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5351

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 11, 2012, 06:03:24 pm »

Allegedly, the biggest-selling LCG in Japan is a game called "Tanto Cuore", a maid-themed deck builder. While a lot of its mechanisms are practically identical to Dominion, its basic currency costs one more than the Dominion equivalent (so the $1 costs $1, the $2 costs $4 and the $3 costs $7). Did you ever consider doing anything like this in Dominion - particularly, moving Copper off the $0 price point?

I never considered Copper not costing $0, because I wanted something you could do usefully with no money. Obv. they can sell out, and I have seen that case, I have seen the Coppers sell out and someone with no money. Obv. I try to avoid that being so possible in games with published cards, and if I've done that then does it matter that Copper costs $0, but what, it still seems nice that it does. And of course since it costs $0 that affects things.

The treasures had their costs from game one. The way to think of it is, all of the other costs were tweaked to work with them.

5352

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 11, 2012, 05:12:20 pm »

Donald is Celtic.

It means "world ruler." And Vaccarino means "cow herder." And then X is the unknown. So, put it all together and it's like that South Park joke. phase 1: herd cows. phase 2: ? ? ?. phase 3: world domination.

5353

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pronunciations and plurals

« on: December 11, 2012, 05:09:26 pm »

One last moment of pedantry and then I'll stop annoying you. Using the Grammy example, it would be correct to say that the game has 12 Dutchys, right?

No, the game doesn't have any cards at all called Dutchy.

5354

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 11, 2012, 12:46:34 pm »

Dolan, why 10 kingdom cards? Did you ever try 12 cards available at a time, or eight? (Different cards, not cards per pile)

As you add more cards you get more options but the game is harder to play, especially when you're new. Of course at a certain point you aren't increasing options much anymore because cards displace other cards for you.

Originally I had ten cards and decided to just put them all out. We could cope with ten so it stayed ten.

At one point I played with eight for a while. It worked fine but was not as good. I never really considered twelve because ten is already too many to remember them all (and I didn't consider odd numbers). There's the neat trick of, it's my first game ever, man I'm not reading all these, I have $4, what costs $4, I'll read those. But ten cards is still a lot.

Another thing is that the number has an effect on the variety you get. With 25 cards and 10 at a time, it takes you, you know, 2.5 games to see them all. If it were 8 cards at a time it would take 3 games. That was the big reason to test 8 for me, and it pushes away from putting more cards out at once.

5355

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 11, 2012, 09:34:18 am »

I reckon it might be difficult for you (and us) to keep track of the timeline as our experience with the cards is different from yours. We don't exactly know the order the cards were designed in, we just know the order of the expansions. So introducing this asymmetry can simply be an effect of shuffling cards around from set to set and it's also quite logical that asymmetrical cards are more complex and thus end up in later sets.

Tournament is a fixed Black Market and is in Cornucopia because I wanted something in the variety-based set that actually increased the number of cards available, which Black Market does. The Knights were always in Dark Ages, from when it was called War. They are Knights; it's a War. The Ruins cards and Shelters vary because that's more interesting than having them be the same. They were made for the set. It was not some drive to increase asymmetry or some careful saving of complex things; it was, can I make Curses more interesting, and then Tom suggesting replacing the starting Estates to push the Dark Ages flavor.

And with Guilds around the corner I wondered if this was a trend or just a side effect of the way cards were released and judging from your answer, I guess it's the latter.

I'm not really looking to tell people about Guilds yet. Let's just steer all questions away from that.

If the game didn't include any cards anyone hated, it wouldn't include any cards anyone loved either. You are complaining about a tiny number of things that some people absolutely adore. Don't play with Tournament and Knights if you don't like them. They are slam dunks for me.

5356

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 11, 2012, 08:11:40 am »

What I've always liked about Dominion and disliked about Magic is that in Dominion all players have the same choices. Every card in the kingdom was available to every player. You weren't limited to the amount of money you wanted to spend on random booster packs and such. You could just buy a set, know every card you were going to get and have equal access to all of those cards.

Cornucopia changed this with the Tournament prizes and it seems that a lot of games are decided on who gets Followers or Trusty Steed first. Dark Ages introduced Ruins and Knights and even made the initial shuffles more different with Shelters.

Now I understand that it's sometimes fun when games are this asymmetrical, but it seems like you're straying further from the original "equal access" concept - if that even ever existed. Even cards that "do something with the trash" attribute to this as the timing of when you play your trasher/trash-grabber matters a lot.

Did you have an "equal access" concept in mind when you started designing Dominion? Is there a reason you've been exploring asymmetry more and more?

When I thought of the premise, my original thought was that there would be some cards to buy, and when you bought one we'd deal out a replacement. When I actually made the game, months later, that sounded bad. Wouldn't a lot come down to having a good card turned over when you got first shot at it? It might seem just like if we draw cards from a deck and I draw a better one, but it's much more in-your-face. Anyway I didn't manage to come up with a good solution, so for the first game, I just put (all) ten cards out at once. I figured, it would make it easy to find the broken cards, and if the game seemed promising I could come up with something better later. Then of course we liked getting to pick from ten cards. So this significant feature of Dominion was something I just lucked into.

From my perspective there has been no trajectory like you describe. The Knights and Black Market are from 2007. I have asymmetry in this area because it was something to do. There sure isn't much of it. It's like $7's; some people felt like $7's would break the game, not realizing that, even if I made say four of them, you still wouldn't have one in most games.

5357

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 11, 2012, 08:01:52 am »

edit: asked this before coming to the post where you said you wouldn't be answering funny questions

I don't want to disappoint people, I just don't want to spend hours trying to think of funny answers. I started looking for an old, unrelated joke to post instead, and even that was taking too long.

5358

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 11, 2012, 04:54:22 am »

How do you go about teaching the game in general to new players?

I uh explain the rules? "This is a game of building a deck..." I explain the data in the game - "you have a deck, a discard pile, a hand of cards..." I explain how your turn goes. I explain the card types, the four +'s, gain/trash, the end condition. I am teaching the game using whatever expansion I am testing, so I explain whatever twists it has.

How many games of Dominion would you guess you have played?

Man. Well, in the thousands. IRL I must have played at least 3K games; it's hard to estimate because any given game night may have involved other games. There are 3600+ posts in playtest forum threads for posting results from playing online; they aren't all games and I'm not in all of them, although a lot are and I'm in a lot of them. That doesn't cover all online games, just from Cornucopia on (I had a bad online version when working on the main set).

What card do you think you are "best" with?  What about worst?

I'm best with new, untested cards. Also against them.

I'm looking at the sets, I don't see cards that say I will lose. I buy the weak cards less often than the strong cards, the narrow cards less often than the flexible ones. I guess like anyone decent can say, I do worse against swingy cards.

Boxers or briefs?

Boxers; the motif on them is a boxer, poised to punch.

Which is more frustrating for you in a competitive-ish game, Turn 5 chapel or 2+P in a Familiar game?

Well I've experienced the former more than the latter so I guess that one. But really, if this game is competitive-ish, phew, I can point to this as why I lost. The pressure's off.

5359

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pronunciations and plurals

« on: December 10, 2012, 07:40:27 pm »

If Ruinses is proper, then Ruins must be singular as well.

Somehow I feel the need to explain this stuff even after saying how pointless that would be. That is what the internet does to a man.

In the sentence "Ruined Village is a Ruins," "Ruins" is singular. You can tell from the "a!" Note despite being a former computer programmer that I put the exclamation point inside the quotes. If you then wanted to say what Ruined Village and Abandoned Mine collectively are, that would be "Ruinses." As usual despite being pretty sure of this I used the internet to verify it before using the word in the preview. If you aren't reading this from a print-out then this power is available to you as well.

If you see the movie Holes, did you see two movies? When you say "I saw Holes," that's shorthand for "I saw the movie named Holes." It's one movie; Holes in this context is singular. The fact that the movie's name is also a plural English word doesn't change that. If the director made another movie very similar to Holes, and then a third, then you might say, "man, I wish he would stop making so many Holeses."

The entire point to me saying Ruinses in the first place, in the preview and wherever afterwards, was because, it's funny. It's funny that the plural is Ruinses, because no-one would actually say Ruinses, and they would sound like Gollum (a character created by a linguist) if they did. Death Cart doesn't say Ruinses, because it would look weird; we don't have someone forcing us to adhere to a particular style guide, although Jay decided to go light on contractions (I disagree there) and to say "he" for indeterminate gender (I prefer "they" like a normal person).

It has not been so common to pluralize proper nouns in the past, but it comes up a lot with card games with named cards. You have this name, it's some ordinary real thing, but it's a name, it's proper, and the style guides say your Magic deck has four City of Brasses and four Llanowar Elveses, not four Cities of Brass and four Llanowar Elves. Normal people say Cities and Elves and that may well be the wave of the future. If you see a newspaper article telling you how many times Madonna won a Grammy though, they will call them Grammys, not Grammies; once it's proper they just add -s or -es.

5360

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pronunciations and plurals

« on: December 10, 2012, 05:33:33 pm »

So does that mean its proper to say "Ruins isa type of basic cards in Dark Ages. They are weak and undesirable Action cards costing 0 that are typically added to a player's deck as a penalty or attack" (as opposed to are)? I'm not sure what proper nouns have to do with it. If you have one virus and then it breeds you get viruses. "Jones" is singular, ("Jones isn't feeling well so you need to work late"), so if Jones has a family, you have a bunch of Joneses. If Ruinses is proper, then Ruins must be singular as well.

If you want to know what a style guide says to do, check a style guide! It doesn't seem worthwhile for me to try to make it clear to you what style guides say, when after all they are not all identical.

I have already indicated that I am not a language prescriptivist. Try to communicate clearly, that's what matters.

5361

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 04:05:36 pm »

Why does Spy cost $4? Were Spy/Spy openings just too annoying to resolve or something?

It's pretty random. I didn't know as much what I was doing then; I tried it at $4 and people bought it and you didn't have to. These days I wouldn't make it at all - it's too slow for what you get, and charging less doesn't fix that. Rabble is the way to do Spy.

The "this has to cost $4 to stop you from opening with two of them" thing first came to light with a main set outtake that was "trash a card from your hand, discard a card, +3 cards." It was $3 for a while and I upped it to $4 to stop that opening (and moved it to Intrigue, then to Dark Ages, then it died). Throne Room is $4 because $3 was too good with +buys; it was cute that you could open Throne / Feast but I couldn't preserve that. Remodel is $4 because that makes it better. Smithy, Gardens, and Feast want to be $4. Militia, Moneylender, Bureaucrat, and Thief are all somewhat randomly at $4; they were trying to fit into a continuum of cards, where as you know the big difference is from $4 to $5. They are correctly less than $5. I'm happy with them being $4; it's not like you want to face double-attack openings a lot (bad or not) when you're new to the game. Moneylender fits fine into the continuum.

5362

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pronunciations and plurals

« on: December 10, 2012, 02:46:49 pm »

Wasn't "filthy, rotten ruinses. We hates them" a reference to Gollum's speeches in the LOTR? ("Filthy little hobbitses....Sneaky little hobbitses....We hates them!") I was jokingly referring to your reference of that.... I did not mean to be offensive or spouting nonsense.

Yes, how could it not be?

I agree. I do not find this suspicious. I was just thinking that "theme" might be a reason why the printed words on the cards might NOT be read as proper nouns but as common nouns by some players even if you mean them to be read as proper nouns.

It's nice that you are just innocently being hilarious. Everyone thinks of City as city, not as a proper noun. No-one says "my deck has four Citys." How much they care about theme has nothing to do with it; "City" is not something they think of as proper.

5363

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 02:36:18 pm »

What games did you play growing up (if any)? What's your earliest gaming memory?

I played a lot of D&D. I played it when it was the little books - Eldritch Wizardry etc. No-one ever played by the rules, because there were awful, so I guess that was probably my first experience with game design. At some point in my teens I briefly tried to be good at chess. I was good at intimidating people by being smart, I would push a piece forward and they would be sure it must be some great plan.

Otherwise, you know, normal American stuff, this will not be interesting. Monopoly, Checkers, etc. etc. Trying to figure out what my oldest such memory is is too hard and boring. I'm like the Memento guy, I can only remember the last 38 years. I have a photo of a man from before then and it says "don't believe his lies;" I think it's referring to Santa Claus.

5364

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pronunciations and plurals

« on: December 10, 2012, 12:18:44 pm »

The fact that Donald views Ratses and Ruinses as the correct plurals just means he's not getting into what little theme there is when he plays (or he's secretly role playing as Gollum and Dominion is really set in Middle Earth).

You're spouting nonsense.

The fact that I view Ruinses as "correct" means I know what style guides tell you to do when pluralizing proper nouns. If you find this suspicious, consider the expression, "keeping up with the Joneses."

Outside of edited material, whatever people do is "correct" - no-one is the arbiter of correct English.

5365

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 12:12:51 pm »

Do you have favorite kid's game?

I'm fond of step-on-feet. You try to step on their feet. They try to step on your feet. You win when every other player has conceded.

Any thoughts on a "Dominion for Kids" sort of variant similar to what we've seen for Settlers and Carcassonne?

I have not given any thought to such a thing. I've played Dominion with an 8-year-old, and I'm not sure I'd want to aim much lower.

5366

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 08:59:43 am »

Is Seaside your second favorite set?

Comparing just the large sets, I like Dark Ages best, then Hinterlands, Prosperity, Seaside, Intrigue, Dominion. They are just strictly in order from worst to best. The biggest gap is between Intrigue and Seaside though; from Seaside on they're all so good that who cares which set is better. I've had plenty of fun with Intrigue and Dominion but for sure there's room for improvement there.

It's hard to fairly compare the small sets to the large ones (or Dark Ages to normal large sets). I like Cornucopia more than Alchemy. I like Alchemy though, I am no Alchemy hater. I probably like Guilds best, but it's close.

What was the most enjoyable set to work on and playtest?

There's no set where I wasn't enjoying working on it. I guess the later sets were arguably more fun because we could playtest them on isotropic. Dark Ages is my favorite set, so, I dunno, Dark Ages?

Don't know why this comes to mind, but what is your wife's favorite card?

I don't know and she's asleep.

5367

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 08:48:53 am »

What was your reaction when you first heard fans talk about "the Silver test"?  Do you feel that Big Money strategies are too strong in base Dominion, and was that a consideration at all when you put together the flagship set?

I'm not sure I would put it like that - more like, when I first heard a non-fan talking about it. I thought, lol. It's pretty obviously stupid and while it's good to realize "hey maybe buying a terminal action every turn won't work out," that obv. doesn't mean the game is broken. Dominion clearly survived that nonsense and so much for that.

I think base Dominion could have better replayability/variety via swapping out some of the duds for more interesting cards. That would also make more-interesting decks better; a bunch of decks where you play just 1-2 terminals plus money is not as much variety as, you know, not that. But I would be changing it for the variety issue, not due to wanting to hurt heavy money strategies.

Heavy money strategies were not a consideration for picking the cards in the main set. Being simple enough was the main concern, followed by, variety. It did well on simplicity, probably it could have been slightly less simple. It wasn't going to have as much variety as when you add an expansion, but it could have had more variety.

Silver isn't awful, and the game has this "only play one action per turn" rule. Those both seem like good things, but together they lead to, sometimes you can do well without many actions. Not playing many actions is just one of the basic solutions to only being able to play one per turn. There are other solutions though, and the main set has them: I can play lots of +1 action cards like Lab, I can play Village and more terminals, I can play Remodels and Remodel Remodel, I can go for Gardens and just live with lots of terminals.

5368

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 08:35:29 am »

Are you in favor of initializing a MTG-like Dominion Pro Tour? Or, in a similar way, do you think it's somehow possible to make taking part at the World Championships more attractive?

Well MtG has a constant flow of new products. Like, should Puerto Rico have a Pro Tour? It feels like the WBC is good enough for most games.

Giving people plane tickets to the championships would require thinking that that promotion was paying off. I'm not sure it would and it's not my department anyway.

5369

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 05:33:56 am »

What does the X stand for?

It's a variable. The unknown.

5370

Rules Questions / Re: It probably doesn't work this way: Possession and Trader

« on: December 10, 2012, 05:02:08 am »

If Alex plays Possession, and then on Betty's possessed turn she has Trader in hand and is about to gain, I dunno, a Province or something, two things happen simultaneously:

(a) Possession triggers: Alex gains the Province.
(b) Trader triggers: Betty may reveal it and gain Silver instead of Province.

Suppose Alex decides to resolve them in that order. First, Alex gains the Province. Then the triggering event for (b) no longer applies—Betty is no longer about to gain anything—but, by the Royal Seal example above, Betty should still be able to reveal Trader. Does Alex gain a Silver if she does? Why or why not?

Trader doesn't "trigger." The confusing thing here is that when you have a card in play that says "while this is in play, when x happens do y" then when x happens we queue up y to happen, and just pick what order to resolve things if there's more than one. But when a reaction card says "when x happens, you may discard this to do y," then this doesn't "trigger;" rather, it is an option, at some point when we haven't yet finished resolving every "when x happens" we want to / have to; you may discard the thing to do the thing, whether it was in hand when the triggering event happened or not. If the card isn't in hand anymore when you want to do it, you can't do it (generally clear anyway since it will say "reveal from your hand" or "discard implicitly from your hand"); if it wasn't there but shows up in time, you can.

Anyway I have apologized for how reaction cards work before and so much for that.

So then. Betty buys Province. Alex decides to resolve Possession, rather than using Betty's Trader first. It changes who will gain the Province, to Alex. Now Betty's Trader cannot be used, although if Alex has one in hand he can use his.

5371

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Silver or Spoils?

« on: December 10, 2012, 04:41:04 am »

Well, here Donald X. says that Feast was once, "+1 Action. +$3. Trash this." and that it was too powerful. That makes me think that Spoils are usually better than Silver.

It actually reads "$4".

"for $4" - the original Feast had a cost of $4, and text that read "+1 action +$3, trash this."

5372

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 04:38:27 am »

I assume when you first started testing Dominion, you tried out a lot of different basic game mechanics that ended up getting canned for various reasons.  Are there any that, with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you had persevered with as you think they would have made the game better in some way?

Day one, your starting hand was 5 coppers / 5 estates, and played cards went to the discard pile; it didn't take long to fix those things. And otherwise it was the same game when I showed it to RGG; there are no lost basic game mechanics.

There are plenty of single-card mechanics that didn't work out, and you can read about them in the secret histories. I have no regrets there, I mean the ones that still seem like they have potential also have the time I spent not getting anywhere to dissuade me. Look at Dark Ages especially, since many cards had their last stand there. There's nothing where I think, that would really have improved the game if it had worked; it's just, that would have been a cool card if it had worked.

5373

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 04:26:04 am »

If you were to play forum Mafia, do you think you would do better as Mafia or Town? (Would the answer change if it were face-to-face?)

I don't know dude. Town sounds easier. As Town I just need to play as Town. As Mafia I have to play as Town but also Mafia.

5374

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 04:19:32 am »

Of all the different mechanics, themes, concepts and what have yous out there that you *haven't* explicitly made a game about, what do you most want to try?

For most of the mechanics I want to try, part of the appeal is not knowing a game that has them, so it's not like I want to list those. I've made several time travel games but no good ones; I'd like to make a good one.

Did Kingdom Builder ever have a different name?

No. I don't work on prototype names much; they need a name to be referred to, before I know if they're any good, and then it's easier to keep calling it that. So the names are usually something like The Spy Game. As you all know, in a surprise twist, Queen decided to stick with the prototype name. Rajive explained that, well, you are building a kingdom.

Out of all the Dominion cards so far released, what is your favourite interaction - combo or nombo - between two or more of them?

I already failed to answer this question. I will list a random interaction for each large set.

Dominion: Thief / Gardens has a certain charm.

Intrigue: I will stick with, Swindler / Silver. You couldn't possibly give me a Swindler, they're so terrifying.

Seaside: I am going to cite Smugglers / Pirate Ship. You open with Smugglers. You draw it and on their turn they buy Pirate Ship. Man. I don't want a Pirate Ship. Man. Urhrhrhr. Smuggle Pirate Ship, buy a Pirate Ship.

Prosperity: I am big on Worker's Village / Peddler.

Hinterlands: I have opened Develop / Spice Merchant so many times.

Dark Ages: Fortress is a pretty fun defense against Knights.

5375

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2012, 03:39:24 am »

If you could choose two (famous) people to play in a game of Dominion, who would they be and why?

Follow up: What cards would be in the kingdom?

This is tangential, but in the movie Midnight in Paris, the ostensible premise is that our hero is going back in time to Paris in the 20s. But the real premise is, our hero is going back in time to Paris in the 20s, and all of the famous people of the day are interested in talking to him. I mean he's a writer and some of them are writers, but he isn't a famous writer of the 20s, and he also gets to hang out with non-writers, Dali and uh, well Cole Porter is playing at a party and he sees Picasso at Gertrude Stein's. Anyway in the end, btw spoilers, our hero learns that he should be happy in his own time. But I'm in my own time right now, I've written some screenplays, and I can't chat up Woody Allen. The whole thing makes you want to start a club for clever creative people, try to put a little Algonquin Round Table into your life, but I don't see why any of them would show up.

Anyway I have no special interest in playing Dominion with a particular famous person I might otherwise like to meet. Man, for any given famous person, either you want to talk to them or have sex with them or both; maybe you want to collaborate on something with them. Playing Dominion, it will just be Dominion, I can already play Dominion.

I played my games a bunch of times with Richard Garfield, Mark Rosewater, and other Wizards people back in the late 90s. I had long conversations with Friedemann Friese and Andreas Seyfarth at the Essen I went to; I don't drink, but Andreas Seyfarth, there is a guy to have some beers with. There was business to discuss with Bernd, aka Michael Tummelhofer. I met Knizia but he just appeared to shake hands and smile and was gone. Tom Lehmann is coming over to play games in a few days, with Wei-Hwa, who you will one day know as the Roll for the Galaxy guy. I guess it's not so hard to meet people within your industry.

My favorite band is Game Theory / Loud Family (all other members quit so he changed the name). Since they are obscure and local, I have gotten to chat with the guy a few times, although I was somewhat starstruck. My favorite movie is Brazil; I will probably never meet Terry Gilliam. If he wants to hang out sometime then man I am there, it sounds like good times, but it's not like I think, oh, if only. There would probably be too much of a disconnect to enjoy meeting David Lynch or Robert Pollard. Woody Allen and Stephin Merritt would just be trying to get it over with. My favorite novel is Little, Big; I have no real concept of that guy, I'm not sure what we'd talk about. I'd go for Gene Wolfe for novels I think.

Scarlett Johansson is hot. Why, if I were ten years younger... and she were five years younger...

Have you ever thought about running for political office (Governor, perhaps?)?

I haven't, but I have flirted with trying to get some of my voting reforms to the governments that might use them, e.g. Sweden's. There are basic problems with basic solutions, where cold hard logic is all you need to see that of course you should change things.

What is your favorite card to Throne Room?

I don't know. Cards with choices are good, like Nobles.