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

Dominion General Discussion / Black Market Deck App or Website?

« on: July 25, 2016, 01:06:05 pm »

With Empires, my Dominion box can no longer hold the randomizer deck (which is absurdly large to begin with).  Therefore I need an artificial Black Market deck.  Can anyone point me to a Black Market Deck simulator, either on the internet or an iOS app?

Ideally it would pick n random cards, then have a "draw button," where it shows you the top three cards.  Then you can pick one or zero, remove the picked card from the pool, and put the other two back on the bottom of the stack.  Card art is a bonus but not necessary.

Should be easy to make.  I made one in Mathematica, but that's where my programming skills end.  Hopefully someone has made a more portable version.

2

Dominion General Discussion / The best time to ignore Ambassador

« on: May 20, 2013, 10:12:25 pm »

I just played kind of a cool game: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130520/log.514f5abbe4b0b79c883bafb8.1369101179722.txt

It's hard to imagine a better board for ignoring Ambassador. There's Duke, Duchess, Gardens, and no engine to speak of. I gladly absorb all the coppers and estates, end up with 8 Duchies, 6 Dukes, 10 Duchesses, and some Gardens for 96 points.

Obviously this is an extreme (and not particularly hard to spot) example, but it does pose an interesting question: when is it desirable to ignore Ambassador? How many of these elements need to be present? What others features of a kingdom make you want to ignore Ambassador? I guess Chapel usually means Ambassador's a no-go, but maybe there are others.

Thoughts?

3

Other Games / What do you call this hobby?

« on: November 29, 2012, 10:48:06 pm »

I'm filling out the "Interests an Hobbies" section on a form, and calling my hobby "board-gaming" just doesn't seem to do it justice. I'm playing Dominion, Pandemic, and RftG, not Monopoly and Life. Is there a better phrase to describe *these* kinds of games?

4

Dominion Isotropic / Dark Ages on Iso a Possibility?

« on: August 18, 2012, 01:38:26 pm »

Given the message on goko.com:

Hello Everyone


As you probably know by now, the first 48 hours of Goko’s public life didn’t go well.
As we moved out of beta and into the live world, we learned that we had problems
with our backend and weren’t able to scale fast enough to support the load.
As a result, we experienced numerous problems and created a really bad experience
for the fans trying to access our games or even get on our website.


We sincerely apologize to the fans trying to play our games and to the broader tech
and HTML5 communities that showed so much support for our vision at launch.
We've made the decision to roll our games and game site back into beta for testing.
We will go live again when it's ready. We’d love to say that will happen tomorrow or
next week, but that’s not the right way to proceed.


If you want to help us test the games before they go live again, or test future games
from Goko, please click here to become a beta tester. Everyone will eventually get in
and we’ll add people as quickly as we can.


Sincerely,

The Goko Team

Is it suddenly possible we might be able to enjoy Dark Ages on Isotropic in the meantime? DXV, are you in a position to comment on this? I don't want to get my hopes up, but man, that would be great.

(P.S. good on Goko for taking more time to polish their product)

5

Dominion General Discussion / How Many Possible Kingdoms?

« on: June 09, 2012, 03:09:06 pm »

Theory stated in his excellent review of Dominion that there are roughly 2 quadrillion different Kingdom combinations. I assume he arrived at this by calculating 157 choose 10, which is about 1.8 quadrillion. That's a fairly good starting point, but it fails to take into account the presence of a Bane card, or whether a game has Colonies/Platinums.

In the Isotropic downtime this morning, I started thinking: exactly how many different Kingdoms are there? Two hours and a bunch of combinatorics later, I arrived at my answer: 1*10^24, or about 1 septillion! That's nine orders of magnitude higher than theory's estimate! Jesus.

Anyway, just thought I'd share my results from an interesting (if not strategically relevant) problem. I attached a doc showing my work. It presupposes a basic understanding of Dominion and discrete math, but if any other game-playing mathematicians out there want to check my work or comment on it, I'd love to hear from you!

EDIT: You need a recent copy of Word to open the document... I have a PDF, but it's slightly too big to post here. PM me with your email address and I can email you a copy.

EDIT2: Do a typo when I input my formula to Wolfram Alpha, I am revising my answer down to 1.23 x 10^16, or about 12 quadrillion.