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4601

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 05, 2014, 06:55:18 pm »

Somewhere you said (and I paraphrase badly) that you could have made a 'complicated' expansion if you had wanted to.  What did you mean by that: complicated in terms of number of processes/clarity of processes or complicated in terms of complex decision making in the turn (e.g. Remodel is more complex in this regard than Lab).  Or some other form of complexity?  Could you offer an example? 

I am talking about words, word complexity. Strategic complexity is fine. Simple ideas that take a lot of words, like Adventurer, are not as bad as complex ideas that take a lot of words, like Hermit, but they still add up to an intimidating package if there are a bunch of them.

Probably the most complex Dominion card is Tournament. It gives you a 2x2 grid of results to wrap your head around, then requires you to read 5 more unique cards to know what you're getting.

Let's consider three main set cards: Thief, Chancellor, Throne Room. Thief is the wordiest card in the main set, but what it does is straightforward and grokable. Chancellor is very simple but baffling. Throne Room looks straightforward but ends up creating rules questions. The problem isn't that I don't want sets full of Chancellors - though I don't - or Throne Rooms - though I don't. Those cards are problems but I do not have the problem of having tons of those cards lying around - they are rare. Instead the issue is that more and more of the possible cards to make (factoring in lots of stuff into that word "possible") end up wordy like Thief. While I tolerate a certain amount of that, especially for attacks (where the complexity is harder to avoid and the card is more important to the set), I sure don't want every card to be that wordy.

When you play Dominion, there are rules. Some are in the rulebook; some are on the cards. They are all in one place or the other; if I don't want a rule in the rulebook, it has to go on the cards, if I don't want it on the cards, it has to go in the rulebook. This seems straightforward. The general rule is, the number of cards you can make for a game is proportional to the product of the complexity of the game, and the amount of space you allow yourself for card text. The rules have to go somewhere.

You can obviously make Dominion cards for forever, if you don't hem yourself in with restrictions. The example I always used for Magic was, you could make the Scrabble expansion. It's all about anagramming. The game however has some serious restrictions. Aside from stuff like, no-one wants Dominion: The Catapult, the main audience for the game does not want it to be too complex. And they like that nearly everything is on the cards rather than in the rulebook.

I have already done the experiment of making an expansion after it was time to stop; that expansion is Guilds. It has a new mechanic that requires reading the rulebook to understand. As a result of moving rules for those cards to the rulebook, the cards themselves are sleek and simple, except Butcher. There is another mechanic that does not really require the rulebook. Those cards all have two abilities and are complex, except Masterpiece. Then there is an attack that's extremely wordy and does multiple things, and then three innocent cards that never hurt anyone, although if I had it to do again I would drop the "they only draw if they got cursed" bit from Soothsayer (a minor example of how I went too far trying to squeeze playability out of later cards).

I remain pleased with Guilds, although it will be surely be the expansion that sells the worst (we already have enough expansions, some foreign publishers will have stopped before this, it's small and people like those less, later expansions are more complex and people like that less). But uh I think it's there in my analysis: it's some fun new cards, where the complexity went into the rulebook for some cards and on the cards for others, and both add up to the game being more complex.

As long as the expansions are good, there will always be an audience of some size for them, even if they are overly complex. But Dominion gets played by gamer's spouses and gamer's parents and gamer's kids. It is so successful because it is not just for gamers. So I think it only makes sense that Dominion products try to be good for that audience, the actual bulk of people playing.

P.S. Without wanting to rake over first player advantage again, have you seen the hearthstone 'Coin' Card mechanic (which, although not without problems, does lead to a near 50/50 1st player/2nd player win rate, but perhaps more importantly, is an interesting mechanic).  Anything you could see with a similar methodology applying to Dominion?

I haven't looked at Hearthstone; I know it's some kind of online Magic Lite. I am not unhappy with where things stand for first player advantage in Dominion. There are boards where a very minor compensating advantage for the 2nd player would still be too much - including, for example, half a VP.

4602

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Games not (playing)

« on: April 30, 2014, 05:58:33 pm »

I'm having the same problems, can create a game but no-one joins, and can't add bots either. Additionally, my automatch isn't working, and the people in the lobby seem to be sorted randomly (not by rating, like my default setting), and I can't click on their avatars to view other information like usual. Basically, Goko's being rubbish, and as a result some of the extension things aren't working for me

EDIT: I can play bots using the "Play Bots" option, when I do this, the in-game Salvager extension is working fine

http://forum.makingfun.com/forumdisplay.php?78-Dominion-Online

4603

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Isotropish Leaderboard (alternative to Goko Pro)

« on: April 30, 2014, 05:54:32 pm »

To be honest, I worry about the reverse Turing test, where it turns out I'm actually a cylon machine.

Tanya had me fooled for a while, but she just posted, "Unfortunately online services needs maintenance every noun, and we have to do it."

4604

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Ace of Spades

« on: April 24, 2014, 06:10:44 pm »

Well I don't quite get the need or point of this 'simplification', but okay... adds some amusement I suppose.

To precisely simulate the physical game, they should let you type in whatever name you want. But in practice just providing one alien option is sufficient. For sure it's better to provide one than not.

4605

Dominion General Discussion / Re: soothsayer thought experiment

« on: April 24, 2014, 06:05:03 pm »

Why is Laura playing TGG and not Teresa or Ted?

Brian and Steve started a heavy metal band and are arguing over whether rehearsing makes them better or worse, while Jay is at a game store trying to blend in and get Laura the promos. So that's why they aren't playing. Teresa and Ted, I guess I haven't seen that episode.

4606

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 23, 2014, 06:41:36 pm »

I have a friend who, when playing Dominion with folks other than me, plays with a few house rules. The one he's most adamant about is each player getting an equal number of turns (not counting extra turns, presumably). I can think of some reasons that equal turns would not improve Dominion, but I'd like to hear your reasoning. Why doesn't Dominion have equal turns like, say, Kingdom Builder? Thanks.

First, most people who aren't serious gamers don't even notice that it's a thing. They do not say, well you got one more turn than me; they have no idea that this is the case. They really really don't notice it. If there was no tiebreaker rule they would never notice it.

Second it's simpler to not finish the round. Originally there was also no tiebreaker, so you didn't have to track who went first at all. The tiebreaker was added as a compromise; Valerie and Dale wanted an awful turn-order tiebreaker, and I guess could not understand the reasoning that explains how awful that is. They said live with it, I said I won't, Jay said I'm going with the game designer (later I realized he had to contractually). But I agreed to a number-of-turns tiebreaker because that didn't have issues, beyond the tracking. It's fairer but you can argue that it's better for casual players to have no tiebreaker, because then they don't have to track who went first and you aren't drawing attention to this advantage. Serious players sometimes desperately want a tiebreaker, they want a winner even if it means counting random data; casual players, not so much, they are happy to tie, especially in a multiplayer game where some players are not in on the tie.

It's obviously good to go first, but people are used to that, in game after game with turns it's good to go first, equal turns or not.

The end condition means if you finish the round you then want to add Provinces, so that those turns aren't lame. That's not always relevant and doesn't always do the trick, but you know, often it's relevant and does the trick. So you add say 8 Provinces, it's a physical game so we still need to draw the line somewhere. We turn the bottom 8 sideways so we know when the game end condition is hit. People talk of "phantom Provinces" but you know, why not solidify those phantoms. Anyway you could do this, but it's a negative, it's more work and wonkier, even if just a little more work and a little wonkier.

When I first made Dominion, the initial end condition was "any empty pile." It directly answered the question, "what if I want a card and there aren't any left." Yes you could buy the last card and have another buy left. Anyway I needed an end condition, I picked that one, that was what it started as. We would usually empty the Provinces. Sometimes you would go for say Remodel and need to worry about how many you left in the pile (there were ten cards in each action pile; leave four Remodels, that's my advice), and who was winning when the piles got low.

The end condition was the end condition, it didn't have a "finish the round" clause. I had never had a "finish the round" clause in any game and did not start here. I had a lot of simultaneous play games where everyone got the same number of turns naturally, but when I had turns, the game ended at some point and we would not necessarily have had the same number of turns. Again, like in most games. I was not constantly playing commercial games that finished the round either, except ones where this was in some way natural as with simultaneous play. Like, in Medici, you finish the round in that you play until the boats are all full; in Through the Desert, you don't finish the round. We never thought "wow some players get more turns in Through the Desert, what's up with that." We never wondered why the round didn't finish for Settlers of Catan or Cartagena or Carcassonne or whatever game.

I always had the "winner goes last next game" rule. Despite going last, the best player did fine. It was obviously good to go first, but it wasn't wrecking the game. We would always play multiple games, and if you weren't winning, you would probably get your chance to go first. You don't want to be sitting on the wrong side of the best player; this never made anyone change seats.

There was never a point where we thought, man this needs fixing, how about finishing the round.

As I said above, once RGG had the game, late in the going, Valerie and Dale wanted a turn-order tiebreaker to address the advantage to going first. That was awful, like I said - oops you lose despite not actually getting an extra turn this game, due to this in-your-face coin flip. And hey it doesn't do anything about the case where you don't tie, where the advantage is so meaningful that it just wins for you. Anyway that awful thing was what they suggested to address turn-order advantage; that's all that came up. It was bad and I got to shoot it down, hooray.

Once Dominion was in the wild, some people felt like they needed to finish the round (as always, play whatever variants you want, I don't mind). When this news hit I did not feel like I had blown it or like I wanted to shift to playing that way. I think it's much better to play multiple games and rotate who wins (or, even better, have the winner go last).

This did make me aware though that some people would be like that, that they would want to right this particular injustice in future games.

So then one day I made Kingdom Builder. The game end condition was going to be someone running out of pieces - obv. I didn't want them to get more turns with no pieces. And it seemed like, the player running out of pieces is ahead, they played more pieces, pieces are how you score points. They may have been playing more dead pieces but you know, they have the advantage here. So, I could finish the round, like all those people wanted for Dominion. So I tried it out, I had the round being finished from the beginning. It worked fine so that never changed. It addresses turn order advantage to such a degree there that Queen thought the last player had the edge, due to Lords (as you can see from their rule determining who goes first), although I think obv. the first player has the edge in games without Lords and even some games with Lords.

Nefarious, Infiltration, Greed, and Gauntlet of Fools are all simultaneous, with no turn imbalance to be addressed. The way Monster Factory works, finishing the round (by say reserving some tiles for that situation) would not mean much, and obv. it's not worth the extra complexity. It doesn't make much sense for Piņa Pirata and is not too relevant for its audience. Unannounced upcoming game has turns and does not finish the round, although there is a thing to reduce turn-order-based advantages.

4607

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 23, 2014, 05:47:27 pm »

I just saw the video presenting Piņa Pirata. It seems like a much simpler game than Dominion or Kingdom Builder. My question is, does the simplicity translate into easier to design? Maybe less playtesting needed? If it is true, is there some aspect in which Piņa Pirata requires more work than, say, Dominion? (maybe intended for younger or less gamery audience require more attention to some details, or different kind of playtesting?)

I wouldn't say that rules simplicity is what tells you how much work the game will take. Sometimes simple rules are hard to come by, and anyway cards with rules on them are a big trick here, those are all rules, they count. You learn the game quickly when most of the rules are on cards, it's a sweet trick, but the rules are still there.

Being lighter does save time. Playtesting still has to determine what's fun and what isn't, what causes confusion, what problematic combos there are. Power level isn't so much an issue though, except at extremes, and not always then.

Piņa Pirata the game was easier to design than Dominion, because it's Crazy 8's but you add a rule each hand. Dominion the game wasn't that hard though, the bulk of it I worked out in a few hours (not counting the work that led up to the idea, Spirit Warriors II and all that, or work on other games that informed this work, like already knowing that I like attacks to hit all opponents). I changed it in important ways later, but the few-hours version is extremely recognizable. Piņa Pirata's cards were much easier than Dominion's cards, because of the balance reason; a Piņa Pirata card can have a huge or minor effect, and there's no cost on it.

From the first version to the published version, almost every non-basic Dominion card changed in some functional way. I am looking at the original file of rules for Jailbreak (the original name/flavor); some of these cards have changed, but, aside from flavor (many of them have had five different names) and what suit is referred to (itself an aspect of flavor although it functionally matters what set of things go with a particular suit), many of them are identical to the original versions. Okay out of the first 10 in the oldest file, 5 survived unchanged except for flavor/suit, 3 got important tweaks, and 2 died.

Kingdom Builder required a lot less work than Dominion. The rules again didn't change much from the initial set, which hadn't been easy to find but it's hard to measure that. For sure the rules took more work than Dominion's, if you don't count work on Spirit Warriors II. Anyway I tweaked the boards, the scoring cards, the abilities; I actually changed the boards repeatedly, but many of the abilities immediately worked, and many of the scoring cards never changed. It's probably fair to say that I spent more time coming up with the initial rules, with zero games played (starting from a deckbuilding game premise) than I did changing things once I'd played it.

For Infiltration, the item cards didn't need to be so balanced, because you drafted them (a variant in the published version), and the rooms naturally could vary from awful to great. I did change some cards to get rid of confusion and no-fun, but it wasn't a lot of work. The rules were very easy; the one thing I tweaked multiple times was how to track stuff getting smashed open.

For Nefarious, the invention cards required very little work, because I could do the math to cost them. Most of them were just instantly perfect. Some did change due to being ones I had to guess at, or to tweak the frequency of different kinds of effects. The rules were again easy, although I pared it down from a more complex game. The twists were the focus of work; again they don't need balance, but they need to avoid bad situations (which I didn't, the published version got a combo that makes the game unplayable) and be fun. I made twice as many twists as the main game got, paring it down repeatedly.

I changed the rules for Gauntlet of Fools early on, but quickly got close to where it is. I tweaked the boasts and classes/weapons a bunch; I didn't tweak the monsters much, although I added more. I wrote a program to play the game so I'd have an idea how much combinations were worth, so I could avoid the case where you want to put all 6 boasts on the best guy and still just beat the worst guy. It turned out there was a big divide, a set of good classes and then a gulf and then the rest, and I spread them out more.

Monster Factory took very little work relative to anything else. I tweaked the topology mix a little; otherwise the only thing to change was the rules, and Nina and I did change them.

Greed is a drafting game; I tweaked the cards a lot over the years, but balance was only a factor at the ends (no cards too ridiculous or useless). Unannounced upcoming game has some cards where I did the math, and some where balance was a factor. I changed the rules on that one a lot more than I usually do.

Overall the trend is definitely that balancing cards takes more time than anything else. When they don't need to be balanced, or want not to be balanced, there's still time to put in making them fun and unconfusing and avoiding bad interactions, but that's just way less work. And when they do need to be balanced, sometimes there is math you can do that solves that problem for you. Aside from cards, the rules can be easy or hard to work out, but even when they take a lot of time, they take less time than the cards do.

4608

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Weird "Adventure" Mode

« on: April 23, 2014, 04:08:20 pm »

I'm curious: Are these sets more mixed than the current ones? I think it's kind of boring to always play with half base / half extension sets. For me, that's even worse than the enforcement to use zaps on later stages.
After all, I'd rather play more human opponents instead of bots. It's a bit sad that I have to if I want all the promos (which I really do). I'd pay like... 20$ for them, I guess.

For my proposed changed version of the adventures, there are other-expansion cards sprinkled into the main set acts 1-3, hinterlands act 3, and guilds. I didn't go back and add any to the other adventures because it turned out at the time that they weren't going to be using them then. I'm not going back now because as long as nothing has been done here it sure seems like a poor use of time. If they put in the new campaigns, which I still expect they will, then I will probably not put in more work on them but I guess it might happen.

4609

Other Games / Re: Pina Pirata (by DXV)

« on: April 23, 2014, 04:31:04 am »

I'm trying to keep my expectations low (concerning the release date). I'm guessing June. Amazon still doesn't have it listed.

Amazon is a good metric for me; when they put it up there's probably really a date, whereas other sites will put up the game for pre-orders way earlier (and have).

I thought it was setting out on its voyage in mid-February but I guess it didn't. As usual I don't have any extra information. A date will probably show up on Amazon before I receive my copies.

4610

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 23, 2014, 04:21:02 am »

You have mentioned earlier that you would recommend Mark Rosewater's "Drive to Work" podcast and his articles when it comes to good learning material about game design even if you do not agree with everything Mark says.

Well I read his articles and blog. There is just too much podcast for me to keep up with.

Since I am a huge fan of "Drive to Work" and the written stuff by Mark as a whole, I am curious which on parts of Mark's "philosophy" you do not agree on.

I don't want to do the research, so I'm just going to consider two classic major issues: bad cards and mana screw.

* Bad Cards *

Mark's stance is that there have to be bad cards. I agree although I would explain it with some different specifics.

Cards are aimed at different kinds of players, which is good, and that means that some other player's good card is a bad card to you. That's straightforward.

For constructed you can make more cards playable by making more cards narrow. You can go to the extreme of making all cards so narrow that all cards are playable in constructed, endlessly, with no power creep. This doesn't work because it means all of the decks are pre-built and all of the cards are overly complex. Mark has never touched on this but that's fine, it's a footnote really. I guess you can note that Netrunner is trying to use this approach; cards are limited as to what deck they can go in (to a certain degree), in order to make more cards playable. Anyway without going to bad extremes, not all cards are playable in constructed, because you have your choice of cards to play with and they cannot all be exactly as good.

For limited they prefer not having a flat power curve. I think that's sensible although I might not take it as far as they do. It's fun having cards where you're not sure if they're good enough, and that means having cards close to the edge of playability, with some on the wrong side (depending on your deck and stuff).

If a card is unplayable in constructed, which many will be, and unplayable in limited, which many will be, then it should be playable in casual - which all such cards can be. Being playable in casual just means giving you a reason to play it. People with very few cards will play whatever you give them, but that doesn't count; you can just do so much better. The game is better if more people like the worst cards, and it's not even hard to achieve. There are many things casual players enjoy that you can do with the weak cards.

For many of the last twenty years they have made some cards that were no good in constructed, limited, and casual - complete wastes of cardboard. They have all but solved this problem at this point. Sometimes they make a common that I'm just not playing in limited/constructed and which has no draw for casual; generally a vanilla guy or french vanilla guy. It's not every vanilla guy though, some of them have reasonable stats for limited or a relevant creature type for a recently-supported tribe.

* Mana Screw *

Mark's stance is that mana screw is good for the game and that there's probably no better solution. My stance is that it does good things for the game but obv. you can do better, you can have the good things without the bad.

Magic's resource system does some good things. It's nice having randomness affect your resource development. It's nice that you can beat a better player due to the luck of the draw.

What's awful is not getting to play. I don't draw enough lands and just get to watch you play; I draw nothing but lands, same deal. You can argue that the game is at least over quickly; man, not good enough. Not getting to play goes against the premise of being a game. I can instead play a game where I get to play the game; I'm not playing a game I don't get to play. I am all for luck giving me a disadvantage sometimes, but I have to be able to fight against it, not just pass until I'm dead.

Mark cites how Duel Masters tried letting you play cards face down as lands, and how that wasn't as good; Mark cites how no-one has solved this problem yet for a Magic-like game (which would never be too convincing). But really. Hearts doesn't have mana screw, look at that. Dominion doesn't have mana screw; when you have poor luck, your opening buys are on the bottom, but you still get to play all those turns. You can get so many Curses/Ruins that you have dead turns, but that's a state your opponents worked to bring about, not just a bad draw.

Anyway there's nothing magical about mana screw, no game needs it. The things the mana system brings to Magic are good; what would be better is having the good things but not having mana screw. I can believe that Duel Masters wasn't the solution for a Magic-like game but it's silly to think you can't do better.

And while we're at the subject - from the top of your head, what is (one of) your favourite article(s) and podcast(s) done by him?

This is just going to be too hard to research. I don't like the articles where the cards talk to each other. Mark ranks his own articles once a year and that's probably a pretty good guide.

4611

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: Telephone Pictionary

« on: April 22, 2014, 03:07:36 am »

There is another way you can do this in a thread that doesn't require any organization and just happens as fast as people contribute.

Go to the Instant Gratification Telephone Pictionary thread. Add a reply that's something like "claimed." Look at the post above yours. Compose a picture if it was text; compose text if it was a picture. If you made a picture, host it somewhere, such as imageshack. Post your text or picture, replacing your "claimed" post. If it's text, put it in spoiler tags. If it's a picture, give it a name that's just random letters and numbers and post the link to it; we won't know what it is without clicking.

Contribute just once per thread. If you post "claimed" and see someone else has done likewise above you, you can either wait for them to finish and then work from what they post, or change yours to "claimed" and try again later or not.

Later, if anyone cares, someone can remove the spoiler tags and convert the images to embedded images, so that the resulting sequence can be enjoyed without highlighting and clicking.

4612

Rules Questions / Re: Baker questions

« on: April 20, 2014, 04:13:31 pm »

Don't know if this has been answered in the secret histories ... Or any other thread. But here goes.

Does anybody understand why we only get a coin token in the beginning with Baker on the board ? But not with Butcher, candlestick maker or any other Guilds card etc. ...

Why would Baker be so special ?

Also, according to dominion online, if Baker is in the black market deck, we get an extra coin token. I'm wondering if this is correct.

I wanted a card that made players start with a coin token. The idea wasn't that all games with coin tokens would have you start with one, the idea was that some of them would. That kind of variety is like a premise of the game.

The card wanted to be a simple one that used coin tokens - simple to fit the text, involving coin tokens so that it felt less tacked on. Butcher had too much text, and Plaza did too at the time (it let you pay a coin token to draw a card). Merchant Guild already had a dividing line. It could have been Candlestick Maker instead. It's Baker.

If Baker is in the Black Market deck, players start with a coin token. That's stupid but consistent. There may be setup rules you absolutely have to do for a card in the Black Market deck; so, you just always do the setup rules.

4613

Goko Dominion Online / Re: 4/17 Updates

« on: April 20, 2014, 04:01:52 am »

I wonder how long before some player posts on Making Fun's forums (or maybe here) asking why in the heck they can wish for Ace of Spades when they play Wishing Well.

I think that's a price worth paying.

I am not thrilled with the glowing red. I am mentioning it in case someone wants to chime in. I haven't blown it in the few games I've played with it but I don't think it's doing the trick. I think a big X over the card would be better.

4614

Rules Questions / Re: I got DOMINIONED! Ill-gotten-gains AND Embargo?

« on: April 18, 2014, 09:05:22 pm »

So what's the deal? I thought the ill-gotten-gains effect would resolve before the "embargo" effect (doesn't the on-gain effect resolve immediately???). But instead, it was the opposite and I lost the game I should have won. Can someone please clarify the rule with embargoed ill-gotten-gains pile when the curses are about to run out? It seems counter-intuitive that the embargo would supercede the card's natural on-gain effect.

Embargo is "when-buy," Ill-Gotten Gains is "when-gain." You buy a card before you gain it - buying it causes you to gain it. So when-buy effects resolve before when-gain effects.

4615

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 17, 2014, 04:59:48 pm »

If I had it to do again, I might give Bag of Gold +3 Actions. That is again just a weird fraction of a card.

It is also a strange thin to tack on a card that gives Gold. Maybe "Bag of $5-costs" could use +3 Actions better.

The idea wouldn't be to turn it into University, the idea would be to raise up Bag of Gold a little relative to the other prizes, both in terms of play value and specialness.

4616

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 17, 2014, 04:52:40 pm »

Is there a specific reason why "+3 Actions" and "+2 Buys" were only used on a single card each (Crossroads and Squire), or was it a coincidence?

A "super Village" giving +3 Actions each time you play it might work at $4 (or $5?), I think. (Though it wouldn't be too interesting without some extra twist.)
+2 Buys isn't that much better than +1 Buy, but it might have been an interesting boost e.g. for Woodcutter (and/or Nomad Camp) to have a second Buy. (This would have made Woodcutter/Gardens quite strong, but still far weaker than Beggar/Gardens, and probably also weaker than Squire/Gardens, so it should be an okay combo.)

Doing them a little made them special, and they aren't things you always care about anyway. Fishing Village lets you play lots of actions and that felt good enough there; Crossroads doesn't feel so much like the +3 Actions card to me, despite saying it. And there's Tribute but being unreliable is different. I put off +2 buys for a while, since mostly you just care about it for Gardens or Bridge etc., but finally I did it, hooray.

At one point Crossroads gave you +1 action per action card in your hand; sometimes you would have no idea how many actions you had left.

If I had it to do again, I might give Bag of Gold +3 Actions. That is again just a weird fraction of a card.

4617

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 16, 2014, 07:10:54 pm »

On topic and to Donald: A friend of mine is currently doing some graphics/arts course and expressed interest in finding out about getting into doing artwork for things like Dominion/Magic cards. Do you know how the artists for Dominion (and similar games) were selected, did you have anything to do with it and do you have any advice for her?

Jay picks his artists; I have nothing to do with it. I have gotten to comment on sketches; since some mistakes in Intrigue (Steward like the guy in charge of a castle, not like the guy on an airplane), I have also gotten to provide notes for the artist, so that they know what the card titles mean. For other companies I have not gotten to provide notes; I did get to comment on the art for Gauntlet of Fools. I endlessly interacted with the artist for an upcoming game.

I would just email the game companies. I'm an artist, here's a link to my portfolio. Some game companies are very approachable, and if they aren't interested it hasn't cost you much.

4618

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 16, 2014, 07:01:40 pm »

For the next Magic core set, Wizards asked various game designers to make cards. Were you asked to make one? What kind of card would you have made?

I was probably asked.

A guy from Wizards contacted me to say they were interested in me designing a Magic card for some product. He didn't want to go into details until I signed an NDA (I signed an NDA years ago, but that was no longer any good). The NDA had a false statement in it, which I guess is not so unusual; as has been noted, the online Dominion ToS says you can't use the product. Anyway I don't like signing false things. I said, could they change that? They said sure and made it worse. I said now it's worse. They said you know we can't actually change anything for you, that wouldn't be fair to the other designers. This was nonsense so now they were also telling me nonsense, which I am not fond of. I never quite convinced myself to sign the NDA and eventually they mailed me some free stuff and said thanks anyway. It was like, 12 booster packs, some "booster battle packs," some sleeves, a bag. It was a nice touch, I even drafted those packs. I would have used the sleeves in a prototype by now but they have a dot obscuring a corner, so I can only use them in a game that doesn't have data there.

Now to put this further in perspective, I already designed a published Magic card, way way back when (Energizer from Tempest). And I always feel like I named haste (they asked the people contributing to 6E, which is better, speed or surprise, and I said hey how about haste). In addition to whatever harder-to-pin-down contributions to the rules (possibly last known information, I suggested that to Bethmo when it wasn't a rule yet); it's hard to say since I was outside the company and don't know what other people were also suggesting. Bill specifically cited an essay of mine as convincing him that they were doing triggered effects the right way, even though I was arguing that they should be different. Anyway I made a Magic card already. It was cool, but I had the experience. It would be nice to have some extra publicity but I didn't know the specifics there. I probably should have just signed the NDA, but at this point it's all been announced and I don't feel left out.

I keep flirting with sending them a list of general suggestions (not cards) that wouldn't require an NDA, and if at some point they were interested in me co-designing a set, i.e. more than one card, then I would probably just sign the NDA. It would be fun to work on a Magic set, but one card, I have had the honor. My name isn't on the card but that's not so bad.

If I had done it I would probably have sent them 100 cards so they would have had a lot to choose from. I have made thousands of homemade Magic cards. I would have offered up especially novel ones.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: April 16, 2014, 05:55:51 pm »

In the Secret Histories/Outtakes, you mention a card that could discard Victory cards for $2 apiece. It started out at $4, then jumped up to $6, then left for being too boring.

This probably seems like a strange question, but what prompted you to go from $4 right to $6 without stopping at $5 along the way? Was it just that strong? How did it play out power-wise at $6? Could another bonus have been tacked on to spice it up without making it too powerful?

It was probably $5 on the way; that would usually not seem worth mentioning, and I haven't kept records of every version of every card. It might have skipped $5 if it was clearly crazy; I can always go back to $5 later. But in general you want to err on the side of powerful, so that the card gets played with and you get data.

It died because we just didn't like it much. It kind of fit into a mild VP theme Hinterlands had/has, but that wasn't enough to save it. Terminal actions that just make money (yes there are various ways to get other value from discarding those victory cards) are not typically crowd favorites. I'm not sure I can say much about how powerful it was; power level wasn't what killed it.

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Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko's Rating System, Part 2: Reverse Engineering

« on: April 15, 2014, 05:50:37 pm »

You know if in the end you have a convincing argument for it working some other way, and you pass this on to Making Fun, they may very well change it. They are not going to have a lot invested in however it works; it just needs to satisfy the people that care about it.

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Puzzles and Challenges / Re: What Card Am I?

« on: April 14, 2014, 09:16:21 pm »

A bit off track, but not completely. Unless you think quite heavily outside the box, this is probably one of those ones that will make more sense after it's explained.

I know what cards are outside the box - they're promos. I think the Big Box may have had some though.

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Goko Dominion Online / Re: power outage haiku

« on: April 11, 2014, 03:18:13 am »

I would say that "haiku" is not a part of English.

It's not only an English word, it also doesn't mean the same thing. The word applies to poems with a particular syllable scheme, as seen by the examples in the thread, whether or not they have a seasonal reference or "cutting." In Japanese terms they are senryū at best, but man we don't call them that, we call them highkoo.

playing dominion
villages tumble from hands --
falling autumn leaves

4623

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 09, 2014, 11:15:03 pm »

There will still be some way in there to have some sort of lobby, though, right?  Otherwise setting up tournaments turns a bit impossible.

There would be a place to chat, if that's what you mean. I haven't written up any proposals for chatting, but I think obv. you want to be able to chat with 1) everyone you haven't blocked, 2) friends only, and 3) specific people. Potentially there's something else you want too, like creating a chat area for a group, such as tournament players, although that would only start to be relevant if the online version got way more popular; as it stands there is no-one chatting. Possibly there are clans, you know, groups people choose to belong to. And then you want to be able to chat with your clan.

Maybe you mean, a way to tell who's on; sure, you want a way to tell who's on, and for that matter you could have stats on what was going on - there are x games being played, y people waiting to be matched, here's how to match them.

I think you and I are using "non-competitive" in different ways here.  Obviously it is (as are almost all non-coop eurogames) competitive in the Knizia-esque "the goal is to win, but the winning isn't as important as the goal" way.  I meant that, as you say, the target audience is more casual as opposed to... I don't know, what do you call the subset of, say, chess players who spend time studying the game and obviously play it much more than casually, but aren't ever going to come close to the rank of Master anything?  Obviously, these players are competitive, but they obviously aren't professional.  The only word my brain is coming up with is competitive, but I'm happy to have a new word added to my vocabulary.

I wouldn't use chess as an example - it's a good example of what not to do, and part of that includes considering the potential audience for a game like that that isn't ancient. But "competitive" is fine, or "serious." Casual gamers, serious gamers.

Anyway I don't know that I have anything to clarify here. I didn't specifically aim Dominion at casual gamers to the exclusion of serious ones, which should be clear from how things turned out. I don't think that would have been a good move either. If I had a game that I thought only serious hardcore competitive gamers would like, I would slant it towards those players, but also I would expect not to be able to get it published and to have it sell no copies if it did get published. That wouldn't stop me from making it, although the lack of interested playtesters might stop me from finishing it.

Dominion's actual audience is large. Just the fact that the audience is large means odds are it's more casual than competitive. There are more people interested in games than there are people interested in games that are heavily skill-based (similarly, the tallest mountain in the USA is at least as tall as the tallest mountain in California).

"You can only maximize one variable" is my favorite aphorism, but I shouldn't have snuck it in here, because obv. it could happen to be true that most gamers are serious even if a few aren't serious; the fact that serious gamers are a subset of gamers doesn't mean there are more casual gamers than serious gamers.

There are though, there are more casual gamers than serious gamers. I always think of what they said about Magic here: there are way more casual players, but the serious players pay more per player.

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Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 09, 2014, 07:35:31 pm »

I think that's an excellent point, though I do think it applies to casual games much more than to competitive games.  One thing a lot of us tend to forget here is that Dominion wasn't really intended, so far as I understand from Donald, to be a competitive game.  (Donald, am I recalling correctly that you've said you really didn't think about tournaments etc. when you were designing?)

I wasn't thinking about tournaments, and man never would be, but it's not that it was designed to be noncompetitive or anything. It was designed to pursue "you build a deck while playing" to its logical extreme, and then after that to work and be balanced (it is obv. a game where you want balanced cards, as opposed to say a bidding game, where you might intentionally want a particular level of imbalance). It isn't say a party game; as usual with my games, it's aiming to have both skill and luck, since that's what most people like, both me and anyone I might randomly be playing with. Skill and luck are built into the premise so it was all down to card balance and deciding how swingy cards could get.

Dominion's actual audience is large. Just the fact that the audience is large means odds are it's more casual than competitive. There are more people interested in games than there are people interested in games that are heavily skill-based (similarly, the tallest mountain in the USA is at least as tall as the tallest mountain in California).

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Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: April 09, 2014, 06:56:47 pm »

The reason I personally care about automatch is that eventually I will have no choice but to use it (short of inviting specific players to a table). Once MakingFun finally overhauls the game-finding system, there likely won't be a lobby at all and I will be using automatch. I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the extension will still be going at that point and will simply adapt to be some kind of wrapper to the native automatch, implementing any "features" that MakingFun hasn't.

Incidentally Jeff replied to that email and said yes, this stuff all sounds good. He is on board with getting rid of tables/rooms and having matchmaking more or less as I proposed. The plan naturally being to work out the details when it's time to actually do it.

Currently I base my sense of progress entirely on the fixed adventures: at the point at which they do the adventures, I will feel like things are moving forward, rather than them just fixing bugs in what they've got now.

Incidentally the fact that you can hack javascript to pick the kingdom cards is viewed as a bug, and you should expect them to fix it. So I wouldn't base any new features on that.