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1

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Allies Preview 1: Allies

« on: March 01, 2022, 10:17:30 am »

Out of curiosity, why did you make the limit of one Ally a hard rule rather than recommendation? It's not a complaint (indeed, I feel like the limit of one way and two total landscapes should also have been hard limits)

Obv. players can do whatever they want. I like to not overwhelm people with stuff on the table; one Ally is plenty. And then I didn't have to worry about how the cards worked with more than one Ally.

Extra complexity always sounds fun, but then you lose the game because you overlooked something simple. You swear it won't happen again, but it always does. Dominion veterans can handle a little more complexity but the game is already very rich and complexity increases with every expansion. Why punish the beginners and the people who understandably think they can handle more complexity than they really can?

I haven't played online in a long time, so maybe they're ahead of me, but it'd be fun to see a "Wild Mode" where these sorts of restrictions are lifted. But you'd really have to design the UI to discourage people from using it as the default.

2

Dominion Articles / Re: Hunting Grounds

« on: March 18, 2015, 09:28:54 pm »

I have to agree. A play pattern I often find in games with HG and Trash for Benefit is that you should very very often overbuild with extra Hunting Grounds as the game comes close to the end - it increases the reliability of your engine, and then when you get through your deck, the extra ones are payload and/or pile control.

Do you find yourself thinking a lot about reliability with HG, in general? Of course if you're getting more power from fewer cards, you're at more risk of bad draws. Is HG a decent argument for, say, Band of Misfits (where the latter offers some mid-grade drawing option?)

3

Other Games / Re: Temporum

« on: November 30, 2014, 01:36:58 am »

Also, I pulled off the Anubis Statuette / Information Age interaction/combo. This caused a confusing rule question... Anubis Statuette says that after you visit the zone you choose, you move your marker to the real zone in that time. But Information Age caused me to visit (and thus move to) other zones. So at the end of it, I was in a different time in a real zone. Does Anubis still move me back to the time where I chose to visit in the first place, in the real zone in that time? It seems not, because the Anubis FAQ says "if the player is in an unreal zone.." But it is a general rules question... why is the Anubis FAQ correct there? What stops the Anubis's normal text of "move to the real zone in that time" from happening? Has Anubis lost track of your marker?

I probably shouldn't speak for Donald but I get the impression he's softened his stance on "the rules are all on the cards full stop." The text, especially on Zone cards, is much briefer and seems just a hair less rigorous than in Dominion. Inquisition for instance has the same interpretation issue as Torturer from Dominion ("can I pick the choice that's impossible to carry out?") with less careful wording. Even the rulebook concedes Inquisition is an "exception to the usual rules," which I take to mean "This FAQ supersedes the card text."

If this is so, it's kind of understandable. Making the rules perfectly clear on the cards is a nice ideal to strive for, and obviously you don't want to stray too far from it, but I guess experience shows that no matter how carefully the card is worded, people will still screw it up until they read the manual (or someone explains it to them).

4

Other Games / Re: Temporum

« on: November 28, 2014, 07:20:23 pm »

Do you own a copy?

Yeah, got it two days ago.

5

Other Games / Re: Temporum

« on: November 28, 2014, 05:54:54 pm »

After about a dozen plays, I have high hopes that this game may actually be as good as Dominion. Of course that's impossible to say yet, but I will very comfortably say, go buy it.

6

Other Games / Re: The Concept of "Victory Points"

« on: September 03, 2014, 08:58:22 pm »

Judo has victory points, but it also has an instant win (ippon).

Ippon or submissions.

7

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New Promo at Origins...

« on: June 15, 2014, 11:35:16 am »

I think my favorite 4 cost would in fact be something like a simple Smithy or Envoy.
Starting every turn with so many cards makes everything much easier.

This has been my thinking too. If you can get big draw reliably and draw up your other Actions, it's as good as Princing all of them. That's got to be your plan A, right? If it isn't available, then something else.

Of course the cool thing about Prince (and maybe the time it has the biggest impact?) is the ability to play cards when you don't have an engine, but you work with what's there.

I think the other major case is where you Prince a +1 Action card to act as a guaranteed Village (or Prince a Village as a guaranteed Crossroads) to get an engine going.

Well, Princing an ineffectual +1 Action card like say a Great Hall is almost strictly inferior to the next alternative. I mean if you have Prince of Great Hall in a Smithy engine, your hope is to draw a Smithy and play it with your first Action, thus winding up in the same position as if you had Prince of Smithy. Same if you replace Smithy with a non-drawing terminal. Whichever card you'd want to spend your first real Action on, you might as well Prince that one, at least if you get the chance to (and are willing to go one turn without playing it).

I'm inclined to think the same goes for Prince of Village. If it's a full-fledged engine you prefer to Prince the Smithy and hope to draw the Village, rather than vice versa. Big hands raise the chance things will go according to plan, I think it's as simple as that. If it's a non-engine scenario where Prince of Village would play like a Walled Village, well 3 actions is probably overkill anyhow.

8

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New Promo at Origins...

« on: June 14, 2014, 05:56:36 pm »

I was really trying to make "King of X" work for King's Court but somehow it just isn't the same. Funny, that. All I managed to do was get "King of Wishful Thinking" stuck in my head.

I think my favorite 4 cost would in fact be something like a simple Smithy or Envoy.
Starting every turn with so many cards makes everything much easier.

This has been my thinking too. If you can get big draw reliably and draw up your other Actions, it's as good as Princing all of them. That's got to be your plan A, right? If it isn't available, then something else.

Of course the cool thing about Prince (and maybe the time it has the biggest impact?) is the ability to play cards when you don't have an engine, but you work with what's there.

9

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The strength of Herald engine

« on: June 01, 2014, 03:50:29 pm »

I think according to the previous game, Herald tends to be extremely powerful on board without villages but some good engine terminals.
At first sight I think this card is UP, just a cantrip doing nothing if it does not reveal action. So when I did not see village I play big money and lose to Herald. Herald reveals another Herald is like a level-2 City. So, it looks very OP in such that kingdom.

Herald hitting any action is like a level-2 City, if you would have played that Action after drawing it with the City. And in most cases you would have, especially if we're talking about a cantrip (like Herald) or terminal draw.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Repeating the old mistakes....the other way round

« on: May 15, 2014, 10:59:45 pm »

When a card misses the reshuffle, you won't play it during the next shuffle. If you choose not to play it so that it doesn't miss the reshuffle, you don't play it this shuffle. So you are playing that card the same number of times regardless of what you do, only the second option comes later, and for all you know you will draw it dead.

Plus if you don't play it now, it has a chance to miss the next reshuffle!

11

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Let's discuss - the best designed card

« on: May 11, 2014, 02:51:12 pm »

I always thought Inn was a pretty piece of work. If you're buying Inn for the on-buy it probably means you have some trouble putting combos together otherwise, so a little sifting is probably welcome. Then the handsize reduction keeps big topdecked Inn stacks from being too good (although I guess I don't know if that would really be an issue or not). It all seems to click nicely.

12

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which of these more powerful attack cards is your LEAST favorite?

« on: March 29, 2014, 06:23:28 pm »

I voted for margrave because discarding 3 cards feels a lot worse than discarding 2, even though the attack is not even as powerful as militia.
I also don't like it because of its vanilla bonuses; 3 cards and a buy is already really good for an engine, which just means I am going to get hit lots of times, and each time I am hit I will have to tediously draw and discard 1 card a bunch more times.

I don't think the attack feels very painful. The thing I dislike is that it strongly encourages mirror matches, because a) well, it's just good and b) your opponent's Margraves help you match up Village+Margrave, which as likely as not is the only good thing you can do with 3-card hands.

13

Dominion General Discussion / Re: followup: Teaching the noob about trashing

« on: March 08, 2014, 04:32:22 pm »

Or how about the fact that they cost $0 while everything else is more expensive.

As far as teaching methods go, I think that's rather backwards. There are several reasons Copper is bad, and as a consequence it costs $0; if you teach it the other way around, they will come to accept this fact without gaining a deeper understanding of the underlying reasons.

...Then again, you might as well try this if all other options have failed.

Besides which, Copper is obviously much better than the $0 Curse or Ruins; and in the opening, better than the $2 Estate. There's no particular reason to believe that Copper costs $0 because DXV thought this was what it's actually worth. In fact I'd argue a cost of $1 is probably more balanced. (Not to say "better," nor that it would really make much difference.)

Copper costs $0 for two reasons. One, because it's good for a beginner to be able to build back up if they accidentally Chapel all their money away. (Or if a serious player gets hit with something like a Masq pin, but at that point it doesn't matter much.) Two, yes, to send a message about how bad this card is; but a skeptic could just discount this and go with the first explanation.

14

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Silverspawn's trashing formula

« on: December 13, 2013, 11:33:38 pm »

Well, first off it's pretty clear these aren't (or shouldn't be) "ratios" in the normal sense. The utility of money, handsize, trashing, etc are all highly nonlinear, to say nothing of board-dependent, so there's no reason to assume that for instance the "1/2" of Lookout is equivalent to the "2/4" of Remaking 2 Coppers. The only thing we can really conclude is that 3/1 is better than 2/1, or 1/1 is better than 1/2, but that was already obvious.

I think the core idea is indisputable: trashing usually comes with an opportunity cost, and all else equal you would want that exchange to be as favorable as possible. (I also agree the opportunity cost mostly consists of the economic damage in the Buy phase of the turn where the trasher comes up, although there are others. The buy spent on the trasher is also big of course, but we can ignore that part if we're comparing Lookout to Ambassador as it's assumed we will buy one or the other.)  The question seems to be whether you can quantify this tradeoff, in a meaningful much less Kingdom-independent way, and unfortunately it sounds like a very tall order.

15

Dominion General Discussion / Most instructive cards

« on: November 19, 2013, 12:25:35 am »

Which cards have taught you the most about the game as a whole, at different levels of your play?

Tactician: I always tell beginners to play with this card. As we know, "Dominion with huge hands" is a very different game with its own rules, where cards like Bank and Forge start going wild and elaborate combos are executed with laughable ease. Tactician lets you experiment with this kind of gameplay without the need for engine-building skill. Now when your plan totally falls apart, you can tell your payload was a dud, not that you bought your Villages and your Smithies in the wrong order or something. Then conversely, when you see the same cards in a non-Tactician game, you know the combo works and it's just a question of whether you can set it up fast enough. (Or, you know the combo doesn't work and not to waste your time, it's a BM game or whatever.)

Fairgrounds: This card, and to a lesser extent Menagerie, really forced me out of my "2-3 key cards" comfort zone at a time when I needed it. Building ramshackle decks with all kinds of strange parts, some of which you wouldn't normally buy, is often a necessary skill: more than ever in the age of Dark Ages.

16

Dominion Articles / Re: Tactics Quiz & Endgame Principles

« on: August 21, 2013, 10:04:12 am »

@ dondon151, RD, WanderingWinder
Re: question #2

I think question 2 can be phrased better, and I think maybe principle 2 can better encompass the "awareness" I was going for. 

What if question 2 and its answer were rewritten as follows?

This is an improvement from my perspective, but I'm still not entirely sold.

The big problem to me is, this is framed as a quiz that has definitive answers; and so I spent a fair amount of time trying to come up with a clear solution to the complicated "2 Provinces left in the pile" scenario, when (as you say here) there isn't really one. It wasn't a total waste, and it's nice to see that you agree with my assessment of that scenario, but still the time could really have been better spent mulling over other parts of the article. This article is good enough I'll probably go back and reread until I've fully absorbed it, but generally people have a limit to how much time they'll allot to an article, and there's no point pushing it more than necessary.

(As a sidenote, I feel vaguely ungrateful complaining about a few "wasted" minutes when surely you must have spent hours writing this article. Sorry if it comes off that way! I don't mean to sound annoyed over it; it's purely a practical concern.)

17

Dominion Articles / Re: Tactics Quiz & Endgame Principles

« on: August 18, 2013, 06:35:15 pm »

Why doesn't question 2 state definitively that there's only one Province left, if the entire answer is predicated on that assumption? It's not as though it's more realistic not to know.

18

Dominion Articles / Re: Short Article on Advisor

« on: August 18, 2013, 11:47:28 am »

Open Advisor/Chapel, play Advisor turn 3, opponent forces you to discard Chapel, curse your "bad luck"

You don't have to play the Advisor.

So if you draw it with no Chapel on T3 you don't play it? (And if you draw it on T4 with Chapel yet to come you certainly don't?) Sounds like it has significantly higher odds of going to waste than Silver. And as blueblimp said, even at its best it doesn't really address the core Chapel problem, so it seems rather high-risk low-reward.

19

Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Fool's Gold / Storeroom

« on: August 14, 2013, 11:59:24 pm »

(3) What other Dark Ages and Guilds cards should be added to the list of FG enablers?

Counterfeit will be very strong. Taxman can likewise be used to gain FGs while trashing, but the attack won't stop anyone from buying FG and you stand a good chance of not being able to buy a FG on the same turn, so I doubt it's much good.

I haven't tried but I suspect FG goes nicely with either overpay or Coin tokens since it can give you a lot of awkward $7-type turns. Merchant Guild and Doctor come to mind, maybe Stonemason under certain circumstances. Also CM as achmed_sender said.

20

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What is your home grown terminology for Dominion playing?

« on: June 29, 2013, 02:29:59 pm »

"Chocking" When a deck loses its purchasing power because of too much green or too many terminal cards.

Is that supposed to be "choking"? If so, it should probably be standard terminology (and on the official list) if it isn't already.

21

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Coin tokens and Possession.

« on: June 28, 2013, 11:55:38 pm »

You can spend them even if you don't use the money for anything! Very wasteful. When Possession is around, you better use up your coin tokens as soon as you get them!

I think you'd better off not getting them, or, at least, not spending them. But if you only spend them immeditaly, there are usually better cards available. Sort of like ignoring Ambassador or Masquerade (insert edgecase here).

The thing is though that coin tokens are one of the easiest/most straightforward ways to guarantee a $6P turn. Ignoring coin token producers might well mean waiting an additional shuffle or two for your Possession, I would think.

22

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Guilds is here!

« on: June 14, 2013, 11:09:23 pm »

I like that the rules use feminine pronouns to refer to a generic player! 

Call me a contrarain, but I don't. It's inconsistent with... all of the previous rulebooks, I think? And all of the Dominion cards, which use masculine when there's an unknown. And I think that's the standard in English as well, if you don't have a gender neutral term to refer to people of unknown gender, go masculine instead of feminine. But this might not be a rule, just what I've always seen done. Perhaps because most of my hobbies and skills are 80%+ male, though (I'm a mathematician, and I play lots of games and the like).

I don't really see what's lost by the inconsistency here. If all of the rulebooks and cards used the feminine, it still wouldn't feel any more natural to you, or to me for that matter.

It's the standard in English, but that's because everything was "80% male" until recently. Pretty much anything worth writing a book about except cooking, childrearing etc. would have assumed the actors were male. So there are fairly good reasons for thinking this custom should change. I'm personally a big believer in the singular "they" but people who go farther will get no argument from me.

23

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Masterpiece

« on: June 14, 2013, 10:41:21 pm »

Well, Treasure Map originally came from the 7th expansion according to the secret history. That was Guilds, right?

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=117.0

Judging by what he said in the Secret History of the Dark Ages Cards, the 7th expansion seems to have been a now-defunct "top-of-the-deck" themed expansion.

I think the 7th expansion turned into Guilds+Alchemy? Or maybe Guilds+Cornucopia?

If Guilds' path is anything like Dark Ages, I imagine that little remains of the originally planned 7th set. That said, there's actually a decent amount of "top of the deck" related stuff here. You have Taxman and Herald; "Name a card" is related; maybe also Doctor but that might be a stretch. Alchemist and arguably Apothecary and Golem are also relevant.

24

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Guilds is here!

« on: June 13, 2013, 11:54:23 pm »

I'm thinking Taxman mirror games will lead to some interesting tactics. Should I Tax Copper and be more likely to hit you, or Silver and do more harm? If I topdeck a Silver, you'll know I have that in my hand, which could be bad if you have one to Tax. Then again, if I turn Silver into Gold at every opportunity, I'll have less flexibility to Tax Silver myself when similar opportunities arise.

Oh wow, I hadn't noticed that mirror synergy before.  Your opponent will know a treasure in your hand the turn after you use Taxman.  That will really change up how it plays.  Previously, I figured I'd nearly always go with Copper.

I think are a couple other factors in favor of going Silver->Gold:

Your opponent is rarely going to want to Tax Gold into Gold (although occasionally it might be good to shuffle a Gold over to the next hand). Accordingly, your Gold is relatively safe from getting attacked, except of course in Platinum games. But if you give yourself a deck full of Silver, they'll surely stop attacking your Coppers and start Taxing Silver->Gold, and then you might be in for a rough time.

Also, Taxman might actually go well with other mild trashers, like say Lookout. This might seem counterintuitive but Taxman is an even slower card than Mine: it's not as though you're going to upgrade all of your starting Coppers into Golds with one Taxman, are you? Why not drop a few? It'll help you avoid your opponent's Taxmen, and if you really need, you can always pick up a couple Silvers when you start running out of Taxman targets.

25

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Comparing Fishing Vilage and Caravan

« on: June 12, 2013, 08:07:23 pm »

Often the difference between 3 and 4 is a question of "will opening with two of these make things nuts?"  Opening with two Fishing Villages is not much different from having two extra Coppers until you buy some terminals.  Opening with two Caravans, though, is a bit like having two delayed Labs available as early as T3.

Surely it's fairer to say the Fishing Villages are like delayed Peddlers with the Copper as a bonus? Or would you make the case that the Peddler part generally comes in too late to count it for purposes of asking whether FV is a good opener? (Whereas the same doesn't hold for Caravan's Lab effect, because double-Caravan would speed up cycling so much that it isn't slow in the same way?)