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1

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #110: This stays in play

« on: April 15, 2021, 02:50:12 pm »

I assumed without questioning it that you shuffle with one card but not with zero

That's certainly one of the 3 possible interpretations; though according to this poll the least-common one. Granted, the poll is not unbiased and happened after much discussion around this had already taken place.

Of course, the power level of Tax Collector varies greatly depending on which interpretation you use. If 0 cards counts as shuffling, then man is it insanely overpowered. Every single card-drawing card gets a +1 Coffer tacked on if you've drawn your deck.

Also a weird thing... if 0 cards counts as shuffling, then Smithy works very differently under first edition rules compared to second edition rules. In second edition rules, when you play Smithy with an empty deck, you would first shuffle your discard pile, and then draw 3 cards (failing to draw any), for 1 shuffle. In original rules, you would "shuffle" each time you go to draw 1 of the cards for Smithy, getting 3 shuffles in total.

Now I'm conflicted... although I think lots of people may assume that "when you shuffle" triggers when you shuffle an empty pile, I don't feel like anyone would have ever assumed that playing a Smithy while your deck is empty would count as shuffling 3 times.

*Edit* And I think I know why. In MTG, you only ever shuffle your library when an effect specifically instructs you to "shuffle your library". Because an effect tells you to do that, people don't think it's all that weird when the rules clarify that even if you have 0 cards in your library, it still counts as having shuffled your library when you're instructed to do so. But in Dominion, shuffling happens automatically whenever your draw pile is empty and you need cards. If your discard pile is also empty, people don't think in terms of "now my draw pile is empty, so I will attempt to shuffle my discard pile". Rather they simply think "oh, because my discard pile is empty, the normal rule that says to make a new draw pile doesn't apply in this situation". So it's not so much a question of "does it count as shuffling if it is only 0 cards" as much as it is "do you still even bother making a new draw pile if your discard pile is also empty".

*Edit again* I think the simple fix is to say that yes, it still counts as shuffling if you only have 0 cards to shuffle, BUT the rule about what to do when your draw pile is empty / doesn't have enough cards to do what you need is modified to say "if your discard pile has any cards in it, shuffle your discard pile and put it on the bottom of your draw pile".

2

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #110: This stays in play

« on: April 15, 2021, 02:38:51 am »

Re: Tax Collector... several years ago, there was a big debate over whether or not it counted as shuffling if you had only zero or one card that was being shuffled. There is no official card that ever cares about this distinction. Donald did eventually rule that you can shuffle one card; but he didn't rule on the question of shuffling zero cards.

Here is the thread: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=15358.msg601263#msg601263

For what it's worth, MTG does state in the rules that things that trigger when you shuffle still trigger if you only have zero or one card.

3

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Janus cards: a new fan mechanic

« on: April 12, 2021, 05:05:42 pm »

How do these work with Wishing Well type effects? What is the card's name while it is not in play?

4

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Total number of card permutations

« on: April 12, 2021, 12:02:14 am »

It has not increased since this thread: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20226

Short version; it's incalculable if you are including things like Landscapes.

5

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: April 11, 2021, 11:04:32 am »

Reading through this gave me a thought:

I generally agree that I'd rather randomize my starting hand, but it does sometimes feel unfair when the first player gets the better option of 5/2 or 4/3 (when it's obvious which of those is better), and the 2nd player does not.

One thing we did try was that the 2nd player gets the same hands as the 1st player, but now I have a new idea: what of the 2nd player got the choice? they could choose the same hand OR they could choose to shuffle. That could give them a slight advantage and possible balance the already existing first player advantage (though in many games, it may not make any difference if they shuffle and get the same thing anyway).

In practice, I may never actually do it, but in theory it's interesting to at least consider.

when i was first taught to play back in... 2010? the person teaching me had a house rule that you started with your whole deck in hand and did your first two turns as one (with two buys).

We used to play that way as well. We wouldn’t even take turns; everyone would just grab 2 cards adding up to cost 7 or less and shuffle them into their starting deck. Of course this was before Nomad Camp.

6

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: April 10, 2021, 02:52:18 am »

If you make the set of options smaller, obviously finding the optimum becomes easier.

That is definitely not true, and easy to prove that it's not. Take a variant of Dominion where all the rules are exactly the same, except you have 1 additional option: Instead of taking your turn like normal, you can choose to gain all Provinces from the Province pile.

Regular Dominion has a smaller set of options than this variant would, yet it's cleary harder to find the optimum strategy.

Okay, but that only proves that silverspawn might have been more precise in his language. I would still posit that if you make the set of meaningful options smaller, finding the optimum strategy tends to become easier. Your example is evidence of that. While you technically increased the number of options, you actually decreased the number of meaningful options to one. This made finding the optimum strategy extremely easy.

And I think that on some boards; allowing you to choose you opening hand would reduce the number of meaningful options. Maybe a lot of boards; I honestly don’t know. Like if Chapel and Mountebank are on the board; or Chapel with a lot of things. Or Cultist or Witch with a lot of things; especially with a good $2. Being forced to randomly start 3/4 forces you to make a tough strategic choice; while being allowed to choose 5/2 would reduce your meaningful choices to one.

And again I’m only listing strong 5/2 boards as examples; partially because 3/4 is a more likely opening hand and partially because $5 cards are a lot stronger on average. And because there are on average fewer choices to make with 5/2 (because you can’t choose silver, and you can’t choose 3/3, etc). But the same thing would apply in the other direction.

I mean, just look at the recent thread about ways to guarantee that you can buy a $5 by your 4th turn. The current rule spawned an entire long discussion about all sorts of combos and cards out there that you can use to accomplish that goal. The variant rule would have completely removed that entire discussion; there wouldn’t be any strategy involved in figuring out how to make sure you get a $5 by your 4th turn. 

7

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: April 09, 2021, 06:58:33 pm »

If you make the set of options smaller, obviously finding the optimum becomes easier.

That is definitely not true, and easy to prove that it's not. Take a variant of Dominion where all the rules are exactly the same, except you have 1 additional option: Instead of taking your turn like normal, you can choose to gain all Provinces from the Province pile.

Regular Dominion has a smaller set of options than this variant would, yet it's cleary harder to find the optimum strategy.

8

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: April 09, 2021, 05:18:45 pm »

Restricting choices you can make doesn't restrict skill; in fact the opposite. The fact that you can't just choose to open 5/2 adds the skill of choosing what to do with your 4/3 opening. The fact that you can't just buy a Province if you only have to spend on a turn adds the skill of choosing of how to spend that . Restrictions on what you are allowed to do doesn't just take away a skill; it replaces it with a different skill.

If you can choose between 5/2 and 4/3, you need to choose what to do with your 4/3 opening and what to do with your 5/2 opening, and then decide which one of them is better. It sounds like you're taking it for a granted that the 5/2 is always better so you don't even need to consider the 4/3, but that's not even close to being true.

No, I intended everything I said to be including a vice-versa for when 4/3 is better and you draw 5/2. I just wasn't clear on that point. Yes, there are also boards where which one is correct isn't a clear choice, but there are plenty of others where it is. And any time one option is obviously better than the other; you remove one element of skill if you allow freely choosing between them.

9

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: April 09, 2021, 04:54:41 pm »

Restricting choices you can make doesn't restrict skill; in fact the opposite. The fact that you can't just choose to open 5/2 adds the skill of choosing what to do with your 4/3 opening. The fact that you can't just buy a Province if you only have to spend on a turn adds the skill of choosing of how to spend that . Restrictions on what you are allowed to do doesn't just take away a skill; it replaces it with a different skill.

10

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: April 08, 2021, 09:04:36 pm »

There is certainly a skill in deciding whether you would prefer 4/3 or 5/2. However, there is also just as much skill in determining what the best choice is given a 4/3 start, when the board favors a 5/2 start. If you have the extra option to simply chose 5/2 instead, then that skill of "how do you best use a 4/3 start" is removed from the game. The variant just replaces one type of skill testing with a different one.

11

Rules Questions / Re: Falconer + Black Cat

« on: April 06, 2021, 01:28:06 am »

Yes. This is the same as the classic example of your opponent playing an attack, you react with Secret Chamber to draw a Moat, then react with Moat to prevent the attack, then react with that same Secret Chamber again to put the Moat back on your deck.

Note that there is no way to show whether the Black Cat you reacted with was the same one you gained with Falconer, or if it was another Black Cat that happened to already be in your hand.

12

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: April 01, 2021, 06:03:27 pm »

The first rule doesn't work in practice. I and many others have had the exact same idea, but it doesn't work.

What the first rule essentially says is only the 2nd player is allowed to win the game by pileout. Considering around 30% of games are won that way, you've just replaced a 10% first player advantage with near total second player advantage.

How is that the case? The first player can still win by pileout, they just no longer get the unfair advantage of an extra turn.

If the first player has a way that he can empty 3 piles while also being ahead by a couple of points, then he would no longer be able to win that way, because all the second player has to do is buy a Duchy. In fact, it would be almost always impossible for the first player to ever win a game by only a couple of points; player 1 would have to not only end the game while ahead, but end the game while ahead by a comfortable lead. Meanwhile, second player can continue to do things that involve getting ahead by a single point and ending the game for the win.

Even if pileouts are specifically a problem, the rule could be amended so the extra turn only applies on province depletion.

The problem would be more common with pileouts simply because it's more common for a very close game to end that way; games that end on Provinces often have at least a 12 point difference in the score. But it's still the same issue with a Province ending... if player 1 buying the last Province would put him ahead by 2 points, then he can't safely do that because he probably won't win. Player 1 can only buy the last Province if it puts him ahead by more points than player 2 can get with the remaining turn.

13

Dominion FAQ / Re: Pearl Diver played with 2 deck cards?

« on: March 31, 2021, 11:44:13 pm »

In an IRL game last week, I had 1 card left in my deck after drawing the card from Pearl Diver. I thought long and hard and eventually decided to keep it on the bottom of my deck.

14

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: March 30, 2021, 04:41:59 pm »

As for the second rule, it doesn't work with any of the cards that change your second hand, like noble brigand or cavalry.

Well you can always implement it as "each player can arrange their starting deck as they want".

I think the real problem with that rule is that there's really nothing special about the arrangement of your starting deck compared to the arrangement of your deck after any shuffle... I think people tend to think of it as different probably because the shuffling happened during the game setup rather than during the game itself. But what order your cards are in when you shuffle for the first time (usually at the end of turn 2) generally matters more than the starting order does in terms of luck. So if you are going to allow players to order their starting deck, why not allow them to order their first shuffle?

And continuing down that line of thinking, why not allow players to order their deck whenever they "shuffle"?

Well sort of. At a certain point, you can say that you make your own shuffle luck... building a consistent deck that doesn't get screwed by bad shuffle luck is part of the skill. And to an extent, that exists in the first shuffle (don't buy 2 terminal draw cards in your opening), but for the most part you don't have any control over deck consistency yet.

15

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variants to make the game more fair & less luck dependent?

« on: March 29, 2021, 11:09:58 am »

As for the second rule, it doesn't work with any of the cards that change your second hand, like noble brigand or cavalry.

Well you can always implement it as "each player can arrange their starting deck as they want".

I think the real problem with that rule is that there's really nothing special about the arrangement of your starting deck compared to the arrangement of your deck after any shuffle... I think people tend to think of it as different probably because the shuffling happened during the game setup rather than during the game itself. But what order your cards are in when you shuffle for the first time (usually at the end of turn 2) generally matters more than the starting order does in terms of luck. So if you are going to allow players to order their starting deck, why not allow them to order their first shuffle?

16

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Resigning at very end

« on: March 25, 2021, 06:51:09 pm »

I would assume they were just eager to get the next game started as fast as possible. When you’re playing a lot of games in a row, a few seconds saved at the end can feel like a lot.

17

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Always second player?

« on: March 25, 2021, 06:50:03 pm »

Does new Dominion online have any sort of “loser goes first” rule like Iso did?

18

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Cool Dudes

« on: March 22, 2021, 03:30:15 pm »

In two player game one uses 8 victory cards instead of 12. How do you handle Dolmen in this situation?

It's under every Supply pile, so its 17 for a "standard" game and scales up to... 22? 22 i think if it's colonies/plats, young witch (for the bane pile), a Looter, and a potion-cost card.

So you want to end a game with 22 empty piles???
As a normal game ends with 3, 4 maybe 5 piles, you only need 5. So you can start the game with a dolmem pile outside. If any pile is empty you put a dolmen on that place and can buy it if you want later to empty it completely.

It sounds like you might be missing something. This card doesn't change anything about how many empty piles are needed to end the game; rather it just adds 1 additional card to each pile (so normal Kingdom piles now have 11 cards in them instead of 10). So after 10 Villages are bought/gained; a Dolmen becomes available to buy/gain, and when that Dolmen is bought/gained, you now have 1 empty supply pile.

No, I think they understand it correctly. They talk about the practical point of view in real life games. If you strictly follow the instructions you need lots of Dolmen, whereas in reality you would need only a very few.

I see, yeah I misread it.

It's also a bit unclear how you go about choosing Dolmen for a game. It it intended to still count towards the 10 Kingdom cards you choose for the game, such that games using it have only 9 Kingdom piles (or 10 if one of them is Young Witch)?

Can a Dolmen go in the Black Market deck? I would think so, because all the cards in the Black Market deck are already not in the supply anyway; so it would just act normally there. But, if you do have a Dolmen in the Black Market deck, you would still follow the setup instructions, so you would also have a Dolmen under each pile in addition to a Dolmen in the Black Market itself.

19

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Cool Dudes

« on: March 22, 2021, 11:42:08 am »

In two player game one uses 8 victory cards instead of 12. How do you handle Dolmen in this situation?

It's under every Supply pile, so its 17 for a "standard" game and scales up to... 22? 22 i think if it's colonies/plats, young witch (for the bane pile), a Looter, and a potion-cost card.

So you want to end a game with 22 empty piles???
As a normal game ends with 3, 4 maybe 5 piles, you only need 5. So you can start the game with a dolmem pile outside. If any pile is empty you put a dolmen on that place and can buy it if you want later to empty it completely.

It sounds like you might be missing something. This card doesn't change anything about how many empty piles are needed to end the game; rather it just adds 1 additional card to each pile (so normal Kingdom piles now have 11 cards in them instead of 10). So after 10 Villages are bought/gained; a Dolmen becomes available to buy/gain, and when that Dolmen is bought/gained, you now have 1 empty supply pile.

20

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Semi-Interesting Dominion Moments Thread

« on: March 21, 2021, 10:30:47 am »

Just played an IRL game with Rats, Watchtower, Forager, and Remodel. We didn’t specifically count the Trash pile; but it was definitely larger than the Copper pile.

21

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Secret Breakthrough

« on: March 19, 2021, 10:18:10 am »

In general, keeping it secret doesn't impact the card at all; because it's only secret until the first time you draw it. And as Timinou said, your opponent isn't going to do something different based on them knowing what you got or not. Even if it was an attack or Masquerade; there's generally not a lot they your opponent can do to respond/change. I suppose if you got a Possession then they could choose to not buy a Masquerade or Ambassador.

VP cards are where the secrecy matters, though. If you picked up a VP card; then your opponent won't know until the end of the game. I think that adds a neat element of uncertainty where your opponent can't track if they're winning or not.

22

Dominion FAQ / Re: Pearl Diver played with 2 deck cards?

« on: March 11, 2021, 10:51:37 am »

The general rule is that any time you need a cards from your deck, and there are not enough cards remaining in your deck to get what you want, you shuffle your discard first (and put your remaining deck on top if it wasn't completely empty, like if you need to draw 3 cards but only have 1 or 2 in your deck).

Pearl Diver follows this rule normally; first you draw 1 card, so you shuffle if your deck is empty. Then you look at the bottom card of your deck, so you shuffle if your deck is empty at that point. If the bottom card of your deck happens to be the only card in your deck, then there is no reason you need to shuffle, because you have enough cards to do what you need to do.

23

Rules Questions / Re: Walled Village + Scheme

« on: March 04, 2021, 06:04:08 pm »

You're right again, I completely forgot about the "not during Clean-up" clause of Village Green and Tunnel.

I completely missed that Hermit, Village Green, and Tunnel had already been mentioned in the posts just above mine; and thought I was bringing up a completely new point.

24

General Discussion / Re: Petty Complaints

« on: March 04, 2021, 05:52:41 pm »

Amazon lists "Movies & TV" and "Blu-ray" as 2 separate sub-categories under the "Movies, Music & Games" category. This makes no sense; clearly "Movies & TV" would be a higher-level category than "Blu-ray"; and it's not like they show a separate sub-category for "DVD".

25

Rules Questions / Re: Walled Village + Scheme

« on: March 04, 2021, 01:21:02 pm »

Of course with the craziness of various combinations, there are ways to get action cards into play after you start discarding things for your cleanup phase. So the new wording lets you top-deck a card that wasn't in play at the start of cleanup. Also, the new wording lets you use the ability if Scheme wasn't in play at the start of cleanup, but gets played during cleanup.

Hermit might be the only way to kick off this edge case actually. You gain Madman in the middle of cleanup step while discarding cards; which could kick off various things. Either call Duplicate (failing to gain another Madman because it isn't in the supply), or using Innovation to play that Madman as a Way of the Mouse Scheme.