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Feedback / Can we have variants to the "3 piles empty=game over" rule?
« on: August 16, 2019, 07:08:15 pm »
Some games are just fast-ending non-games due to the 3-pile-rule. Particularly games with both ruins and curses. They would play out as much more interesting proper games if they didn't end by the 3-pile-rule.
So that's why it would be great if this rule could be adjusted in the advanced options, or even better in the autoplay options. There could be multiple options: extend to 4-pile or 5-pile instead of 3-pile, end only by provinces running out, or just give an exact number of turns and then the game ends at that point (I'll bet experts would have fun crafting challenge games with that option). I can think of some more cool options but I think I'll leave it at that now for brevity.
I surmise that the 3-pile-rule was originally made to accommodate the base game, which didn't have so many powerful cards, and on top of that to accommodate the game as experienced by new players. Because, for new players, they could reasonably both build dysfunctional decks, and no one's deck would have been strong enough to buy provinces often, except through the occasional lucky hand. And so in that case the game would have just dragged on and on, so it needed an alternate end condition in the 3-pile-rule. If new players experienced the game dragging on and on while failing to be able to buy provinces, it would've seemed like the game didn't "work", which could be a thing to cause bad reviews, so I surmise that the 3-pile-rule was important when Dominion was still a new game.
But today, Dominion is very established and popular, and the conditions of playing online are different from playing with cards in so many ways. We have tons of expansion sets with more powerful cards on average than the early sets, and this makes it much more rare that the board is so weak that tedium occurs before all 8 provinces get bought.
Do people agree with my assessment? Even if you don't agree perfectly with it, would you still prefer if there was a way to turn off the 3-pile-rule or select other options that cause the game to end?
So that's why it would be great if this rule could be adjusted in the advanced options, or even better in the autoplay options. There could be multiple options: extend to 4-pile or 5-pile instead of 3-pile, end only by provinces running out, or just give an exact number of turns and then the game ends at that point (I'll bet experts would have fun crafting challenge games with that option). I can think of some more cool options but I think I'll leave it at that now for brevity.
I surmise that the 3-pile-rule was originally made to accommodate the base game, which didn't have so many powerful cards, and on top of that to accommodate the game as experienced by new players. Because, for new players, they could reasonably both build dysfunctional decks, and no one's deck would have been strong enough to buy provinces often, except through the occasional lucky hand. And so in that case the game would have just dragged on and on, so it needed an alternate end condition in the 3-pile-rule. If new players experienced the game dragging on and on while failing to be able to buy provinces, it would've seemed like the game didn't "work", which could be a thing to cause bad reviews, so I surmise that the 3-pile-rule was important when Dominion was still a new game.
But today, Dominion is very established and popular, and the conditions of playing online are different from playing with cards in so many ways. We have tons of expansion sets with more powerful cards on average than the early sets, and this makes it much more rare that the board is so weak that tedium occurs before all 8 provinces get bought.
Do people agree with my assessment? Even if you don't agree perfectly with it, would you still prefer if there was a way to turn off the 3-pile-rule or select other options that cause the game to end?