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Topics - WheresMyElephant

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Consider this the counterpart to the "How Guilds affects existing things" thread, I guess. How do our new cards play together?

Butcher+Baker: I've posted about this before, but think it could be a nice combo. Baker coins let you Butcher Estates into Bakers and later Bakers into Provinces. Especially nice with good Copper trashing like Spice Merchant (or Doctor?) It could of course be argued that overrelying on Coin tokens like this carries too high of an opportunity cost, or that it's just too slow like most upgrading-everything-into-Province schemes.

Journeyman+Doctor, Herald+Doctor: Both cards can benefit from trashing, but perhaps more interesting is deck inspection and deck rearrangement (respectively). Journeyman might give some unusually big, high quality hands which I guess might favor overbuying Doctor.

Herald+Journeyman: Herald is a little bit unreliable as Villages go; Journeyman makes up for this somewhat by at least skipping Heralds when you run out of Actions. Admittedly, this sounds like an awfully expensive engine if its biggest selling point is "Well at least it isn't quite so bad when it fizzles," but if that's worth just $1 here and there, it might pay for itself. Herald will also provide deck inspection when it misses, which is nice.

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Dominion General Discussion / Math in Dominion
« on: December 06, 2012, 05:57:05 pm »
Of course I'm not the first to notice, there is a lot of math in Dominion. There's the obvious stuff like the average card value in your deck and probabilities and when to buy a Duke, on down to the little stuff like simply counting VP or the amount of coin in the deck. But it goes beyond this; much of the theoretical discussion amounts to full-fledged proofs of theorems (albeit usually rather informal) and the creativity that goes into them can be very impressive. And it's very obvious from many posters' diction and argument style that they have some training.

So I'm wondering, how many of the strong players here have a significant background in math or a related field (especially involving some proofs)? Do you think this background (or lack thereof) significantly affects your skill level?

If Donald X. is reading this thread I'd be very interested to hear his thoughts. I seem to remember hearing or inferring that he has some math background; if correct was this very influential in the design of Dominion and your other games?

For my part I have BS degrees in math and physics, but my Iso rating topped out somewhere around 27 (and is much lower now, but I'm less active), so I'm probably not the most interesting person to ask. I do feel like it's helpful, but it's easy to get carried away debating theory and forget that sometimes the clear-cut problems with cool pithy solutions are small potatoes.

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Other Games / Designing a computer "deckbuilding" game
« on: October 04, 2012, 06:18:36 pm »
Is this the place to talk about designing your own games?

 I've been batting around the idea of making an online-only deck building game. There seem to be a lot of interesting possibilities and mechanics to explore without just tacking bad stuff onto the Dominion formula (or being a creative genius). A few that come to mind include:

* Huge decks, like a thousand cards, that would be impractical in a physical card game.

* Much more elaborate deck inspection and deck rearrangement options. You could have a "Spy" that tells you their current score (which might be basically impossible to track), and the amount of money left in their draw pile. You could have a card that reshuffles your draw pile to clump the Treasure together in three-card groups. A Moneylender that always appears in the same hand as Copper.

* Changing the text of a card (to add a +$1 bonus or something).

* Cards that have "accountability problems" in Dominion, like bad cards that you have to play on your turn.

Does this sound like fun to anybody? Any particular thoughts? Mechanics you'd be interested to see?

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