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1

Variants and Fan Cards / For fun & giggles

« on: March 19, 2018, 06:00:32 pm »

We leave the real & balanced cards to Master Donald... these cards we just made for fun & giggles! We drew them on cardboard and to play with them, assigned a real card that was sort of like-looking to be that card. Translations from German below. (We own 4 extensions, sorry if a name or such of an existing card is repeated.)



Tax Collector
Take 1 card each (random and unseen) from the hand of all
other players to your own hand.
+1 Action
Cost: 5 - Action - Attack

Goldmine
Take 1 Gold to your hand and gain 1 Gold.
Everyone else gets 1 Gold to their deck.
Cost: 5 - Action

Firestorm
Every other player trashes 2 of their hand cards.
They draw 1 card from their deck.
Cost: 4 - Action - Attack

Reward
All other players together decide on 2 cards to give to you from the stock
(of cost 3 or higher each, but no Victory cards). You put them to your hand.
Cost: 4 - Action

Good Fairy
+ 2 Cards
+ 1 Action
The other player who first shouts "Good Fairy" after this card is played
gains 1 Gold. You gain 1 Gold. (Whenever someone shouts Good Fairy
when none is played, they gain a Curse.)
Cost: 4 - Action

Word of advice: Good Fairy and Reward made us laugh a lot. Reward, because it can be used for something that doesn't help the other person, and also because it initiates a discussion among the other players. I also wanted to add a touch of cooperative or helpful play as one of us sometimes gets into fights. Good Fairy on the other hand is just generally funny (and sometimes requires an extra round or decision if both shout at the same time). One reason for introducing Good Fairy is to punish the absent-minded or those who do something else when it's not their turn!

Caveat: Try not to use Goldmine and Good Fairy in the same game... the Gold stock will be empty soon! Though that too caused giggles...

2

Rules Questions / Re: Hunting Party: Can I postpone the +1 action until drawing cards?

« on: February 05, 2018, 01:30:08 pm »

Right, that's good to know! Thanks!

3

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 04, 2018, 10:27:31 am »

Are you suggesting that creating Google DeepMind was not a difficult task?

Yes, it was incredibly hard to lay the foundation the first time. So was writing the first C compiler. It then becomes expontentially more easy when that foundation is released to the public in the form of libraries, which is what happens all the time in the deep learning and programming community. One machine learning open source framework is Google TensorFlow, for example. Based on that, other frameworks popped up, like the amazing Pix2pix, which can be trained with sample data to generate image sets. And if you google DeepFakes, you'll find a lot of NSFW examples of what people are doing on their home computers today with little experience... replacing faces in movies through a deep learning network! Amazing stuff where we can be dwarves on the shoulders of giants, but where our absolute height is still increasing.

There's a grey area between the two, but it does feel more legitimate to train a neural network on example cards and non-cards, rather than hand-hold it with "the rules and mechanics of Dominion to begin with".

Yes, definitely a gray area. But every approach will choose some layer of abstraction. Even AlphaGo had some form of rule-based pre-processing before it send things to the neural network. The "understanding" of a machine-learning "AlphaDominion" could be as simple as knowing the current properties & rules and having them available in text data format, it wouldn't even need an iota of strategy input. *Any other format* you deliver to the neural network too is a human-chosen abstraction of some sort, even if it was a scan of the card in pixel format (you had to settle for a certain resolution; you sneakily photographed the card from the front because you as human know that gives it more meaning; you defined what is a Dominion card and didn't photograph the bottom of the box; you had proper lighting in the shot, etc. -- these are all steps to ensure that basically the text on the card is readable, short of actually transcribing it, but that would be just another step).

Most of these abstractions (which require human knowledge) are in the strict sense just there to save computing time. If the computer was infinitely fast, then you could have it simulate the whole universe and its atoms, and tell it to evolve over billions of simulation years to come up with a planet where someone invents a card game which then gains good reviews on the simulated Amazon. And who knows, we might be the ones living in such a simulation...

4

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 03, 2018, 04:46:27 pm »

Secondly, as we've discovered, making a computer play Dominion well is difficult.

That's what they said about Go too, then Google DeepMind came along

In all seriousness though, self-training neural networks can be extremely effective in coming up with strategies. But as you say, and as I said in my comment also, this would not necessarily translate to interesting cards. That too will one day be possible -- just simulate a human brain digitally, and you have all the ingredients to have the neural network measure every card for how stimulating it is! -- but by that time, we're happy if our AI overlords still keep us around in the first place (if how humanity treats less intelligent species is any indicator, we better learn to be cute and cuddly, as surely we want to go the way of cats and dogs instead of pigs and cows!).

5

Dominion General Discussion / Re: German translation not always optimal

« on: February 03, 2018, 12:52:49 pm »

And wow... that errata page for the translation is LONG... any chance Dominion's German publisher is going to improve it for a new edition?

6

Dominion General Discussion / Re: German translation not always optimal

« on: February 03, 2018, 12:51:40 pm »

Thanks! By the way, since we discovered the Wiki today, we're now using an iPad near the table to resolve all ambuigities and questions by searching for the Wiki page with the original English text + Official FAQ.

For anyone who can't open above link, add a ")" to the end of the URL.

7

Dominion General Discussion / German translation not always optimal

« on: February 03, 2018, 12:45:48 pm »

It is probably already known that translations can introduce errors or ambuiguities. The German translation of Dominion too, while being good and fun, falls into that sub-optimal territory. (I would play in English, but not everyone I'm with understands it fluently.)

As a random example, the card Menagerie in Germany says something along the lines of "If you have cards with different names in your hand, + 3 Cards, otherwise +1 Cards". This is quite ambiguous: it could mean you only need *some* cards to be different, not all. And what happens if you only hold 1 hand, would that qualify for "holding cards with different names" -- it seems not, as one doesn't even have multiple cards! (The guide book makes this issue clearer in German, by the way.)

Now take the English original. The sentence simply is: "Reveal your hand. If there are no duplicate cards in it, +3 Cards. Otherwise, +1 Card." Boom. Absolutely crystal clear and easy to understand, no room for misunderstandings.

Or take what German Dominion World points out on their homepage's January news, where they say a part of the German second edition of the base game includes a printing error which has the Mine card read to trash an "action card" from the hand, when it should read "treasure"...

Other translation decisions are not directly ambiguous or introducing misunderstandings, but simply lack the direct clarity of the original. For instance, "Victory" cards are translated to just "Points". The more proper German translation would be either "Sieg" (Victory) or "Siegpunkte" (Victory points), a word used in other games, so it's not even uncommon.

I guess my rant ends here, and thanks for one of the best games in the world! I'm saying this as an owner of a huge collection of Spiel des Jahres games, but Dominion stands out as probably the one we play most often, including the extensions...

8

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 03, 2018, 12:38:06 pm »

Maybe another approach to machine learning created cards could be this: the AI understands the rules of Dominion and can play against itself, having been trained to play good. It then throws random newly designed rule cards into the mix, but making sure that rule card doesn't randomly already exist in Dominion, and then plays another million rounds with those against itself. It thus now incorporated the new card into its training data. Now we check if the new random card turns out to be bought a much higher or lesser amount of time than any other, i.e. if it is completely over or underpowered. If neither of those, it may be potentially a new interesting card. Or it may end up being boring because it's not a truly new type of rule

9

Rules Questions / Re: Hunting Party: Can I postpone the +1 action until drawing cards?

« on: February 03, 2018, 06:14:03 am »

Fantastic thanks!

That 2nd edition + English rulebook sounds very clear. Bookmarked for reference.

10

Rules Questions / Re: Hunting Party: Can I postpone the +1 action until drawing cards?

« on: February 03, 2018, 05:58:26 am »

Thanks! So to clarify, does that mean "+1 Action" or e.g. "+2 Actions" on any card with several instructions can always be used at *any* point in that card's turn, thus one needs to ignore the "do the instructions in order from top to bottom" from the base rules in regards to that (as the instruction to draw more cards is *below* the instruction to do +1 action)?

(Again, I have German rules, so I can't do very exact quote rules and there may be extra fuzziness introduced.)

11

Rules Questions / Hunting Party: Can I postpone the +1 action until drawing cards?

« on: February 03, 2018, 05:42:02 am »

Hi! We have a question in regards to the card Hunting Party. Its first action is +1 Card, its second is +1 Action, and its third is an instruction that lets you gain new cards into your hand. So our question: Can the +1 Action be "held" and used on a new card one gains through the putting of extra cards into your hand, if an action is drawn?

It seems the Dominion base rules suggest to always apply instructions in order, which may mean that +1 Action would need to be done immediately, and thus cannot be done on the extra cards one would only draw in an instruction following it. But we felt maybe as Hunting Party is a 5 gold high-value card, it is intended that one can apply the +1 also to an extra action drawn with it. (Or maybe it can only be "held" if one cannot follow the instruction at first as one doesn't have an action card in deck, before drawing more?)

A similar question applies to the card Farming Village. We are unfortunately left with the German instructions, which might add some extra translation confusion at times (though it seems well-translated). We also checked the Wiki on this card but are still not 100% certain. Thanks!