
-Players get into fights. -1 to Euro. They're resolved by rolling six-sided dice, -1 to Euro.

Although Pandemic was designed around a theme, the designer was willing to include mechanics that made very little sense in the theme, for reasons of gameplay (only pass cards if the city name matches).

It's also a cultural thing. Arkham Horror was designed for the adult comic book store crowd (nothing wrong with that crowd, I am in that crowd myself), and a publisher oriented towards that market (Fantasy Flight Games). Pandemic was designed for the familygeek crowd, less the kind of geek that hangs at comic book stores, more the kind of geek who works for Yahoo as an interaction designer. The publisher (Z-man) is also an Euro publisher, perhaps not quite as family-oriented as Rio Grande Games or Hans im Glück, but far closer to those than to Fantasy Flight.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Rigoletto

« on: October 03, 2012, 08:35:09 am »

Who curses Rigoletto? No, he has bad luck, but the whole cursing and swearing revenge stuff is his domain. Very thematic.

The Duke isn't a king (at least not in the opera, I think he is in the play it's based on), so no king's court. I can't think of any card to represent Gilda or the assassin. Maybe a saboteur for the latter, then some card costing more than 3 for the former.

11

Dominion Articles / Re: Deck Archetypes

« on: October 03, 2012, 07:43:04 am »

I would like to see a sort of taxonomy / canon of deck types you should be familiar with too, but I'm not sure the OP's division is so useful. Attacks must usually play a part in both money/terminal-based decks and more action-oriented decks, so distinguishing attack decks as a top-level thing I'm not so sure about. I think the most important distinction in Dominion (and thus the one that should be at the top of the hierarchy) is between those decks that try to play more than one action per turn, and those that don't. Here's my proposal:

* Treasure-terminal decks
-* Big Money-type decks (e.g Big Money Wharf, Big Money Envoy, Big Money Masquerade)
--* Alternate treasure decks (Fool's gold, etc.)
--* Money+trashing decks (e.g Golden deck)
-* Terminal-based rushes (e.g IGG/Duchy, Horse Traders/Duke, Workshop/Gardens)

* Action-based decks
-* Megaturn engines (e.g Horn of Plenty, KC/Bridge, Governor, Native Village/Nomad Camp/Coppersmith
-* Full draw engines
--* Alchemist-based
--* Hunting party-based
--* Scrying pool-based
--* village&draw-based
-* Steady engines (either dig through whole deck but not in play at same time, or full draw but not every turn)
--* Minion-based
--* Conspirator-based
--* Tactician-based
---* Single tactician
---* Double tactician
-* Rush engines (Ironworks+gardens/islands/Silk roads)

12

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Stratified Random Kingdoms

« on: September 28, 2012, 05:46:46 am »

The thing about attacks, and cursers especially, is that they often have a runaway character with an early (possibly random) advantage translating into a huge one later. But they're not the only cards which have this. It's just a feature of Dominion, as Davio says it would take a full redesign to change it, at which point you'd have another game anyway.

One of the reasons I was so interested in Gauntlet of Fools is that while it appears a simpler game than Dominion, it has fewer runaway effect since there's no building up of strength (barring the occasional character of weapon, like the sack of loot). In general, a tactical error late in the Gauntlet phase should have almost as big effect as an early one.

I played Kingdom Builder for the first time yesterday (OK, this does start to sound like alt.fan.dxv), and that game has very little runaway effect as well, compared to Dominion.

13

Dominion General Discussion / Re: An Attempt at Theme Discussion

« on: September 25, 2012, 04:47:42 am »

I mean, there's some medieval thing going on, but if you would have slapped a random license on it (Star Wars/Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Manga!) it would still be a great game, so the theme is pretty much interchangeable.

People tend to speak as if this is a sign of weak theme. I think rather it's a sign of a good game.

The most absurd claim of this sort I've seen is the claim that Mage Knight is weakly themed, because you could paste a business theme onto it if you wanted... It's plainly obvious (to me anyway) that the mechanics in Mage Knight are chosen from a fantasy adventure perspective - sure, you could push experience levels and exploration onto businessmen somehow if you really wanted, but it would be obvious it was an RPG-like game in disguise.

Dominion, by comparison, could fairly have any theme that involves building up something fairly broad and varied. In other words a space empire retheme would be unproblematic, a competing circus companies retheming would be a little narrow and probably feel odd, and the zombie retheming which actually exists is pretty awful.

14

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Google + Walled Village

« on: September 19, 2012, 02:37:16 am »

I bet the card they *really* wanted Donald to make was Walled Garden.

Action/Victory, Cost 5, 2vp. +1 card +1 action. When you discard this from play, put it on top of your deck. (You still get your hand, but you have to get it through the walled garden.)

But that's more like Apple 

Google have far better policies than most companies when it comes to deleting and/or moving out your data from their services. Backing up gmail offline is easy and a thing I recommend everyone should do (if you can do with poorer search), you can delete it from gmail afterwards. Not many people know you can look at and edit your search history at history.google.com . www.dataliberation.org shows you what options are available for migrating off Google services - and it's actually a team at Google that's behind it.

A promo card only available if you log in with Google+ is not particularly worse than cards only available if you pay, IMO. Sure, Goko gets your real identity (assuming you don't lie), but if you're paying them with a credit card they probably have that already. As always, how anonymous you want to stay is a tradeoff.

15

Help! / Re: Beaten by a level 0 on a Chapel board! What happened?

« on: September 18, 2012, 06:16:42 am »

I may be totally wrong, but I think I would have gone for some draw earlier, in particular I would have bought labs some of the times you bought markets and bazaars (bazaars? Why would you want bazaars? That goes for you opponent too).

Considering lab is out, I think it was not a good idea to buy a potion in turn 10.

16

Other Games / Re: Gauntlet of Fools: GenCon playtest report

« on: September 11, 2012, 08:22:20 am »

If it wasn't for Kicktraq, I'd probably never thought of making this "complaint" I've seen the game I supported/preordered quickly drop out of the top 30 board game projects, and really underperfom on its projections. And it's a game about boasting!

17

Other Games / Re: Gauntlet of Fools: GenCon playtest report

« on: September 11, 2012, 08:01:32 am »

(Kickstarter really need a public chart on the history of the funding)

That exists: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/2012515236/gauntlet-of-fools

18

Other Games / Re: Gauntlet of Fools: GenCon playtest report

« on: September 11, 2012, 07:21:37 am »

and after all, that's probably not Donald's part of the job...

I'm not suggesting he has skirted his obligations or anything, obviously not, by my estimate Gauntlet of Fools is a terrific game. Not many new games excite me, but this one does.

But since he is (last time I heard) a full time designer living off doing it, it would seem a good idea to talk a little more about it.

Edit: And yes, while it was quickly funded, it could have raised a lot more. Compare it to Resistance: Avalon, the Viticulture boardgame, The Great Heartland Hauling Company etc.

19

Other Games / Re: Gauntlet of Fools: GenCon playtest report

« on: September 11, 2012, 06:11:19 am »

It's conventional to do promotion for a Kickstarter game in the phase where people can actually contribute to the kickstarter. Also, I kind of think most other designers who have a game on Kickstarter know if the rules are online there or not!

I really hope Travis and you are doing this as an experiment to how well a Kickstarter project can do with virtually no promotion. Comparing it to Resistance: Avalon and Flash Point: Fire Rescue (which were excellently promoted) I don't have any better explanation.

Despite your lack of apparent excitement, I am excited about this game. So there!

20

Advertisements / Re: new Donald X game - Gauntlet of Fools - on Kickstarter

« on: August 20, 2012, 02:18:08 am »

The game seems plausibly fun from the intro, but I am pretty skeptical about this part.  What is the chance that a successful entrepreneur can't get access to $15k?

Travis is also launching a lot of other stuff now (Resistance: Avalon and some expansions to Flash Point: Fire Rescue), and he's got shelf space in selected Target stores, and it's a one-man business. Quite possibly, the $15000 is what he needs access to in addition to what he can get access to elsewhere. Few Kickstarter projects are funded entirely by their supporters.

I'm very excited about this game. Travis is supposed to demo it at GenCon. Anyone there who can give an impression?

21

Other Games / Donald X.'s new game on Kickstarter

« on: August 19, 2012, 10:58:00 am »

Hello,

Anyone else interested in Donald X. Vaccarino's new game on Kickstarter, Gauntlet of Fools? I'm a supporter, and I was a little surprised it didn't get more attention... although it's reached its goal already, of course.

It's a fantasy game, where you bid on heroes by boasting, e.g. that they could do this dungeon blindfolded. Selection of heroes and weapons avaliable is random, like the tableau in Dominion. Then they go into the dungeon with the handicaps you bought them for. Dice are rolled for combat - I was a bit skeptical of that, but interestingly it's just for your attack, not your dodge.

It looks a good deal faster to set up than Dominion, and it shares the element of a random tableau (with a gazillion combinations) that you must evaluate before you pick a strategy and start the game proper. As for the actual dungeon/gauntlet phase, I doubt there is quite as much room for tactical cleverness as in Dominion... but the ratio of meaningful to obvious decisions is probably a bit better.

Lighter than Dominion, absolutely (at least with only this game, it cries out for expansions), but still something I'm very excited about.