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Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Nocturne has been released, go buy it!
« on: December 28, 2017, 09:41:43 am »
Maybe to thwart someone who's about to Possess you?
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions
« on: December 28, 2017, 09:35:17 am »
I'd got the impression a "nombo" was usually something that looked like it would be a combo, but which failed dramatically for an unanticipated reason. Secondarily, it could mean a group of cards that worked especially badly together.
I'd have said Inheritance on Band of Misfits was an example of the first usage, and Chapel+Gardens an example of the latter.
Something like, oh, Market and Farmlands, where there's no particular reason to use them together, but equally no unexpected pitfalls or particular reason to avoid incorporating them into the same strategy, I wouldn't have called a nombo.
I'd have said Inheritance on Band of Misfits was an example of the first usage, and Chapel+Gardens an example of the latter.
Something like, oh, Market and Farmlands, where there's no particular reason to use them together, but equally no unexpected pitfalls or particular reason to avoid incorporating them into the same strategy, I wouldn't have called a nombo.
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Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Nocturne Cards: Cursed Village
« on: December 27, 2017, 07:36:12 pm »
It occurs to me that CV might be a really strong counter to discard attacks. Possibly the strongest?
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Christmas Kingdoms 2017
« on: December 26, 2017, 07:24:16 pm »Looking forward to the discussions wether these cards are canon.At first glance, Vacation looks way too overpowered to be canon at $5?
Personally, I'm looking forward to the discussions of the anachronistic electric lights in the artwork...
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 26, 2017, 07:07:21 pm »I mean, you can't have things like werewolf and vampire as treasures.Werewolf would actually be simpler as an Action reading: "Choose one; +3 Cards; or each other player receives the next Hex." That also sorts out the minor wrinkle that people can react to a Werewolf being played in the Action phase, even though it's never possible for the attack component to apply then.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Magic Lamp is the dumbest card-shaped thing
« on: December 22, 2017, 12:38:31 pm »It is a larger consideration, but you don't buy Leprechaun until you can do that consistently. You start the game with Magic Lamp in your deck.Do you not? $3 looks like a good price for a card that gives you early Golds in exchange for getting Hexed a bit. Leprechaun/Night Watchman, for example, looks like it would be a strong opening.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Magic Lamp is the dumbest card-shaped thing
« on: December 22, 2017, 11:09:35 am »
I've not played with Leprechaun yet, but by inspection, the fact that you can't (easily) count treasures towards the cards in play for Leprechaun looks like a larger consideration than the "exactly", or the lack of prohibition on duplicates.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Magic Lamp is the dumbest card-shaped thing
« on: December 21, 2017, 08:20:41 pm »
Some kingdoms contain the tools you need to help Treasure Maps collide; some don't.
The same can be said for Province/Tournament or Magic Lamp/6 distinct uniques.
So then the question becomes: in each case, how likely is it that a random kingdom will contain the help one needs?
The same can be said for Province/Tournament or Magic Lamp/6 distinct uniques.
So then the question becomes: in each case, how likely is it that a random kingdom will contain the help one needs?
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Magic Lamp is the dumbest card-shaped thing
« on: December 21, 2017, 07:31:10 pm »two Urchins
[...]
Tournament/Province
[...]
Magic Lamp
It really feels like Treasure Map ought to be mentioned in the same breath as those. Perhaps also Hermit/Madman. I also remember one tense game in which I managed to get my Champion on the table just before an opponent's Warrior engine went off, which is a kind of anti-bomb.
Magic Lamp gives you three Wishes, but you can only ever do it once. And now that I've experienced the frustration of drawing a Wish dead, I'll note it's not strictly better than Gold to have in your deck. Meanwhile, Treasure Map gives you four Golds. Top-decked. (Wish may gain you a card to hand, but the Wish itself is gained to discard.) How does the power of the benefit, the difficulty of setup, the swinginess, of Magic Lamp compare with Treasure Map?
Province/Tournament, meanwhile, gives a definite swingy advantage to whoever sets one off first. Another notable difference is that you get to keep the Province and Tournament, so can set it off again.
(Mercenary feels like the odd one out in this company, for being decidedly weaker and decidedly easier to obtain.)
Is Magic Lamp really a bigger deal than Tournament and Treasure Map?
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 21, 2017, 01:27:25 pm »I rather like a night card at the end of a good turn. It's like a satisfying terminal punctuation mark at the end of a well-constructed sentenceHowever, by that analogy it could be argued that buying is the full stop to the turn, and Night cards are that annoying sequence of "PS" "PPS" ... from somebody who doesn't know how to structure a letter properly.
After what's gone before in this thread, I feel I need to make explicit that I'm not quite that down on Night cards. And I had a good game yesterday in which we used Werewolf, Raider and Ghost (Cemetery/Haunted Mirror); sparing use of powerful Night cards seems to be a lot more fun than piles of the cheap stuff.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Magic Lamp is the dumbest card-shaped thing
« on: December 21, 2017, 01:18:55 pm »Just asking because it sounds like you are saying that it's impossible for you to activate Magic Lamp if you play two Cursed Villages. It will be harder, for sure, but it's still possible.Depends. If your second Cursed Village draws you one card you've not played before, you've broken even. If it draws you two, you're ahead. (And remember you'd quite like to improve your hand and have a better turn at the same time as setting up for Magic Lamp.)
It feels as though, especially with several distinct Heirlooms flying around, if you can just draw and sift heaps of cards then playing six uniques will often be fairly straightforward.
Neither of us managed to cash in our Magic Lamps especially quickly, but we both got there by routes that were also useful in their own rights.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Magic Lamp is the dumbest card-shaped thing
« on: December 20, 2017, 08:41:35 pm »
I played a Magic Lamp game this evening. Two players. Opponent and I managed to cash in our Magic Lamps on consecutive turns.
He got there by buying Werewolves, Secret Caves and Cursed Villages (draw to 6, discard duplicates, play some stuff, lather, rinse, repeat); I got there by thinning away much of my Copper and buying an early Skulk. (Oh, and having a Raider still in play from my previous turn, so I didn't even need to draw more cards.)
It felt like both were well-conceived strategies that worked, neither relying overmuch on luck.
He got there by buying Werewolves, Secret Caves and Cursed Villages (draw to 6, discard duplicates, play some stuff, lather, rinse, repeat); I got there by thinning away much of my Copper and buying an early Skulk. (Oh, and having a Raider still in play from my previous turn, so I didn't even need to draw more cards.)
It felt like both were well-conceived strategies that worked, neither relying overmuch on luck.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 20, 2017, 11:19:27 am »Is Fool any more random, fiddly, or slow than Black Market?Personally, I've never tried Black Market. A couple of friends do have it, and I mean to some day.
My hunch is that a play of Black Market will likely be as slow as a play of Fool, but it might advance the game more.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 20, 2017, 01:35:41 am »Sorry. To be clear, the main thing I came here to post about was Fool and its inclusion in the first recommended kingdom, secondarily about Night. But the latter part is the one that's turned out to be contentious. When I say "the trouble Nocturne has [caused]", I mean mainly Fool, but also Night a bit.Nothing in any of those caused the trouble that Nocturne has.You have changed the topic there, from Night to Nocturne. I notice these things!
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Night, I would have been happy doing in an early expansion. Seaside added the Duration phase, but because it says "at the start of your turn" (a time when previously nothing happened), instead of naming a phase, it didn't bother anyone. Somehow that's how perception works here.
But you play Durations at the same time as other Actions (or whatever) in the same way. It feels to me as though a Duration-like Night card would be "+1 Action. At the start of your clean-up phase..." whereas a Night-like Duration card would be "If it is your action phase, set this aside. Play it at the start of your next turn."
It seems to me that the real issue is the size and timing of the cognitive load; perception is an important contributor to cognitive load.
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So. When you say Nocturne there, you put down the whole set
Hmm. Two points:
• My talking about the trouble that Nocturne caused my playing group doesn't mean I think that all of Nocturne is troublesome.
• I liked the look of Nocturne and bought it. That first game was just painful, but the second one was fun despite my reservations. Trouble is, the other players were considerably more negative about it; I'm worried I may run out of people to play Nocturne with, here. )-8
To recap the end of the original posting: I'd be really interested to hear anyone else's experiences. It looks like there's a consensus to leave out Fool at least until everyone at the table understands Boons much better. But I'm still hoping someone will come up with an idea for how to construct more likeable kingdoms, or some other way to have them like Nocturne more so they'll keep playing it with me.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 20, 2017, 01:04:56 am »if you have any interest in chess at all, and can wrangle four players, two boards and two clocks, bughouse chess is AMAZINGMy favourite Chess variant for 4-6 players is a somewhat tweaked variant of Penultima. Hilarious fun, though admittedly more divergent from normal Chess than most variants. (-8<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 09:07:59 pm »It looks like your problem is that the expansion has anything new in it. They all have that problem.I arrived quite late to the Dominion party, but I've seen my playing group come to grips with Dark Ages, Guilds, Adventures and Empires when each of them was new. Nothing in any of those caused the trouble that Nocturne has.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 08:31:29 pm »
It started out mainly about Fool, but it turned out that wasn't controversial.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 07:24:33 pm »Night cards are no more fiddly than Action or Treasure cards.Now, you see, to me that's almost exactly 50% more fiddly than:
- In your Action phase, you may play one Action card.
- In your Buy phase, before buying cards, you may play any number of Treasure cards.
- In your Night phase, you may play any number of Night cards.
- In your Action phase, you may play one Action card.
- In your Buy phase, before buying cards, you may play any number of Treasure cards.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 07:21:51 pm »Forgetting to do stuff at discard is the mistake I make more often that any other, by a long shot, so I welcome anything that will help me not do that. The Night phase fits the bill.I'm used to paying attention to what I'm discarding from play during clean-up. There have been cards that behave specially during clean-up ever since Seaside. (Sure, you can put Durations somewhere special, but you can put Scheme/Herbalist/Treasury/Travellers somewhere special, too.)
Conversely, I just throw my hand straight in the discard pile. Or did, anyway.
As I say, there being all four combinations of Duration/non-Duration and Gain-to-hand/Gain-to-discard amongst the Night cards then adds to the confusion somewhat.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 07:14:07 pm »I think that the fiddly side of Night cards all comes from it defying deeply-ingrained time-saving moves.Nicely put.
Though there's also another aspect that I'll try articulating more clearly.
In pre-Nocturne Dominion, the standard template for a turn was:
• Play Action cards until you run out of either cards you want to play or actions to play them with
• Play a whole bunch of Treasures
• Buy N cards, where N is often 1
• Clean up
The Action phase and the Treasure-playing part of the Buy phase were quite open-ended; you never knew how much people were going to do. But then they moved onto the second half of the Buy phase, and it was very clear to everybody how much money they had to spend and how many cards they could buy. Once they've done that, the next person can start playing while they clean up.
The Night phase comes after making purchases, and is open-ended. So now the current player has to remember to say explicitly when they've finished, and the next player has to remember to wait.
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I kept doing my Clean-up before my Night phase. Like, I'd discard all my cards from play, then play might Night cards, then be like, sorry, I need those cards to reference with my Night cards, I need to get them back out.
That did happen to us, too. Not often, but when it did the next player really regretted starting their turn as soon as the previous began cleaning up.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 01:33:30 pm »Agreed.A better option would be to just not play with 4 players.
Everybody knows 4-player Dominion is kind of.. meh. Dominion is balanced for two players.
Everybody knows that some people think that, but not everybody thinks that.
My preferred player count is 3. It feels quicker than four players, but more fun and interesting than 2.
The two-player game is clearly the tournament-grade variant, with less luck, no scope for kingmaking and no argument about how important it is to come second rather than third. But that's not necessarily the point of playing Dominion.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 01:30:17 pm »I don't agree at all here; I think Night is clearly the simplest way to do those effects (not the ones that didn't have to be Night cards, like Cobbler, but you know, the other ones, like Monastery). Delaying effects is more complex and causes mistakes.I saw this discussed during the previews, and I saw your reasoning and it seemed good at the time.
But when we got it to the table, we all found Night far more fiddly to deal with than, say, Scheme. And it didn't just feel like the problem of getting to grips with a new mechanic: Reserve cards were a walk in the park by comparison.
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And it's not like other players would remember you had that Monastery effect or whatever coming
Well, we seem to remember when someone has a Scheme to resolve, or needs to decide whether or not to upgrade Travellers. And the cards are on the table as an aide memoire.
I feel the problem may be self-perpetuating. The slower things are going, the more impatient everyone is to start their turn. The more often people start their turns prematurely and have to stall or undo, the longer everything takes and the more frustrated and impatient people get.
For Monastery specifically, it really feels like a "+1 Action. This turn, you may trash one card when you discard it." Action would have been a simpler starting point than the variant which relied on the Night mechanic.
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It's a bummer that it's in the first recommended set.
Mmm. I think that may be a bigger problem than the Fool card's existence.
I'm also wondering if the density of Night cards in that first recommended set might be too high. We all felt a kingdom might be more comfortable and run more smoothly with just one or two Night piles. With hindsight, we should probably have brought out one of the previous sets as well as Nocturne and base cards.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 12:44:56 pm »
While we're digressing onto the subject of games that aren't Dominion for a number of players other than what we had sitting round the table last night, I'll put in a good word for Hive. It's the first game in centuries which I feel is a worthy competitor to Chess as a pure strategy two-player game.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Fool is a pity
« on: December 19, 2017, 02:00:51 am »Just to make sure, though, you are aware that if you already have Lost in the Woods and you play Fool, nothing happens.Oh, indeed. But I think once the Fools started flying (after the second shuffle) a player only started their turn Lost In The Woods twice in the remainder of the game. With three other players, it was pretty likely one of them would have drawn their Fool each round.
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Dominion General Discussion / The Fool is a pity
« on: December 18, 2017, 10:23:25 pm »
Nocturne has arrived in the UK. I got my copy last week, and took it along to play with friends this evening.
Often, I just pull out whichever cards seem cool, but not really knowing how the cogs would turn with Nocturne, I started with the first recommended kingdom in the rulebook.
The (four-player) game took two hours! )-8
The chief culprit was Fool. Once one player bought a Fool, another did; once two had done so, the other two did as well. And we were seeing those Fools pretty often!
Every time somebody plays Fool, they need to take Lost in the Woods, take three Boons, digest what they are, choose an order, receive them, keep track of which should be discarded at once v. which should be kept until Clean-up, and finally re-evaluate their strategy for the turn.
For added fun, sooner or later somebody takes the Earth's Gift and decides they would have preferred a different Boon. So in the middle of resolving Fool, they gain a Blessed Village. And try to work out whether to receive that Boon at once, or keep it until next turn. And then figure out how to represent in terms of table layout which Boons they've not yet received, which are being held until clean-up, and which are being held to receive at the start of next turn.
Meanwhile, with Fool in the kingdom, the Boons deck needs shuffling very frequently and every time that happens people need to stop and double-check the correct subset of the Boons has been discarded.
People also struggled, albeit to a lesser extent, with the inconsistency where some Night cards are gained to hand and others are not. And most of the players both in that game and a subsequent one where I picked the kingdom myself to go light on the Boons felt pretty strongly that Night was an unnecessary complication compared with Actions that had +1 Action and a deferred effect. Especially, they seemed to destroy the rhythm of the game because you can no longer begin playing as soon as the previous player has made their final purchase. A lot of turns had false starts, further adding to the confusion.
None of us found it our most enjoyable game of Dominion ever. Some of the players are soured to Nocturne entirely; most are at least vowing never to play another game with Fool.
This is somewhat startling and dispiriting. I assume that if playtesters had had this experience something would have been done about it, so why were things different for us. We're all experienced gamers, not especially slow, and everyone was already at least somewhat familiar with Dominion.
I'd be really interested to hear anyone else's experiences. /-8
Often, I just pull out whichever cards seem cool, but not really knowing how the cogs would turn with Nocturne, I started with the first recommended kingdom in the rulebook.
The (four-player) game took two hours! )-8
The chief culprit was Fool. Once one player bought a Fool, another did; once two had done so, the other two did as well. And we were seeing those Fools pretty often!
Every time somebody plays Fool, they need to take Lost in the Woods, take three Boons, digest what they are, choose an order, receive them, keep track of which should be discarded at once v. which should be kept until Clean-up, and finally re-evaluate their strategy for the turn.
For added fun, sooner or later somebody takes the Earth's Gift and decides they would have preferred a different Boon. So in the middle of resolving Fool, they gain a Blessed Village. And try to work out whether to receive that Boon at once, or keep it until next turn. And then figure out how to represent in terms of table layout which Boons they've not yet received, which are being held until clean-up, and which are being held to receive at the start of next turn.
Meanwhile, with Fool in the kingdom, the Boons deck needs shuffling very frequently and every time that happens people need to stop and double-check the correct subset of the Boons has been discarded.
People also struggled, albeit to a lesser extent, with the inconsistency where some Night cards are gained to hand and others are not. And most of the players both in that game and a subsequent one where I picked the kingdom myself to go light on the Boons felt pretty strongly that Night was an unnecessary complication compared with Actions that had +1 Action and a deferred effect. Especially, they seemed to destroy the rhythm of the game because you can no longer begin playing as soon as the previous player has made their final purchase. A lot of turns had false starts, further adding to the confusion.
None of us found it our most enjoyable game of Dominion ever. Some of the players are soured to Nocturne entirely; most are at least vowing never to play another game with Fool.
This is somewhat startling and dispiriting. I assume that if playtesters had had this experience something would have been done about it, so why were things different for us. We're all experienced gamers, not especially slow, and everyone was already at least somewhat familiar with Dominion.
I'd be really interested to hear anyone else's experiences. /-8