Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

1

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: August 11, 2015, 05:33:58 am »

Tell me, why are you correct over many other people who have been playing longer? Sure, it might not be a logical argument on it's own, but it's good circumstantial evidence when everyone else is shooting you down that you MIGHT be wrong.

Ehm, I made ample of arguments and do not see how I am less polite than some other posters in here. By the way, "because the majority says so" is no argument. So why don't you tell me why you are right and actually make soem arguments of your own instead of just hiding behind the majority opinion?

2

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: August 02, 2015, 07:35:42 am »

You (Horatio) said in your second post on this page that you know $8 cards should not be in an official set because they're problematic. And yet you're still fine with that.

That sounds a lot like not wanting to improve your cards.

Sure, I could make it more expensive but 9$ cards are problematic in Colony games. I could make it weaker and price it at 7$ but then it would have to be a Double Peddler as anything else would be too strong and this is obviously not what I want
This is why I have to accept its natural limitation of being an 8$ card and try to improve it despite of that.

1. Make blanket claim that fan works are always worse than official/professional works.
[...]
5. Finally claim that his repeated blanket statement was "implicitly stochastic" all along and that he actually doesn't disagree with anybody that the blanket statement was false.

You might wanna stop making things up. I never used the word always or all.

If you do not understand or unwilling to understand that statements of the kind "tomorrow the weather will be bad" means "tomorrow the weather will MOST LIKELY be bad" and not "tomorrow the weather will DEFINITELY" be bad I cannot help you.

That is exactly what I meant. These statements are insulting and based on nothing but seemingly hatred/disrespect towards fan writers/designers/whatever. From this point on I stopped taking you seriously. You disrespect cannot be founded in a rational point of view. Or do you think you are the only one being rational here while everyone else is an ignorant moron? Seems very unlikely.

Pissed off fan card designers indeed. ^^

Saying something like "Shakespeare is better writer than some fan fiction author" or "Kuroswa is a better director than Michael Bay" has nothing to do with hatred (for the umptenth times, I have printed about 40 fan cards so I obviously like fan cards; I also sometimes read fan fiction but just because I subjectively like it from time to time doesn't mean that I lose my objectivity and cannot be honest about it being medicore or bad literature), disrespect or irrationality but with lack of interest to play postmodern relativistic games. Not everybody who is engaged in artistic activity is making something sublime.

3

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Coloured back cantrip

« on: August 02, 2015, 07:17:32 am »

If one wants to enable Snakes to be trashed not just by Doctor and Lookout one can make Snake a Reaction card with something like "When you draw this reveal it and <bad things happens>.". If one wants Snake to be forced-revealed if one gets it via Masquerade (are there any other border cases?) one has to change the text.

Furthermore a Reaction card avoids potential rule issues due to force-playing. For example the text "As soon as this enters your hand for any reason, you must play it (this does not cost an action)." has the problem that you cannot play action cards during your cleanup phase. So you'd have to add quite some text to clarify that a) this is an action card which can be played during the cleanup phase and b) you do not draw a substitute card for it (if I remember correctly the rulebook says that you draw UP to 5 cards).

Of course, if one can trash Snake from hand one would have to make the effect of it harsher .

4

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: August 01, 2015, 08:53:31 am »

But then again nobody here is so arrogant as to assume that some stupid fan cards can as good as official cards.

Should have been obvious that my statement is a stochastic one. If one says that men are stronger than women, that X is a better runner than Z or that the weather will be bad tomorrow it is totally clear to anybody who is not a total moron that the stochastic caveats are implicit.
ON AVERAGE men are stronger than women, UNLESS Z HAS A GOOD DAY AND Z A BAD DAY, X is the better runner than Z, THE LIKELIHOOD THAT IT WILL RAIN TOMORROW IS .8 is how you would state the above stuff unambiguously. Stylistically such statements are quite horrible which is why nobody uses them.

Your statement isn't stochastic.

You trying to tell me that expected values aren't stochastic? Seriously?

I'm trying to tell you that

But then again nobody here is so arrogant as to assume that some stupid fan cards can as good as official cards.

has nothing to do with stochastics. It's not hard to understand, unless of course you refuse to.

Direly wanting to misunderstand me indeed. I already said numerous of times that such statements imply ON AVERAGE and not ALWAYS.

If I said for example that a sprinter is better at running 100m than me I obviously mean that he is on average, i.e. in most of the cases, quicker than me. He might be ill, he might become old or whatever and in these cases he is not quicker.
Obviously it is not necessary to add "on average", every adult person who is not totally braindead (ot intentionally wanting to misread somebody) is aware of all the preconditions, caveats and subtexts of language.

Anyway, this "discussion" has become pointless. If I pissed of some arrogant fan designers who cannot deal with the fact that they are not the next Donald X this is more of an achievement than an error.

5

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: August 01, 2015, 07:07:13 am »

But then again nobody here is so arrogant as to assume that some stupid fan cards can as good as official cards.

Should have been obvious that my statement is a stochastic one. If one says that men are stronger than women, that X is a better runner than Z or that the weather will be bad tomorrow it is totally clear to anybody who is not a total moron that the stochastic caveats are implicit.
ON AVERAGE men are stronger than women, UNLESS Z HAS A GOOD DAY AND Z A BAD DAY, X is the better runner than Z, THE LIKELIHOOD THAT IT WILL RAIN TOMORROW IS .8 is how you would state the above stuff unambiguously. Stylistically such statements are quite horrible which is why nobody uses them.

Your statement isn't stochastic.

You trying to tell me that expected values aren't stochastic? Seriously?
As I already said a zillion times, my point is that the average (To avoid further misunderstandings I use average here in the sense of stochastically average, i.e. 'expected'. When I say "an average Monument yields about 4-6 VPs" this means "the expected VP token payoff of a Monument is around 4-6" but do not use the latter, more technically precise wording as it sucks stylistically. Gee, it is a card game so it should be hyper-crystal-clear that we are not in a deterministic world!) fan card, is far worse than the average official card. Obviously if you restrict the sample to the best fan cards or fan card designers the difference in average quality diminishes.

i can't shake the feeling you're just changing your mind now to avoid looking bad.

Well, I cannot shake the feeling that this is less about (direly wanting to misunderstand) my statement but more about fellow fan card designers being pissed off because somebody told them the obvious: that their cards might be inferior to official cards as they are not Donald X and have not played dozens or hundreds of times with large enough playtesting groups yet.
Unlike you I seem to be able to deal with that simple objjective fact and my subjective preferences for fan cards respectively fan material in general.

6

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Coloured back cantrip

« on: August 01, 2015, 05:57:59 am »

About your hypotehtical Snake Charmer, here are some quick ideas about what Snakes could do.

"Discard a card" is in my opinion bad as you could discard a second snake you have in your hand and to prevent that you'd have to make some messy 'simultaneous play' rules for the card. On the other hand this does not have to be a liability but can be an asset if you want to prevent the scissors effect/ dampen the effect of being massively snake-spammed.

"Gain a Curse" would lead to snowballing so in a game without trashing Snake Charmer would be perhaps be too much of an automatic early buy.
A milder effect of that could be achieved via "Gain a -1VP token".

"If your -1 Card token isn't on your deck, put it there." OR "Take your - token" are obvious ideas with the malus Adventure tokens. The problem is that multiple Snakes in your hand would not stack (again, the question is whether you want them to stack or not)

"Take a Venom token" is also an idea if you wanna play around with different effect for the token (from a practical perspective this has the advantage that you do not have to print new versions of Snake when you modify its effect). With the Venom token you could e.g. stuff like "draw one less card during your Clean-up phase" (compared to the -1 card token milder as the malus is potentially delayed and stronger as stacking is enabled).

7

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Less Ruined Ruins

« on: August 01, 2015, 05:35:34 am »

Personally I've always felt like they needed to be stronger to make the "five different junk cards" mechanic worthwhile.

I totally agree, you rarely play ruins, but in my opinion most straightforward improved ruins would be too strong. For example Ruined Village is too weak but making it a Necropolis would be too strong. Xerxes idea ("You may discard an action card from your hand. If you do, +2 Actions.") sounds fine but I think that one has to be wary of making the interaction among Ruins too strong:
Let's say for arguments sake that you have a hand with all 5 different Ruins. Then Xerxes's Ruined Village and Ruined Library implies a net effect of +1 action +2 cards respectively that you can discard three ruins and draw two new cards.

I find it hard to tell whether this is too strong or too weak.

8

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Coloured back cantrip

« on: August 01, 2015, 05:06:37 am »

This isn't worth making or testing as a card, but I thought it was interesting from a theory point of view. How useful is it to know the position of a particular (in this case otherwise useless, but the idea could be applied to other cards) card in a deck? Should this be worth 1 or 2? (Instinct tells me 1) Would it be improved by giving it shuffle placement, Stash-style? How much is the mystic synergy (and such) worth?

Obviously it is strong when Mystic or Wishing Well is in the deck.
Otherwise it is stronger if the marked card is an action cards than a treasure card due to actions management.

I doubt that marking a card warrants much of a price increase but this is just a guess, the folks who sleeve Dominion can easily test it.

About a marked cantrip, I'd agree with you and say that it is worth 1 or perhaps even 0. Unless there is TR, KC, Herald, Scrying Pool, Peddler or Conspirator (have I forgotten a card?) in the deck, a pure cantrip is not just worthless but bad as you might draw it while having 0 actions. I don't think that it is totally useless though to have the pure cantrip marked as there are situations when this knowledge is helpful, e.g. when you gotta decide between playing a terminal draw and another action and the terminal draw looks bad precisely because you know that you will draw a marked, dead card.

By the way, I like the idea of the Snake mechanic. Not because force-playing a card is interesting per se, decision-density wise it is obviously bad but so are dead cards like curse, but because instead of dead curses you'd have active nasty thingies in your deck.
They probably shouldn't be too nasty though as one already has a pretty large incentive to trash curses but it could introduce some nice tension, wanting to direly get rid of the snakes quickly, into the game. So I'd say that the idea is quite  interesting from an atmospheric perspective.

9

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: August 01, 2015, 04:42:03 am »

you only come here to take on anyone who points out anything wrong with your argument no matter how diplomatically they express themselves. Stop acting up!

Acting up? The point of a forum is to debate with people you disagree with (unless one is a fascist and believes in harmonic, organic unity; but thankfully this is is not a place where fascists gather). Unlike some other folks in here I do at least read the posts instead of assuming that somebody wrote something which he actually did not write.

It's like running your first marathon. Of course you should have ambition and train hard for it but be friggin' realistic and don't expect to or pretend to be the first in the finishing line as there are folks who ran some already and have more time to train.

If you use "I'm not as good as the more experienced runners anyway" as an excuse to not do your best, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

True. But neither me nor anybody else claimed that one shouldn't strive to improve one's cards.

10

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: August 01, 2015, 04:14:06 am »

The problem we have is that you originally used this argument as a reason for people not to bother working that hard on their cards.

Nope, I never made such an argument:

Donald is totally right that there should be no 8$ card in a normal Dominion set, they are just too wacky. But then again nobody here is so arrogant as to assume that some stupid fan cards can as good as official cards.

I said that my card is wacky (in this very thread we also shortly discussed why 8$ cards are problematic) and that I am fine with that (otherwise I wouldn't have done an 8$ card in the first place) as fan cards are worse than official cards anyway.
I didn't say though, and already said that I never intended to imply to, that one shouldn't strive to improve one's cards. This includes this very card, given the limitations (the main problem are the large returns so an early investment pays off (too) well, as opposed to games in which a player who early hits 8$ can only buy a 6/7 action card or Gold and the lack of mitigation of this via delaying the payoffs like in the case of Prince) of making an 8$ card well balanced.

It's like running your first marathon. Of course you should have ambition and train hard for it but be friggin' realistic and don't expect to or pretend to be the first in the finishing line as there are folks who ran some already and have more time to train.

And last but not least I'd like to point out again that I play with quite some fan cards and also use fan-made stuff in other boardgames. I guess the large majority of boardgamers is not doing that so if I am biased in any way it is not against but towards fan material.

11

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: August 01, 2015, 03:19:03 am »

commissioned fan art done by an artist who didn't even like it

"Commissioned fan art" isn't fan art, it is a job by a pro.

Hey, would anyone like to become a professional artist today? I'll give anyone that draws me a "really good" bucket of water the 42 cents left in my debit/giftcard thing

Whether you like it or not,there are ample of professional artists whose job is their art. Michelangelo appeared in the discussion and he was a proand if we consider board game design to be a form of art there are also some professonal board gamer designers. Rosenberg, Wallace and, guess what, Vaccarino come to mind.

It is based on the Bible, so it is by definition Biblical fan art.

That's like saying that Shakespeare is "(historical) fan art" because he used stuff like Holinshed's Chronicles while writing some of his plays, i.e. it is utterly preposterous.

Horatio and you guys agree that:

-The average fan card is worse than the average official card
-Some fan cards are better than some official cards

What fact do you disagree about? Repeating those two things back and forth isn't going to help.

Personally, I think Horatio is saying:
-it's impossible as a non-published designer to consistently design cards approximately as good as official ones.

Horatio, is that correct?

Yep, I said so here here. Obviously there are ample of cards here which are better than cards like Thief, Spy or Scout.

Should have been obvious that my statement is a stochastic one. If one says that men are stronger than women, that X is a better runner than Z or that the weather will be bad tomorrow it is totally clear to anybody who is not a total moron that the stochastic caveats are implicit.
ON AVERAGE men are stronger than women, UNLESS Z HAS A GOOD DAY AND Z A BAD DAY, X is the better runner than Z, THE LIKELIHOOD THAT IT WILL RAIN TOMORROW IS .8 is how you would state the above stuff unambiguously. Stylistically such statements are quite horrible which is why nobody uses them.

12

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 30, 2015, 05:10:22 pm »

"Professional" means they're paid for playtesting; they aren't. I don't think his group is any larger than mine. If by "more regular", you mean "more frequent", that's true. Again, a lower frequency can be made up by a longer period of development.

Nope. Nobody pays playtesters. Professional means having some boardgamers with stamina and an analytical mind (there is a reason the top two German boardgamer designers, Uwe and Stefan, have a technical-mathematical background) in your group. Would you mind to point out the games you published which were tested with your playtesting group? And if you haven't published any games, would you mind to point out all the Dominion cards which are based on an idea of yours?
If you pretend to have the same skills for game design as Donald X and a similar playtesting group but have done neither, designed an entire game or just one official card, I gotta call you out on your bullshit.

There is nothing wrong with aspiring to be a game designer. As long as one doesn't lose one's humility and honesty while one is still in the process of becoming one ...

13

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 30, 2015, 04:49:04 pm »

For what it's worth, Horatio, I don't think anyone here is saying, "Your card isn't as good as the official cards, so it's a bad card and you should feel bad about your skills as a designer for making it."  I think they're just trying to say, "Here are some ways you can make your card closer to the quality level of the official cards."

My card is pretty whacky (gee, it is an 8$ card which Donald X did not do for official sets for very good reasons) and I have no issues with folks who do not like 8$ vanilla cards. I also do not mind criticism, there are some pretty good posts in this thread which helped me to understand the card better. Naturally I do not agree with every form of criticism, there are also some fairly ridiculous posts in here which are ignorant of basic stuff and naturally I do strive to improve my card.

But unlike some other folks I seem to be more aware of the natural limitations of fan cards in general and an 8$ in particular.

I still have no idea why my point about fan cards being worse than official cards, the humble and commonsensical notion that fans do not devote as much time into designing and playtesting as game designers who do it for a living (and probably have a larger, more regular and more professional playtesting group), pissed off so many people.

14

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 30, 2015, 04:36:11 pm »

commissioned fan art done by an artist who didn't even like it

"Commissioned fan art" isn't fan art, it is a job by a pro.
A boardgame which comes to mind is Feld's "Der Name der Rose" (The Name of the Rose). Stefan didn't care much about doing a "Heimlich & Co" variant, it was just a job for him, but the game is actually pretty good.

A short philosophical note, if you are a materialist motivations do not matter. So it is totally irrelevant whether Feld or Michelangelo cared for the particular job they did, what matters is the end result. And as they are both experienced in their field even a job into which they put no heart turns out to be pretty good, respectively in the case of Michelangelo, sublime.

15

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominon: Frontier

« on: July 30, 2015, 04:25:41 am »

Hasn't Donald X has decided against using a card like Plantation? The problem is that quadratic scoring implies that the differences rise linearly, i.e. the first card provides a net VP benefit of 1, the second of 3, the third of 5 and so on.
Not sure whether the dominant strategy would be to rush for them immediately but I guess it happens fairly soon in a lot of decks so the crucial decision is only when to start the rush for it (then your next few turns are pre-decided).

This could be interesting but it doesn't sound like it to me.

Correct, Donald tried this, and that card became Duke.

I think the advantage of Duke is that the differences rise linearily but slower and not as explosively than with this hypothetical card.

Duchies Dukes -  VPs diff.
        3        0 -      9   3       
        3        1 -    12   3
        4        1 -    16   4
        4        2 -    20   4
        5        2  -   25   5
        5        3 -    30   5

16

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 28, 2015, 02:11:23 am »

Are fan cards more likely to be worse?  Sure, but that's because fan cards are often just initial ideas that haven't been tested or refined whereas official cards are highly developed.

That's it. Somebody here said who was involved in the process said that many Dominion cards got playtested around 100 times. It is fairly natural that fan cards are underdeveloped relative to official cards. As I already said, hyperobvious, natural stuff and not controversial anywhere besides among pissed off fans.

Seriously though.  Renaissance art is just fan art of the Bible.

Not that I am not used to preposterous arguments by you but claiming that guys like Michelangelo were "fan artists" tops it all.

17

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 27, 2015, 02:40:25 pm »

Examples? Like 50 Shades of Grey and Shakespeare? Give me a break.

I recently played a fan-designed Descent campaign with some friends. I really liked it and so far it seems to be decently balanced but the natural caveat was that it is a FAN campaign (i.e. underdesigned, undertested and not made by the guy who most likely has the best insight into this game, the game designer) so it is per se MOST LIKELY worse than an official campaign. We have been presently surprised but it was MORE LIKELY that the fan campaign would have been worse than an official one.

Same here. Pick out a random fan card and a random official card and it is highly likely that a) the fan card does not even have art and b) it is fundamentally worse than the official card. And this is the best place for Dominion fan cards, if you just surf the net you will find aweful stuff like fan cards that are oblivious of official cards and thus clearly better or worse (more often better) than existing cards.

I also often play with a Race for the Galaxy fan expansion so you really might wanna think twice before you claim that somebody who is far more into fan-made stuff than the average boardgamer is out on a crusade against fan designs.

Whether you like it or not, claiming that fan cards are worse than official cards would be nowhere on this planet a controversial statement. It is just a dose of realism which some fan(atic)s in here seem to be unable to tolerate.

18

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 27, 2015, 02:08:24 pm »

And all of that for what? To defend a fan card? Boy, they are not worth it. I have made plenty of bad fan cards, and if people pointed out why they were bad, of course i struggled to improve them, but sooner or later you have to see it how it is and, if there's no solution, let go. Unless of course you think that you don't have to try to make them as good as possible. In that case, you shouldn't be surprised if they turn out as bad as you predicted, though.

How about reading what I actually wrote before pulling things out of your ass?

Donald is totally right that there should be no 8$ card in a normal Dominion set, they are just too wacky. But then again nobody here is so arrogant as to assume that some stupid fan cards can as good as official cards.

So contrary to your claims I neither defended my card nor implied that I do try to make it as good as possible. I rather acknowledged the natural limitations of my very card as I went for a price which is considered to be narrow by Donald X (for the reasons I outlined in the very same post) and thus unusable for official cards by the author. Gee, that's the very 101 of my card and it is even emphasized in the title of the thread.

If I pissed off some fan card designers who arrogantly assume that their cards are as good as official ones via claiming something commonsensical, that fan cards are worse than official cards, so be it. You also might wanna get off your "logic" train, I never said that all fan cards are worse than all official cards. Pretty obvious that there quite some bad official cards which are easily outmatched by the best fan cards.

If you actually read what I wrote instead of assuming things you would know that I like fan cards and have so far printed about 40 (out of hundreds or thousands; without wanting to insult anybody the majority of cards and ideas here, including mine, are utter crap) of them. Not that you would actually need to read anything, the  very fact that I post in the fan cards section of this forum should suffice for you to know that if I am biased in any way it is towards and not against fan cards. But unlike you I seem to be aware of their natural limitations.

19

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominon: Frontier

« on: July 27, 2015, 12:51:33 pm »

Hasn't Donald X has decided against using a card like Plantation? The problem is that quadratic scoring implies that the differences rise linearly, i.e. the first card provides a net VP benefit of 1, the second of 3, the third of 5 and so on.
Not sure whether the dominant strategy would be to rush for them immediately but I guess it happens fairly soon in a lot of decks so the crucial decision is only when to start the rush for it (then your next few turns are pre-decided).

This could be interesting but it doesn't sound like it to me.

20

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 27, 2015, 12:31:55 pm »

In my gaming club there are two game designers.

the plural of anecdote is not data.

Correlation

Correlation does not imply causation

It is not like I did not use the word correlation deliberately so thanks for telling me what I already know.

21

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Co0kieL0rd's other cards

« on: July 25, 2015, 03:51:32 pm »

Suburb seems like a decent 3$ card even without the Reaction part (which is obviously not strong enough to make the card worth 4$). Bog Village is a neat idea but I fear that nobody wants to trash Bog Village lest another player plays a Bog Village before you do and thus exploits the trashed Bog Village. Obviously this incentive problem is increasing with the number of players. One way around it might be self-synergy: buy a lot of Bog Villages in order to be able two per turn and thus convert them often enough into quasi-half-Bazaars.

Demagogue, Draft Horses, Mediator, Sentinel and Routing are simply great cards (printed all of them) and when I am gonna print further Dominion cards I will also include Tollkeeper.

22

Variants and Fan Cards / (mainly) some hybrid cards

« on: July 25, 2015, 01:59:59 pm »

Some card ideas, all but one based around the idea of (hybrid) Victory cards. Once they are moderately balanced (respectively eradicated) I will provide images. All names are preliminary.
I think that the first 3 cards are moderately OKish but I am not too happy with the last three cards.



Seneschal - 5$ - Action - +1VP or +2 Action tokens
You may discard up to 3 times ...
... a VP token for +2 cards.
... an Action token for +2 actions.
... a Coin token for +2$.

About the wording, not sure about whether "discard" or "spend" are better as both are slightly confusing.
About the card, it is a Tribute variant with tokens instead of cards and thus provides more control as well as the possibility to save and set up a megaturn. On average (assuming that you spend all tokens and do not just accumulate the VP tokens which I guess is bad) the card provides 2 actions and 1 card. But it is just a village on average, most often it will be used 2 out of 3 times for +2 actions, +2 card which is worth 6 or more.
The Coin improvement happens rarely but if there are Coin token gainers in the deck this ability is pretty strong.
About the pricing, I am not totally sure that it is worth 5$ so I also consider 4$ and "When you gain this put your -1 Card token on your deck."



Mathematician - 4$+P - Victory - X VP: worth X VP if you at least X copies of X different cards in your deck

Now the wording is obviously aweful and preliminary.
The quadratic scoring should lead to VP values between 3 and 5. The more players there are the harder it is to get a lot of copies of an action card whereas with curses/ruins it is easier to get several (but this is nothing one should strive for ) and with treasure cards it is practically mostly irrelevant (unless there are Feudum silver rush games; Platinum rarely runs out; Potion rush in the endgame to improve this card seems far-fetched).

6: I don't see how you can get 6.
5: Unless there is a lot of trashing you could probably aim for 5 Copper, 5 Silver, 5 Gold and gotta live with 5 curses and/or 5 ruins and then you might get 5 of one action card or five of one victory card.
4: With trashing keeping coppers/ruins/curses in your deck just to improve this card seems unwise so here the maximum is probably 4, via 1-2 treasure cards, 1-3 action cards and 1-2 victory cards.
3: These are just the maximum goals you strive for so sometimes you can only reach 3.

I guess that the average value is slightly beneath 4 so 6$ would also be a fair price. But due to the quadratic scoring I want to tie the theme of the card into something science-y (Mathematician is just a preliminary name), hence the Potion in the costs.
If it is too expensive I will drop the Potion and use 6$.



Charlatan – 5$/6$ - Victory/Action/Attack/Looter - worth 1 VP per empty supply pile
Each other player discard the top card of his deck. If it is ...
... a Victory card he gains a Curse.
... an Action card he gains a Ruins.
... a Treasure card he gains a Copper.

Swindler, Mountebank and now a Charlatan.
This card is a variant of Asper's Iron Maiden (far better name than Charlatan). I used the flexible-spammer part of Iron Maiden but substituted the upper part for VPs. Thus the card has become self-synergizing in two ways: via playing it you make it more likely that the Curse or ruins pile runs out and via having it in your deck you also make it more likely as you get double-spammed when another player hits this hybrid card with his own.
Unlike other self-synergizing card like Minion or Fool's Gold this is a Victory card so it has the potential to ruin the game  if the dominant strategy is to rush for these cards (buy them early and play a spamming game in which decks are crappy enough that nobody can acquire other decent Victory cards anymore). I do not think that this is very likely, not at least because of the price, but as it would make the card unplayable I have to test it well.
About the pricing, again this will depend on playtesting. If the card is strong enough to often trigger 3-pile endings I consider 6$ to be an appropriate price whereas if it just empties one spam pile and leads most often to 2-pile endings I’d say 5$.



Harlot - 5$ - Victory/Treasure - 2VP/ worth 1$ per 4 cards in play

This is based on a weaker form of Harem which has been discussed on this forum some time ago and provided 1$. This is better but still slightly weaker than Harem as you are more likely to hit 1$ than 3$ . The idea is obviously that of a treasure card which works well in draw-intensive engines.
 'Per 3 cards' is another option I considered but here the average coins the card provides would be above 2 so the price would have to be above 6 and for mechanical as well as thematic reasons I did not want a stronger Harem.



Cavalry - 4$/5$ - Action - Reveal the top 6 cards of your deck. Put the revealed Victory cards into your hands, discard 2 cards and put the other cards on top of your deck in any order.

As my motivation was to make some more hybrid cards I also wanted a better Scout and this is a simple terminal mixture between Scout and Cartographer. The other version I considered was to switch the order ("Look at the top 6 card of your deck. Discard 2, reveal any Victory cards, put them into your hand and put the other cards on top of your deck in any order.") but I felt that this would be too strong. It obviously requires testing as 6 cards is a lot.



Golden Necropolis / Ghost Town - 3$ - Action/Duration –
+2 Actions, +1$ per (pair of) Victory card in your hand.
At the start of your next turn: +1 Action, +1$ per (pair of) Victory card in your hand.

First I wanted to make a Duration-Victory card (similar to this: a duration necro with 1 or 2 VPs) but as I have no card template which features this weird combo I decided to just go for a duration card. The theme is once again Victory card interaction and the card is a Crossroads / Fishing village variant.
Not too happy yet with this as 1$ for each Victory card seems too strong whereas 1$ per pair seems too weak and '1$ for each Victory card in your hand besides the first one' is awkward. Perhaps the easiest solution is to provide the $ only during the first turn (or to just delete the card ).

23

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 25, 2015, 12:20:36 pm »

In my gaming club there are two game designers. One is a well-known author who has produced numerous games and the other one never published a game. Based on his stories it seems to have mainly been due to bad luck / bad timing but then again I seriously doubt that this games (never played one of his prototypes so it is just guesswork) are better than those of the guy who has published plenty of games.

How is that relevant?  Yes, some people don't get published because their games suck.  There are also good designers who don't get published due to lack of opportunity or even lack of desire (see: various free, well-reviewed PnP games), and there are also published games that are terrible.

I really don't know what you're trying to say with the example, but even if it were applicable, the plural of anecdote is not data.  And you admit that you haven't even played his prototypes, so it's an anecdote without any basis whatsoever.   

Correlation, my point is that folks who have actually published a game are more likely to be good at it than folks who have not. Now I am the last person on this planet who wants to argue that commercial success and artistic quality go hand in hand, otherwise there would be more Criterion edition DVDs of Kurosawa and Bergman movies being sold than Michael Bay movie DVDs. Even in the boardgaming world bad games like Monopoly, Risk and even Settlers (which was a seminal game 20 years ago but nowadays is far too random and lacks decision density) would not sell as well as they do and we all know a number of great boardgames which are not very well-known because they are produced by a small published or because somehow news about ths particular good did not spread.

But most of the time we gamers are fairly good ad judging quality and great games get produced, published and bought even years later while the crappy ones die in development or after they are thrown onto the market.

24

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 24, 2015, 05:42:55 am »

Getting published and becoming a commercial success requires more than just skilled writing and creativity.  Luck is a major factor, as is perseverance and knowing the right people.  Marketing savvy can help too.  There are certainly talented writers who aren't published because they lack in other departments.  There are bad writers who yet succeed because of those other things.  Likewise for game designers.  Sometimes these talented people are content not to seek out commercial validation, and that doesn't diminish their ability at all.

Getting published and becoming a commercial success requires more than just skilled writing and creativity.  Luck is a major factor, as is perseverance and knowing the right people.  Marketing savvy can help too.  There are certainly talented writers who aren't published because they lack in other departments.  There are bad writers who yet succeed because of those other things.  Likewise for game designers.  Sometimes these talented people are content not to seek out commercial validation, and that doesn't diminish their ability at all.

In my gaming club there are two game designers. One is a well-known author who has produced numerous games and the other one never published a game. Based on his stories it seems to have mainly been due to bad luck / bad timing but then again I seriously doubt that this games (never played one of his prototypes so it is just guesswork) are better than those of the guy who has published plenty of games.

Anyway, my original point was that official cards are better than fan cards and I stand by this. Even LastFootnote admitted that many official cards got a lot of playtesting. More time, more folks to play with it, the abilities of the game designer, well, if anybody here thinks he can top that he is ludicrous. Individual fan cards (they are mostly Peddler, Village or Lab variant) can of course be as good as existing cards .

I don't think I've called it overpowered, at least not seriously so.  I've just pointed out that it was more powerful than Grand Market while effectively costing less.  If GM didn't exist, I would have just waited to hear the results from testing.

Does that new text even fit on a card?  I think it's over-complicating what was supposed to br a simple design.  It sounds OK for testing, but it doesn't seem worthwhile.

Probably gotta use a smaller font and skip the long line which is used to seperate "When you gain this .." from the normal text. My goal is obviously not make the card messy but just to balance it (I don't think that GM's copper restriction would make much sense for an 8 card which is mostly buyed in heavy-trashing games and even if it would make sense I wouldn't wanna copy it).

25

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: an 8$ card

« on: July 22, 2015, 06:05:11 am »

Dude, there is some really great fan fiction out there and some really terrible published stuff as well.  Having talent for something doesn't mean you'll end up doing it for a living, and doing something for a living does not mean you are any good at it.  And you are underestimating how much testing is done by some of the fan card makers here.

Nope. First, to get actually good at writing, as with anything in else in life, you have to do it constantly over years. This is why people who only do it for a few hours a week in their spare time cannot become good at it.
Second, if you compare fan fiction, something which is derivative and unimaginative, to proper literature you are direly begging to not be taken seriously.
Same with Dominion fan cards. If any of us were good at designing games they would, big surprise, actual design their own game and not do derivative work. Then again I am not really surprised that fan(atic)s overestimate their skills.

Dude, I can tell you right now—from experience—that the official Dominion cards don't get as much testing as you seem to believe. Some of the later cards in Dominion: Adventures had maybe one to two dozen plays before being finalized, not hundreds. I mean they could have been changed if a problem had been discovered after finalization and before printing, but there really wasn't much testing during that period. I can tell you right now that many Enterprise cards have had more playtesting than several of the Adventures cards.

Great that you were in the group with which Donald playtested his Adventure cards. Ridiculous of you to imply that your cards are more balanced and better than official cards.


Back to the card.
I am considering to make the card a bit weaker via "When you gain this, each other play gains a Coin token and +VP token", thus converting King into a Market when it is first played, and wonder what the folks who think that the card is seriously overpowed think about this.