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Messages - Snowyowl

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1
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas
« on: March 13, 2020, 03:05:33 pm »
A Victory card with an on-play effect. It has no other types. Figuring out how to play a card that isn't an Action or Treasure (or Reaction or Night, for that matter) is left as an exercise for the reader.

2
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 28, 2020, 05:29:19 pm »
Thanks for pointing that out! I think I'll try the blunt-force solution and just say "non-commissioner card"
You can still loop it if there's cost reduction and a suitable Command in the supply, like Captain. Perhaps that's convoluted enough that it's OK.

3
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas
« on: February 24, 2020, 04:51:11 pm »
Towering Pile of Uselessness
$0 • (no type)
-
When you buy this, +1 Buy.

4
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 23, 2020, 04:24:40 pm »
The point about making it an Action so it works with trash-for-benefit like Raze is a good one. I've also tweaked it so that it synergises with itself, at least. Oh, and renamed it so it's not a Treasure. How's this version?



(Illustration: a detail from The Watchmaker 2 by Maja Stosic, released here under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.)

5
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 22, 2020, 11:22:11 am »
Yep, it doesn't really work well with other +Buys, including itself. Sometimes you don't care about the downside because you're buying Events or using money for non-buy purposes, and sometimes the +1 Buy is worthwhile on its own (at the very least there's a 0-cost card in the kingdom that you can buy with it). And there are trashers that can make use of it, like Counterfeit.

Still, this does raise the question of when you're buying it in the first place - there's little reason to get a 0-cost card unless you're spending several Buys this turn, and that's its weakness.

6
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 21, 2020, 05:22:38 pm »
Edit: New version here



Quote
Nickel Silver
$0 • Treasure
+$2
+1 Buy
While this is in play, cards cost $1 more.

Nickel Silver or German Silver doesn't actually contain any silver, it's an alloy of 60% copper, 20% nickel, and 20% zinc. It was used to make jewelry and cutlery that imitated the appearance of silver, but much cheaper (and lighter). It was only made in the West from the 18th century onwards, but it was known as "white copper" in China much earlier than that.

7
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 17, 2020, 07:15:24 pm »
Deed
$2 • Treasure
$0
When this is your first buy in a turn or when you trash this, +$3 and +1 Buy
Cheap card with a trashing theme? This has clearly just escaped from Dark Ages. But the name and art give it a fiscal flavour, like something from Prosperity or Empires.

It has some compelling uses. e.g. with Watchtower, you can buy it and immediately trash it for a net +$4 and +1 Buy just for having Watchtower in hand.

Cards that give a large-font 0 of something are just intrinsically hilarious. (Overgrown Estate.)

8
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 14, 2020, 05:47:48 am »
Scolapasta, since you're tightening up the wording, do you need "When you play this" in there? By default, cards take effect when played.

9
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 13, 2020, 02:43:55 pm »
Keystone's kinda interesting, if you put it on Copper then you'll have 1 less card in hand each turn. So you can draw an extra with draw-to-X effects. Which you conveniently have, as Keystone is one.

.. still kinda weak even then, paying 4 for an effective draw-to-6 sometimes is not that interesting, even if it does cantrip.

10
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 10, 2020, 04:42:03 pm »
Roundabout cards

When you use these cards, pay close attention to the order that you dealt out the Supply piles. They don't exist in a shapeless vacuum any more: they can look at the piles adjacent to them, or even further away! They all have the type "Roundabout", but that's just so you don't forget to pay attention to the words "to the left" and "to the right". There's no rules meaning to it. And they all share a common theme.


Quote
Pearl • $4 • Treasure - Roundabout
+$2
Cards from the three piles to the left of this cost $1 less this turn.

Quote
Circlet • $2 • Treasure - Roundabout
Choose one: +$2 , or gain a copy of the card to the left of this.
-
When you buy this, you may discard a card of the pile to the left of this. If you don't, trash this.

Quote
Smuggling Ring • $5 • Victory - Roundabout
Worth 1VP per 2 cards of the pile to the left of this in your deck.

Quote
Round Table • $6 • Action - Command - Roundabout
Play the next non-Command Action to the left of this costing up to $3, leaving it in the Supply.
Play the next non-Command Action to the right of this costing up to $3, leaving it in the Supply.

Quote
Calliope • $3 • Action - Roundabout
Trash a card from your hand. Gain the next card to its left that costs $0 to $2 more than it.

Quote
Waterwheel • $3 • Project - Roundabout
After you play an Action card, if the pile to its left is an Action, you may play a card of that pile from your hand.

Notional FAQ:
During Setup, deal out the piles from left to right. Every Kingdom card has one card to its left and one to its right, because the order is a circle; even if you've arranged your cards in a line, consider the rightmost card to be one step left of the leftmost card. (That's why they're Roundabout cards, and not Straightforward cards.)
Only Kingdom cards have an ordering; Base cards, non-Supply cards, Events, Projects, tokens, and any other things that have wandered onto the gaming table do not have anything to their left or right.
"The pile to the left of this" means that Supply pile, even if it's empty. "A card of a pile" means a card that started the game in that pile.
"The next non-Command Action to the left of this" means keep looking to the left until you find a card on top of its Supply pile that qualifies. This may refer to a different card over the course of the game, as the contents of piles change. It may loop around and refer to the pile itself, if no other card qualifies, and failing that it'll refer to nothing at all.

Design Notes:
These cards aren't really balanced. But they show off what's possible with this mechanic.
Sorry about the grammar in "a card of that pile". "From" is more correct, but unfortunately "play a card from a pile" already means something in Dominion.
The design space of Dominion is constrained by the fact that any particular card can only rely on having itself and the Base Cards available. Duke can count the number of Duchies you have - but you can't make a card like it that counts Villages, because what happens in a game without Villages? Roundabouts provide a loophole: put Smuggling Ring to the right of Village, and you're done!
The card in Dominion that almost uses this mechanic is Young Witch. Although she couldn't quite be errata'd to a Roundabout card as I've written them here, since her behaviour around split piles and empty piles is different.

Smuggling Ring's name definitely 100% fits the "circle" theme. Rings are circles.

11
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 07, 2020, 08:34:19 pm »

Quote
Judge
$3 - Action - Reaction

+1 Action
Look at the top card of your deck. Draw it, or trash it and draw a card.
--
When you gain a card, you may reveal this from your hand, to put that card onto your deck.

Am I missing something, because this seems like it's strictly better than a Lab? Guaranteed to draw two cards, +1 Action, and the option to trash one of those cards along with a top-decking reaction.

You parsed it wrong. The options are draw it; or trash it and draw a card. Not draw it or trash it, then draw a card.
Yes, that's the way it's intended to work. You only ever draw one card from it, but optionally you can also trash and/or topdeck.

I'll pay more attention to the clarity of my wording in this week's contest.

12
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 07, 2020, 02:19:32 pm »
How about different cardbacks, like Stash?

13
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 07, 2020, 02:50:36 am »
Is this intentionally phrased "Draw a card" (instead of +1 Card) to try to get around the -1 Card token or something? I don't think this quite does the trick.
It was because vanilla bonuses like +1 Card always go before the ability, but this mechanic only makes sense if the draw comes after the grooming. Now that you point it out, I forgot that conditional bonuses can can come after. Thanks for the feedback.

Well done naitchman!

14
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: February 03, 2020, 03:51:20 pm »


Quote
Judge
$3 - Action - Reaction

+1 Action
Look at the top card of your deck. Draw it, or trash it and draw a card.
--
When you gain a card, you may reveal this from your hand, to put that card onto your deck.

15
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Quicksand Landmark - Feedback Welcome
« on: January 30, 2020, 06:58:18 pm »
Personally I think its more in spirit to speed up Dominion with the use of generous cards like Council Room.
Or by getting rid of slowing attacks.

Consider other generous mechanics like the one attached to Bishop (Your opponents may trash a card) combined with something that encourages buying green rather than a VP engine..
Like:
Sidewalk Preacher
+1 Card, +1 Action
Each player may trash a card.
If this card is trashed during your turn gain +$3.

Even Embassy where everyone gains a silver is not a bad example of generosity in card design (although silvers aren't great).
Effects like Council Room make the game finish in less turns - I think Saul is talking about effects that make the game finish in less minutes. Cantrips and effects that require your opponent to react on your turn generally make a turn take longer, even though they make more happen in that turn. And trashing enables megaturn engines, which can stretch out a turn to five minutes.

16
I love the principle here. I'll be secretly judging every fancard on this basis from now on.

The kind of Actions you can play without needing to track the effect are similar to Night cards - they can't interact with +Coins, or +Buy, or +Actions, respectively because you'll lose them before you can spend them and because they're only tracked by which cards you have in play. Perhaps they can provide you with some inspiration.
You've mentioned trashing and drawing already. The other effects I can think of with this property are discarding, gaining, searching and reordering your deck, and things that use counters (VP, Debt, Coffers, Villagers, etc.). And any combination of them, e.g. trash-for-benefit.

17
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas
« on: January 23, 2020, 06:42:35 pm »
Castle
$3 - Reaction
When you gain a Castle, you may discard this and get +1VP
--
Setup: Add the Castles pile to the Supply
(This is not a Castle)

18
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: January 23, 2020, 03:24:50 pm »
Challenge: Automaton
Design a card (or card-shaped object) that may cause playing а card that the player cannot predict or prevent.
Would you count cards that use Boons or Hexes? That's currently what fills the chaotic, chaotic niche of things the player may not want to play.

19
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: January 22, 2020, 07:10:43 pm »
You say that but you haven't accounted for the debt-costing Victory cards in Empires II: The Empire Strikes Back

20
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: January 22, 2020, 06:19:47 pm »
Okay, here we go! Sorry for the delay, I was busy last night.

We're all more or less in agreement about what constitutes a good card, but everyone has their preferences. With that in mind, here is the sort of thing I particularly favour:
  • Less text is a bonus. Cards should be as simple as possible, and no simpler.
  • Whether it's actually playable in practice, in the paper and digital versions. No cards that take a long time to resolve, have effects that could be forgotten, require players to remember things instead of tracking them, only make sense in English, or would require a weird UI.
  • I don't look too closely at balance, in terms of cost. It's enough that a card could be made balanced. After all, if Chapel is allowed to cost $2, none of you have to worry about undercosting your cards.
  • Name and flavour count. It's the little touches that make it feel like a real Dominion card.
.. oh, and it should be fun to play too.

UserCardComments
spinefluVistaIt’s been great seeing this refined over the course of the week. The concept is great. The final version is carefully balanced. I'm flattered that it has two duplication effects – double your doubles, you're really going for the contest theme this week. Nice job on the art, too. The wording is a little complex; it has a different effect for every Victory card in the base game, and even one that isn’t. I’m not sure about referencing Potions on a non-Alchemy card.
majiponiCoffer ClickerAfter the third or fourth time you play this, you may never need to worry about money again. Who needs terminal Silvers when you have a terminal Diamond for $4? The no-quadrupling caveat might not be necessary. If somebody wants to buy Villages and extra copies of this so they can try to outrace their opponent, it’s worth a try. This card is crazy, don’t try to make it sane! Note that the box only comes with 40 coin tokens, so you'll eventually need a different way to track your vast wealth.
Something_SmartKnight ErrantA terminal Gold with a chaos-inducing… upside? Interesting. I don't know how often it'll matter who makes the choice - and in any case, the top of players' decks isn't very controllable. I love the $3-$6 as a callback to the Knights pile from Dark Ages. It’s unfortunate that it looks so much like one, and yet for the purposes of cards that care about Knights, it’s not a Knight. Nor an Attack, for that matter.
mad4mathunnamedPotent stuff! Any cantrip becomes a Lost City and any terminal Silver becomes a +4$… even before their actual effects. With all that, it’s maybe a bit too much. It’s already an $8 Project, so you can’t simply balance it by increasing the cost. And it needs a name.
GubumpMausoleumProcession with no downsides. Simple idea, well executed. With the name and trash-for-benefit effect, it could be an actual Dark Ages card. Not strictly better than Upgrade, but close enough that I’d never take Upgrade if this is around.
scolapastaSiege TowerThrone Room for Attacks! This was a tall order, but you pulled it off. So many Attacks don’t combo with themselves. Splitting the effect over two turns is an inspired fix. The extra Setup clause is inelegant, even Moat doesn't have that – if Siege Tower shows up in Kingdoms with no other Attacks, it should be able to live with the consequences.
AquilaSummer House / Taverna / CavernNice! Thanks for trying something new with this one. Another set of Shelters was outside the rules I set but it’s definitely allowed – I should have encouraged it more. Summer House is actually useful, what kind of Shelter is this? Taverna might be hard to line up, but only being able to get a card you already have two of is a good drawback (I’d probably always use it on Gold). Cavern is tempting – I can’t see how it would be played if you need 4 otherwise-dead cards in your hand, but it’d be interesting to find out.
[TP] InfernoToadsCool plague of frogs. I like the parallel with Rats here – you get one and they infest your deck, and fittingly it benefits from trash-for-benefit in the same way as Rats. The way it gets a lot worse when its pile runs out is interesting, and adds some nontrivial traps to a card that's otherwise a Smithy variant.
pubbyZimbabwe MoneyPoints for originality: You made the only card in this contest whose doubling is unambiguously bad for its player! It’s good in that it looks like a bad joke but it secretly has uses for Projects, for Debt, for anytime you really need the +Buys. Oh, and for doing weird stuff that tracks the cost of cards. Not exactly medieval-themed, though.
FragasnapProvisionerAgain, it looks like a bad joke but there’s definitely combos that make it work, e.g. don’t have any bad cards in your deck. The extra Silver prevents it from being a dead card. It’s a shame that it’s so dependent on shuffle luck – it’s most useful when you have about 5 cards in discard, and there’s no way to control whether it shows up then.
D782802859HarlequinWelcome to the forums! This is nice – you want to spend it on a good card, but you don’t want your good cards to be trashed. It produces some interesting choices. Good work. The timing suggests it should only work on Actions – if nothing else, it’s not clear what “playing” a Curse or Victory card would do.
kru5hTwinsIt’s rare to actually want 4 Actions (or 6, or 8 ) so it makes sense that it’s an optional extra. I don’t see why it returns to the supply instead of trashing – some combo where you can keep gaining them once the Supply is empty? Sometimes you just want a $4 Village in your deck and the bonus doesn’t matter. Good card.
somekindoftonyFlatteryI’ll be honest, I’m just amused by the mental image of two players getting these and comboing off each others’ Flatteries. “You’re the best!” “No, you’re the best!”. Self-replicating gold is every miser’s dream and the +Buy is a powerful bonus; once there’s two of these in play the game won’t last much longer.
NoMoreFunDance HallIt’s really interesting to compare this with Coffer Clicker, above. There’s a limit to how many Actions you can use up in a game, and cards like Champion show that even unlimited Actions aren’t necessarily unbalanced. So this starts out as a basically-Necropolis, hits the sweet spot around the 4th time you play it, and shortly after becomes… a completely dead card. And again, past 40 it becomes hard to track.
Saul GoodmanAddictionWelcome to the forums! This card empties two piles by itself, making a very short clock before the game ends. Is Dominion too long a game for you? Getting to play and gain the best Action every turn is amazing, but it’s a steep penalty and you need to buy the card legitimately at least once. It’s a good question whether you always buy this after your opponent does – maybe the -10VP from curses is enough to stop them? A brokenly cheap card, but that doesn’t mean anything! It reshapes the game and it creates interesting decisions, that’s the important part.
grepFlooded FieldsSimple, but effective. Its two effects both make sense individually and feed each other. Making it a Victory card so that it can trigger itself is very elegant, and gives it a reason to be played in the midgame when players don't want Duchies. Doesn't work on Provinces, but doesn't necessarily force a Duchy game the way e.g. Duke does. A simple but deep card.
natichmanProfitIt’s an expensive dead card if there isn’t enough +$ in your hand, when discarding your Treasures means you may well be worse off for playing this. And it’s brokenly strong if there are reliable sources of money in the Action phase. With very little middle ground.
mandioca15PromenadeThis would have been a very good entry to the previous contest! Its value depends a lot on whether you have another source of Villagers – it’s too expensive for a Throne Room and too cheap for a King’s Court.
GazbagTown HallMakes a lot of sense. It’s a kind of intermediate between Barracks and Lost Arts. $6 to make a bunch of your cards into Villages is about right, you can prepare for this it by filling your deck with cantrips first. It looks like it’ll take skilful timing to have enough of an engine to buy this without immediately becoming the Village Idiot with too many +Actions.

Winner: Flooded Fields by grep
Runner-up: Mausoleum by Gubump

21
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: January 20, 2020, 10:40:08 am »
48 hour warning!

There's a lot of good entries this week - it'll be great to read through them again but hard to pick one winner.

22
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: January 16, 2020, 05:12:43 am »
Tell me if a set of Shelters doesn't count as one entry. Or indeed if any of them are crazy.
I'll allow it. If they're meant to all be added to the game together, they're not so different from a split pile.

23
Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread
« on: January 14, 2020, 03:40:59 pm »
Can I do that from my phone or the app?  I can't seem to find that menu.  It lets me edit the post . . . but when I click on it, there is no option to reduce the size.
I don't know about the app.

On the website: In the editor, it shows the size of the image. This is a field you can edit, just click on it. Then click Apply, then Save.

... or, like spineflu says, write this code in your post:
[img width = 300]http://i.imgur.com/4JOj7WG.png[/img]


Maybe we should be allowed two entries for a contest that is about doubling! :P
Nice try, but nope. I'll only judge the last card each person posts.

24
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas
« on: January 14, 2020, 02:01:53 pm »
no

25
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas
« on: January 14, 2020, 01:54:20 pm »

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