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Messages - sprocket science

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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Trade
« on: April 18, 2018, 08:43:58 am »
The basic idea of a trade mat seems interesting, but I am not sure how it fits into Dominion. Trade implies an exchange between players, ideally for mutual benefit. That implies that the utility of different cards is different for different players. That may be true if the players are following completely different strategies, but then the question would be why you bought the card you don't want now in the first place. I can only see edge cases, like one player trashing down their starting coppers, and another player with a counting house or gardens strategy wanting them. But even then, the question is why I would want to give my coppers to my opponent who wants them rather than trashing them - I gain nothing from this.

Besides, none of the cards actually facilitate a trade in that sense.

Canal basically trashes a card, and can gain cards from the trash - just that it is using its own special trash.

Charlatan I do not fully understand. In a multiplayer game, do I load up the curses one by one, and then fire them at some point? Or can I use this so that only the player on my left hand side always gets cursed? That is actually problematic, see the advice on attacks that target only a specific player. Does the 'your choice' imply that you can even pick which player gets the single curse? Ouch, I don't think that will work well.

Forgery is interesting, though it seems a bit like Necromancer and the Zombies. How does this interact with Canal? If both are in the kingdom, I might buy Canal just to take these actions for myself, if they are any good - potentially leaving Forgery with nothing to do. Is that intentional?
 


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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Variant: Anti trash-loop rule
« on: January 31, 2018, 10:47:51 am »
Your proposal would completely change (break) Lurker. You normally want them in pairs to immediately gain the card you trashed. If the cards are put into the trash at the end of the turn, you opponent would always have first pick of your trashed cards, which makes this much more swingy and may lead to one player playing a pure 'leeching' strategy.

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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Asper's Cards
« on: December 15, 2017, 07:15:29 am »
My main problem is that the game isn't really something I can propose to the regular German publisher, because I don't think they'll dig the humor.

If you go to the site of satire magazine 'Der Postillon', there's usually advertisements for 'non-politically correct' games ('Minderheitenquartett'). I have no knowledge about the publisher behind that, but it is safe to say that they are comfortable with humor you would never get past a major family-oriented publisher.

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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Ice Age
« on: December 06, 2017, 11:51:50 am »
A compromise option would be once per shuffle with a maximum of one per turn. It's less elegant, though. And "at the end of your turn, if you shuffled this turn", which is more or less the same but prevents any gain-and-remove-ice shenanigans - is even less elegant.

I think 'Once per turn, when you try to draw a card when your Deck is empty, remove one ice token from each card' or  'When you shuffle, remove one ice token from each card if you haven't already this turn' are both reasonably elegant.

The first one doesn't work because of various other things that cause you to shuffle other than drawing (Lookout, Navigator, etc).

You are right, it would have to be 'Once per turn, when you try to draw, reveal, or look at the top card of your Deck but your Deck is empty, remove one ice token from each card'. That was what I intended, but I got the terminology wrong... Or by avoiding terminology: 'Once per turn, when you try to pick up the top card of your Deck but your Deck is empty, remove one ice token from each card', but the former is probably better...


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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Ice Age
« on: December 05, 2017, 07:17:41 pm »
Rediscover
Again I'm not particularly happy with the name - it's hard to think of so many ice themed things! This is a cheap expand but the gained card is delayed based upon how much more expensive it was than the trashed card. Gain and play shenanigans are hard to do with this but trashing $5's into set aside Provinces might be too good, so this might have to be limited to gaining non-victory cards.

As the freezing is meant as a punishment (to make the card cheaper), instead of limiting the gaining to non-victory cards, you could limit the freezing to non-victory cards.

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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Ice Age
« on: December 05, 2017, 07:13:03 pm »
A compromise option would be once per shuffle with a maximum of one per turn. It's less elegant, though. And "at the end of your turn, if you shuffled this turn", which is more or less the same but prevents any gain-and-remove-ice shenanigans - is even less elegant.

I think 'Once per turn, when you try to draw a card when your Deck is empty, remove one ice token from each card' or  'When you shuffle, remove one ice token from each card if you haven't already this turn' are both reasonably elegant.

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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Ice Age
« on: December 05, 2017, 07:08:20 pm »
Actually, if done in the right type of engine; you can shuffle multiple times per turn, which would make Ice cards even stronger.

Yeah, because of this and because of junky slog decks, I think ice should be once per turn as Gazbag originally suggested. There are still little loopholes like mission, outpost, and possession, but that shouldn't really be a problem.

I really don't understand your argument concerning junky slog decks. Until the reshuffle, it makes very little difference whether a card is iced or in my discard pile. In a slog, it takes many turns from one reshuffle to the next, so most ice token effects, maybe apart from Frost Spirit and Frozen Cache itself, are likely to miss it, which makes them completely pointless (except perhaps the coin tokens from Mountain Village). 'Once per shuffle' would power up Ice Cave, Glacier, and Frost Spirit in slog decks! On the gainers, it would be hard, admittedly.

When using 'once per shuffle', Snow Hag should probably only give one token, though, Rediscover would give 0,1, and 2 tokens, and Frost Spirit maybe 2 or 3.



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Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Ice Age
« on: December 05, 2017, 02:13:36 pm »
I really like your idea as well. It's a mechanic with many interesting possibilities. It also works nicely thematically.

My first reaction was also that you should remove an ice token per shuffle, not per turn. When you draw your deck, that may be equivalent. But in sloggy games, the difference is quite significant. Freezing a card (I like the wording proposed by pacovf) only really has an effect at all if you can make it miss a shuffle, i.e. by freezing it right before a shuffle, by putting enough ice tokens on it, or by cycling quickly and shuffling often. So in sloggy games, freezing would hardly ever do anything. As is, the ice tokens mostly reward fast cycling, at the cost of making cards like Ice Cave pointless if that is not possible. Changing the mechanic to 'per shuffle' would definitely change the balance how many ice tokens certain cards should give, though.

I agree there are mechanical problems. I think a shuffle can be defined as 'trying to draw a card when your Deck is empty', which deals with the 'no cards' edge case. But it should be limited to at most one thawing per turn, so the rule would need to be 'Once per turn, when you try to draw a card when your Deck is empty, remove one ice token from each card' or  'When you try to draw a card when your Deck is empty, remove one ice token from each card if you haven't already this turn'. It doesn't go on a card, so can be wordy...

I noticed another point: Is freezing a card good or bad for you? With Glacier, Ice Cave, Frost Spirit, and (unless you have really good trashing) Snow Hag, freezing the cards is good for you, because it delays junk from entering your hand. With Cold Storage, Frozen Cache, and Citadel, it is meant to delay the gaining, and so is bad for you. In itself, that is fine, but if you add a card like Venturer that accelerates the thawing, it becomes an issue. On Venturer, the accelerated thawing out of the coppers is meant as a punishment, but if you combine Venturer with the delayed gainers, it suddenly becomes a reward. You could argue that makes the mechanic more interesting and gives more tactical options, but I think I like it better as a force of nature that cannot be affected directly.

BTW, the concept brought to mind the delay mechanic proposed here http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=16895, which is only about delayed gaining, though. The ice token idea is more flexible, allowing different delays, and also enables 'frost spiriting' away cards you already have. But still, some of the card ideas might carry over.


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