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1

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion Wild Lands

« on: December 22, 2018, 12:36:23 pm »

Nile Crocodile is overpowered, I guess. It can gain anything, even a Colony. You should say "one of the trashed cards".

It can only gain a Colony if somebody else has previously trashed a Colony via a different card. Crocodile cannot trash Victory cards.

I don't think it is that strong. Sure, you have to test it and it might be best at $5 but it is not crazy as there is rarely non-Victory stuff that costs more than 6 whereas there is a lot of non-Estates junk that costs less than 3. So relative to Knights this will often help the opponents. Sure, later in the game you can trash&gain, like 2 Rogues in one, but note that the very presence of Crocodile incentivzes you to (if this is feasible) thin less and sift more.

I think that this is the most interesting trashing Attack that CouduHieh has posted so far as it differs significantly from existing cards.

Play with Remodel, Swindler, Salvager, Apprentice, or a kind of thing. Although you use Crocodile and one of them is rare (around 15%), its pover governs the game.

Remodel and Salvage only trash Provinces or Colonies in the endgame for tempo reasons. Apprentice and Province/Colony seems pretty borderline so only Swindler is a thing. I don't think that this warrants restricting Crocodile from only gained trashed cards instead of cards from the trash which seems more fun due to a potentially larger selection in multiplayer.

2

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Patron and "reveal"

« on: December 22, 2018, 05:12:10 am »

You might want to read the first post of this thread.

Your guess that I didn't is poor. I stopped there on your post though.

Fine with me if you are set on denying the difference between reveal and "reveal" that Jeebus pointed out.

3

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Patron and "reveal"

« on: December 21, 2018, 05:47:07 pm »

The difference between the top card of your deck always being revealed and "reveal" in the sense of something being explicitly written on a card is extremely counterintuitive.

You've lost me.

You might want to read the first post of this thread.
There is "reveal" as a keyword, what Patron's wording hints at.
There is other stuff revealed, like the top card of your discard pile.

Even though Patron clearly refers to the former you can nonetheless confuse it with the latter. If I ever play with the card I am 100% certain that even the hardcore gamers at the table will ask me what this supposed to mean, whether stuff in the discard pile or the trash is revealed and so on.

The average family gamer is in great shape with Patron. The Dominion nerds create questions that family gamers never think of. Family gamers are not checking the rulebook looking for ways to be confused.

A pretty weird accusation given that folks like me did not know what reveal means precisely, what is actually considered to be revealed, before Patron came along. So I re-read the rules not to become even more confused about something which I did not get but to realize that reveal is actually a keyword (that has been hitherto been mostly irrelevant). But I read over that part which Jeebus pointed out here and which reveals, pardon the pun, the difference between "reveal" and reveal.

I understand that you think that your baby is perfect but I think that something like this is a fairly natural and inevitable issue that arises when you do many expansions and use a keyword for a new card which has so far never been rigorously used (again, the difference between "reveal" and reveal).
Also, just because your playtesting group got the card immediately does not imply that other playing groups will do so as well. There is always groupthink and group bias and Jeebus pointed out that a playtester was actually wrong about Patron supposedly not requiring the using the word "reveal" phrase.

4

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Patron and "reveal"

« on: December 21, 2018, 08:45:16 am »

Now imagine you are an average family gamer who plays the game only a few times a year.

Why do I even have expansions for a game I play only a few times a year?

Because somebody likes choice, got it as a present or whatever. Motivations to get expansions are numerous. I have expansions for games I only play once or twice a year and I am an avid gamer so it is not hard to imagine that many family gamers play less frequently.
For example my little cousin has several Dominion expansions and I don't think that he plays will all of them all the time and I certainly don't think that he would get immediately get the difference between reveal and "reveal", assuming that reveal has been consistently translated into German.

5

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Dynasties

« on: December 21, 2018, 08:39:01 am »

These are all very interesting cards. I have a hard time judging Armoursmith and Rider but on the first glance they look sound.
Farrier could be too good for $3 if there is a run on the pile in many games so it might have to cost $4. But on the other hand opening double Farrier isn't that brilliant: some cycling, no boost to the economy and you could end up in a similar situation as somebody who mindlessly buys Saunas in the opening.

6

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion Wild Lands

« on: December 21, 2018, 08:34:38 am »

Nile Crocodile is overpowered, I guess. It can gain anything, even a Colony. You should say "one of the trashed cards".

It can only gain a Colony if somebody else has previously trashed a Colony via a different card. Crocodile cannot trash Victory cards.

I don't think it is that strong. Sure, you have to test it and it might be best at $5 but it is not crazy as there is rarely non-Victory stuff that costs more than 6 whereas there is a lot of non-Estates junk that costs less than 3. So relative to Knights this will often help the opponents. Sure, later in the game you can trash&gain, like 2 Rogues in one, but note that the very presence of Crocodile incentivzes you to (if this is feasible) thin less and sift more.

I think that this is the most interesting trashing Attack that CouduHieh has posted so far as it differs significantly from existing cards.

7

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Patron and "reveal"

« on: December 21, 2018, 08:11:05 am »

One just has to read the thread that Jeebus linked to realize that among a bunch of Dominion nerds only few could figure out what reveal includes precisely. Now imagine you are an average family gamer who plays the game only a few times a year.

The difference between the top card of your deck always being revealed and "reveal" in the sense of something being explicitly written on a card is extremely counterintuitive.
It is as if the rules said that all horizontal stuff is considered to be cards but not "cards" in the sence of gaining, cost reduction and so on. The actual rules, saying that Events are not cards but stuff that you can buy, are much better.

8

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Patron and "reveal"

« on: December 20, 2018, 06:40:12 pm »

Nice catch. It neatly illustrates that Patron is a bad design (the stuff above the line is fine) as reveal is anything but a clear keyword, lots of stuff gets revealed all the time.
I consider it to be by far the most messy and complicated card of the set. Even after you got the difference between reveal and "reveal" you have to re-read the text of all other Kingdom cards.

9

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 20, 2018, 09:57:53 am »

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Research is not fun

« on: December 19, 2018, 03:42:09 pm »

It is OKish as a trasher but you cannot use it as well to draw was Apprentice. There is the tempo issue due to it being a Duration and the setting aside which is relatively bad (compared to Apprentice) if you trash something like Gold for draw in the endgame.

11

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 19, 2018, 07:51:30 am »

Because the cantrip trasher effect is sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful.

I am pretty sure that Vanguard will more often be an asset than a liability (far more so than Pirate Ship which you mentioned but which can be quite nasty in some Kingdoms in multiplayer games).
Keep in mind that the "attacked" player selects, in the absence of handsize Attacks and the -1 Card token, out of 6 instead of 5 cards. That matters a lot as the card will start to become crucial (we know these moments from Upgrade, Junk Dealer and Lookout) later in the game.

It is your design so you can of course take as many liberties as you want. But I think that being a gift during a large part of the game (it is nearly as good as having a cantrip trasher in your deck) and only affecting one player disqualifies this from having the Attack type.

12

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 19, 2018, 07:40:08 am »

It just seems weird that Alice plays Vanguard, Bob trashes a card from his hand, Charles sets aside a Horse Trader and Alice takes the Flag from Bob. Bob got compensated for having lost the Flag and Charles got a gift as well although the Attack did not involve him at all. Existing Attacks are always symmetric, they affect all other players.

Certainly there's some potential for politics introduced, but that's inherent to the concept of Artifacts. Playing Vanguard to attack one player is just an extension of buying a Flag Bearer to take the Flag from one player.

Taking the Flag from another player via gaining/trashing Flagbearer is not an Attack. So why should taking the Flag from another player while gifting him the net effect of a cantrip trasher be considered an Attack? Sure, late in the game that can hurt just like Masquerade or Junk Dealer can hurt but this influences your play, you will trash slightly slower.

13

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 19, 2018, 07:29:32 am »

It just seems weird that Alice plays Vanguard, Bob trashes a card from his hand, Charles sets aside a Horse Trader and Alice takes the Flag from Bob. Bob got compensated for having lost the Flag and Charles got a gift as well although the Attack did not involve him at all. Existing Attacks are always symmetric, they affect all other players.

14

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 19, 2018, 06:52:02 am »

Masquerade isn't an Attack cardf because it would be unclear how it should be resolved if one player blocks the attack.

Pretty simple, that dude doesn't pass a card or gets passed a card to, i.e. in a 3P game you simply resolve Masquerade as if it were a 2P game. And if both players Moat you pass a card to yourself.

That does not align with how the card is worded. If I block the attack, my right neighbor is still told to pass me a card. He's not told to pass my left neighbor a card. To make it work the way you describe it, the card would have to use a much more complicated wording. Those additional words would only ever matter if a straight attack-blocker was in the kingdom, and Intrigue never had such a card (and started as a standalone edition, mind you). It's so, so much simpler to just not have it be an attack.

Sure, the wording would be a mess. I am just saying that you could commonsensically play Masquerade as an Attack card and that if Masquerade, which is often harsher than Vanguard (and led to the broken KC-Goons-Masquerade combo), isn't an Attack Vanguard, which is often a gift, shouldn't be one either.
I read the card as a partly-delayed Smithy: it always net draws 3 cards with the last card only arriving in your hand at the end of your turn. It has the upside of potentially drawing you more cards if the Flag is uncontested and the downside of gifting whomever you steal the Flag from something (the stealing itself obviously cannot be considered as Attack, otherwise Fool, Borderguard, Treasurer and Swashbuckler could be Attacks as well). This is why I don't think that it should be an Attack. Sure, it is more complex as in the later part of the game there is a little mini-game arising about whether you really want to play Vanguard anymore as you might be superthin and direly want to hang on to whatever you have. But that seems to be more like a downside attached to Flag late in the game, akin to Cathedral potentially trashing good cards late in the game, than a genuine Attack.

15

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 19, 2018, 05:54:30 am »

Masquerade isn't an Attack cardf because it would be unclear how it should be resolved if one player blocks the attack.

Pretty simple, that dude doesn't pass a card or gets passed a card to, i.e. in a 3P game you simply resolve Masquerade as if it were a 2P game. And if both players Moat you pass a card to yourself.

Also, while you can get a better card via Masquerade while you are on the passive side of it most of the times it is neutral or bad whereas Vanguard seems to be mostly good for the Attacked player.

16

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion Wild Lands

« on: December 19, 2018, 05:24:47 am »

I’ve also removed the curse gaining with tiger, so now how does it look.

You can tell yourself that it is Josephine plus Destry with the Attack being arguably nerfed (lower likelihood of hitting vs. giving the Attack player the option to e.g. trash a Silver instead of a $5). Probably OK at the price.

17

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 19, 2018, 05:17:20 am »

With 6 cards in hand this will be more of a gift than an Attack until fairly late in the game. Of course it becomes much stronger with handsize attacks.

It isn't really an attack anyway because it is trivial to defend against it. Still good that it has Attack type I think.

There is one official card that is remotely similar to this in terms of being potentially hurtful late in the game, Masquerade. It doesn't have the Attack type.

With 6 cards in hand this will be more of a gift than an Attack until fairly late in the game. Of course it becomes much stronger with handsize attacks.

It isn't really an attack anyway because it is trivial to defend against it. Still good that it has Attack type I think.

You can also trash your own cards if you have the flag. The Attack type is strange, a player can react to it, even if is not affected (like multiple militias, but at least, in that case, is affected once)

Yeah, it is totally weird to give something which is more often beneficial than harmful and, as you pointed out, often not affecting the supposedly attacked player, the Attack type.

18

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion Wild Lands

« on: December 18, 2018, 02:28:28 pm »

If I made explorer a 7 or 8 costing card would it be better?

I'd first ask myself why no offical cards that cost $7 or $8 do pure vanilla stuff.

DXV had a Double Peddler that costs $7 during the playtesting of Prosperity and it later became Grand Market. So the official Double Peddlers, Conspirator and Grand Market, are either conditional or hard to get instead of very expensive.

I don't want to sound harsh but I think that you fall into the common trap of designing cards that do too much (and I say this as a guy who is biased towards overcomplexity!) and not comparing them carefully enough with existing cards. Explorer is better than Caravan, Harvest and Merchant Ship; Tiger is Nobles with a Knight/Giant like Attack substituting the Necropolis option.

19

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 18, 2018, 01:57:38 pm »

With 6 cards in hand this will be more of a gift than an Attack until fairly late in the game. Of course it becomes much stronger with handsize attacks.

20

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion Wild Lands

« on: December 18, 2018, 01:54:26 pm »

Explorer is overpowered. It is basically Caravan and, if we use a conservative estimate for deck variety, Merchant Ship combined.
Or, to view it from another perspective, even if it did nothing on the second turn it is most often a double or triple Peddler which is too strong for $6.

Zebras is overpowered as well. Of course you rarely want to buy it and gift it to the other players but with any Workshop or Remodel variant (or even just Hermit) you are glad to get a Laboratory that later degenerates into a Fugitive.

21

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 14, 2018, 03:18:54 am »

The silliness goes away somewhat when it's not always so obvious which choice is strictly better; such that your opponent actually may be likely to make the wrong choice.

But this only works if you think you have a significantly better understanding of what the best choice is, i.e. if you assume that your opponent is a worse player than you.

No. GendoIkari specifically pointed out that the choice is meant to be complicated and murky, when even the best players in the world could mess up. Also, as the card offers the choices and not the player, how well player A understands it has nothing to do with how likely player B is to make a mistake.

When you are close to time control in chess and the opponent has little time on their clock (they get extra time after the time control), making a move that gives him more options is often better than one that gives him fewer options, even if the former is slightly inferior to the latter. This has nothing to do with player strength, playing like this is smart even if you are the the less skilled player or even if you don't understand the current position particularly well. Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves.

You could argue that due to the time constraints, at the very moment of choice the player who got served more options is currently the worse player, not due his skills but due to the bad time situation.
But, to get back to Bottle Imp, this is pretty much the very situation we all are in when we play with a fairly unusual new card, we are then all (situationally) bad players.


Maths has been mentioned a few times in this thread and I think a lot of people come towards this either from plain intuition (intuitively more options imply freedom and are perceived as good although being in a huge mall with a huge selection of products can also make you feel the other way around) or from something like optimization where a larger option space is better than a smaller one.
But we talk about games, not decisions made by individuals in a void, so you gotta take strategtic interaction into account. And if you come towards this from game theory you are not surprised about more options being potentially bad.

22

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 12, 2018, 06:23:44 pm »

I love this, except for being perhaps too automatic which is, given that you can construct your deck such that you have a discard more often, arguable. Do you think that it would be too expensive if it costed $1?

It doesn't give +1 Action like Villa, so that makes is less automatic imo. (Also, you can put the +1 Buy after the "once per turn" for bigger text, like Save.)

It is an Event "cantrip", there is no cost of playing it beyond the gift to the opponents. When you return to your Action phase the number of Actions you have remains constant. Also, what I just noted is that like Villa this is bonkers with draw-to-X (but unlike Village it doesn't flood your deck with degenerate villages).
If one wanted to avoid this one could do it as Edict: In games using this, once per turn during your Action phase, you may look through your discard pile to put a card from it into your hand. If you do, all other players may do the same.

23

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 12, 2018, 02:58:26 pm »

I love this, except for being perhaps too automatic which is, given that you can construct your deck such that you have a discard more often, arguable. Do you think that it would be too expensive if it costed $1?

24

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 12, 2018, 02:53:09 pm »

On the other hand, if for some reason player A already knew that for all players it was good to purchase the auction prize for 9 or less and bad to purchase it for 10 or more, then yes player A should immediately bid 9.

You assume again perfect rationality and perfect information. Human beings are not perfect so player A could gamble, bid 9 and hope that everybody else undervalues the asset.
It also depends on how granular the currency is. If you could e.g. bid 9,01 there is little cost in not gambling and not immediately bidding 9.

1. In the case of cursed bottle, the correct amount is either the minimum amount or not to take cursed bottle. So in fact it is very possible to compute the exact amount.

I wanna see these computations. Seriously, I know nothing about solving stochastic games and your knowledge about it could probably help a lot in creating decent Dominion bots.
I hope that the irony comes through. No human being calculates the optimum amount for Mountain pass or Bottle Imp while playing the game, not even experts in stochastic game theory. We use heuristics, rules of thumb.

2. This does not come into play with cursed bottle. Paying more for the bottle imp is both a higher cost and a lower reward. On the other hand, if you had to pay more than the previous time, it could work very nicely.

Huh? Bottle Imp doesn't have two upsides, it has an upside and a downside. If another player takes Bottle Imp away at a moment which is good for you because the costs of -13VPs outweighs the benefit of auto-Wishes each turn you are happy that he does it.
And, this is crucial, the other player might not behave irrationally at all! His deck could differ a lot from yours so for him the benefits of auto-Wishes outweigh the -13VPs.

3. Again, this doesn't apply to cursed bottle because of how you have to underbid. Like, am I going to buy bottle imp for 6 hoping that my opponent will spend 5 on it? That's nonsense; they are losing less than me, and regardless they can still just buy it for min amount.

Ccreating an option for you to get rid of -13VPs is always good. Creating an option for you to get rid of auto-Wish is always bad. You ignore this basic trade-off of the card the entire time.
In a situation in which you have played Cursed Bottle, have 6 Coins and want to buy an Ironmonger (because that is the b best card right now) you have 2 Coins left. There isn't any difference cost-wise between paying 0, 1 or 2 for Bottle Imp so your choice depends on how direly you want to hang onto it and how much you value the option that somebody might snatch it away from you. The best option is Kingdom-, time-, deck- and player-dependent.

Holunder:
I think that you are trolling, sorry if you aren't, I won't respond to you anymore.

You do implicitly assume stuff which is not always automatically the case in a real game of Dominion: that decks are symmetric, that the evaluation of the strength of a card is equal among players and constant over time, that nobody makes mistakes and so on. I might disagree too harshly with these assumptions but I have no interest in trolling you; this is about the game, not the players.

25

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 12, 2018, 02:23:27 pm »

Why bother starting with a small bid and then gradually increasing it, until one player is no longer willing to pay that much? Surely both players should just be bidding the correct amount to start with.

Great post. I'd like to add that it also depends on the precise rules of the auction and on how granular the currency is. If we stick with your Power Grid example, what also comes into play is that the worth of a power planet is not equal for all players. Well, that's also so in the real world, here the marginal benefit of getting an asset also differs among people which is why it would be stupid to immediately bid your willing to pay. That Picasso might be worth 5 for you but if everybody else is unwilling to pay more than 1 a starting bid of 5 would unnecesarily cost you 4.

If you only look at "worth" as "how good is it for me to have", then yes. But really, you getting it is also your opponent not getting it. From that perspective, it should be worth exactly the same to both players. As in, even if it would be a horrible plant for me to have personally, it could be so good for my opponent to have that it's still better for me to have it over all.

True that, I totally forgot anti-kingmaking in Power Grid, that you sometimes gotta pay more than you wanted to stop somebody from ending the game.
Also, while talking about this game, while it is not related to Bottle Imp as there is no auction involved, the resource market works like real markets, i.e. you got sunspot equilibiria, expectations unrelated to fundamentals driving prices and so on. If players think that other player think about them that they think that uranium will be in high demand, these very players will buy a lot of uranium. No irrationality involved, just believes and expectations driving the system.
Which brings us back to Bottle Imp: your expectations about how other players behave will influence the amount you pay for it.