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976

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: What are the new mechanics in Nocturne?

« on: February 14, 2018, 10:44:05 am »

Also, States: cards which you are temporarily given which sit in front of you and affect your play (positively or negatively) while you are in that State.

Necromancer, as well as (temporarily) turning cards face-down in the trash, also means the game starts with three different Zombies in the trash, which is kinda neat.

977

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Did I find a bug, or am I missing something?

« on: February 14, 2018, 10:41:56 am »

What's the problem?

I'm not familiar with that log structure, but presumably you played Conclave, then played Outpost when Conclave said "you may play an Action card from your hand that [...] If you do, +1 Action." And you did, so you got +1 Action. And then you used your extra Action to play Gladiator.

978

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: February 14, 2018, 10:38:09 am »

Iiiinteresting!

I can envisage boards where you might want to keep one, maybe even two, of your Coppers though? Particularly, keeping a Copper would let you buy Gold instead of a $5-cost on T4.

Also, you probably want to buy a Ruins on T3.

I'd love to know how that combo fitted into various kingdoms. I can see three very different ways to proceed:

• Buy the cards you really want, then once your ruins run out let the Death Cart eat itself,
• Buy another Death Cart every third turn.
• Rely on cantrip +Buy or a gainer to keep the Death Cart fed constantly throughout the game.

979

Dominion Articles / Re: Monastery

« on: February 12, 2018, 08:29:54 am »

Hmm. I've only played with Monastery three or four times so far, but I've tended to find I want two, unless there's a good early gainer available.

Yes, you occasionally draw CCEMM which isn't great unless there's a(nother) good $2 in the kingdom. But But at least that turn you'll be reducing the risk of it happening again, and CCCMM is OK once in a while. Normally, you're trashing two cards per shuffle rather than one, and that feels important enough to be worth the downsides.

Particularly, though, I'd rather have two Monasteries in hand and $1 less to spend than try to line up a single Monastery with gaining/+Buy, then gain/buy something crummy so I can trash two cards.

980

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: February 12, 2018, 08:16:14 am »

I'm not seeing how that works. If you have rubbish at the top of your deck, Wisp gets it into your hand, but doesn't leave you any better off than if the rubbish hadn't been there. Worse, the rubbish has to be second card down for even that to work.

981

Dominion Articles / Re: Witch, revised for 2018

« on: February 10, 2018, 09:55:12 am »

"But Mountebank is in the kingdom!" - Actually, after you play Mountebanks a few times, they block it often enough that you probably want to buy the Witch to hand out the rest of the Curses.

Just get a second Mountebank. Or (n+1)th. Playing two Mountebanks in one turn is worse for your opponents than one Mountebank and one Witch.

There is the old saying that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. I now propose: nobody ever lost Dominion by playing King's Court on a Mountebank.

982

Other Games / Re: Dominion clones

« on: February 09, 2018, 11:46:05 am »

I read the rules to Secret Hitler and they seemed an overly complex version of the Resistance, but I've never played it. What's up with that game?

Well, the first thing to get clear is that Resistance is an underly complex version of the Resistance. I'll sometimes play base Resistance to introduce a new player to the game, but even then only if I'm sure they'll need it. Otherwise, you need to add the Commander and Assassin (Merlin and Assassin in the Avalon re-skin) at the very least to give the game adequate depth.

In my group, we tend to add either Bodyguard and False Commander or the Reversers to spice things up further.

That's what Resistance is, to us. So for us Secret Hitler is considerably pared down before adding comparable complexity in a different direction.

Right now, I'd say Resistance, Secret Hitler, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Secrets, Spyfall and Mafia de Cuba are the best hidden-role games. Yes, Resistance and Secret Hitler have more in common than the others, but they're still a very long way from being the same game.

983

Other Games / Re: Dominion clones

« on: February 08, 2018, 09:00:55 pm »

...games designed by people who are excellent at marketing but not excellent at design.  See, e.g., Secret Hitler.

There's not much wrong with Secret Hitler. It builds on Resistance, sure, but it adds a lot, and the things it adds are mainly improvements. The one aspect I'm not so sure about is player elimination, but the game is at least engineered so it can only happen when things are almost over.

Edit: Exploding Kittens, on the other hand...

984

Other Games / Re: Dominion clones

« on: February 08, 2018, 08:05:04 pm »

Puzzle Strike is Dominion with player powers.
Flash Duel is En Guarde with player powers.
The arrogantly named Chess 2 is chess with player powers.

I get the impression from people who've played both that Codex is Magic: The Gathering. Presumably, with player powers.

985

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 06, 2018, 01:07:24 pm »

Um. Unless an "Echip token" is different from a coin in some way, both these are bogus.

If you toss 1,000 coins, the chance fewer than 718 of them coming up heads isn't 0.718 . (Let alone the chance of 718 or more coming up heads.) Similarly, if you toss 10 coins, the chance of fewer than 7 of them coming up heads isn't 0.7 . (My calculator says 0.99995 or so!)

The way to do this would be to use the binary expansion of e and toss a single coin until the result is clear.

986

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 05, 2018, 12:11:42 pm »

Postscript:

I've just realised a genetic algorithm could potentially come up with good answers given briefs like: "This is a proposed new Night mechanic. Make some balanced cards which use it." or "This Night card costs $1 and says 'At the start of your next turn, +4 Cards. This is gained to your hand (instead of your discard pile).' It's interesting; now please make it balanced."

And that's probably the most promising line of attack for using computers to help design real Dominion cards.

987

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 05, 2018, 12:05:49 pm »

It could work well except that what we started out looking for in this thread was hilarity, and what we seem to have drifted into wanting is a Donald-o-matic that can spit out new Dominion expansions for us with quality at least as good as those made by the real Donald. If the Donald-o-matic managed to work on hardware that cost less to run than the real Donald, that would suddenly move from the realms of an academic exercise to another scary step towards the technological singularity.

What I don't think anybody really wants is a computer which learns how to make balanced cards very similar to those already in the game.

A genetic algorithm running on sentences in a CFG isn't going to come up with Durations, VP tokens, coin tokens, Reserves, split piles, Debt, Night, etc. having seen only the base game.

988

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 04, 2018, 02:36:22 pm »

It's like that joke in Dirk Gently, the book, where he constrains the cacophony of notes to C and gets cacophony in C.

Yes! That!

(I almost mentioned it myself. Now I'm wishing I had. (-8 )

989

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 03, 2018, 06:23:46 pm »

What Philipp is suggesting doesn't sound ridiculous to me. It's just that you can't simply throw a 2009 IBM server machine at the problem and expect it to solve it by itself.

Conversely, I can easily write this Python program:

Code: [Select]

print """
Rats
Action, cost $4

+1 Card
+1 Action
Gain a Rats. Trash a card from your hand other than a Rats (or reveal a hand of all Rats).
_
When you trash this, +1 Card."""So now I've written a computer program that produces good Dominion cards.

Right?

To put it another way, there is an important distinction between machine learning, and encapsulating human learning in a computer program. There's a grey area between the two, but it does feel more legitimate to train a neural network on example cards and non-cards, rather than hand-hold it with "the rules and mechanics of Dominion to begin with".

990

Rules Questions / Re: Hunting Party: Can I postpone the +1 action until drawing cards?

« on: February 03, 2018, 01:25:03 pm »

Based on my experiences teaching Dominion to people, I'd say the clearest way to explain "+1 Action" is "Immediately add 1 to the number of Actions you may play this turn".

Also, people grasp what "+1 Action" does a lot better if you explain it at the same time as, and in the same way as, "+1 Buy".  The comparison is useful, because it's harder to make the mistake of thinking "+1 Buy" means you buy something there and then.

991

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 03, 2018, 01:17:50 pm »

I don't think that would bring much to the table in practice.

Firstly, as we've discovered, even constructing meaningful cards is difficult. Secondly, as we've discovered, making a computer play Dominion well is difficult. It's not easy to be in a position to have a computer design cards and playtest them.

But more importantly, making cards that are legal and balanced is only part of the battle. Cards also have to be different, and interesting, and fun. Ideally, they're also thematic, and introduce entirely new game mechanics.

Without those considerations, we'd be flooded with new card ideas like "Blacksmith: Action $4. +3 Cards. Discard the top card of your deck." or "Boring Village: Action $3. +1 Card. +2 Actions. Each other player may gain a Curse." They're not existing cards but, I mean, really... (-8

There are a lot of other really disruptive skills computers are going to acquire long before one can take the rules PDF for the Dominion base set, churn for an hour and spit out something as fun, innovative and high quality as the Adventures expansion. Donald X. has rather more job security than doctors and airline pilots.

992

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 03, 2018, 10:50:59 am »

I pondered that.

Then I realised, even if it flooded your deck with Copper, it's still a $3-cost giving +$3 this turn and next. Buying just those and Provinces might be hard to beat!

993

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 01, 2018, 08:34:09 pm »

+1 Coin per differently named Treasure Map from your hand that is not a Treasure card from your hand.

Although actually simpler than it sounds, that would produce so many rules questions!

994

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Letting a computer design Dominion cards: recurrent neural network edition

« on: February 01, 2018, 12:14:40 pm »

I think that given a huge dataset (thousand or even millions of (good) cards), this could make good cards.

I doubt that.

If you really wanted a computer to make good Dominion cards rather than just amusing aberrations, you'd want to train it on:

• Good cards
• Bad cards
• Good things that aren't (legal/sensical) cards
• Bad things that aren't cards

There's no point letting it churn out cruft like an infinite number of monkeys until it happens to reinvent Smithy; you'd want it to come up with good stuff that's not currently in Dominion and "Dominionise" it.

995

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: February 01, 2018, 12:07:49 pm »

Save / Moat
Allows to ignore all the attacks.

That way you can avoid getting hit by a bridge troll every turn!

It's even better than that. You can avoid getting hit by a Bridge Troll and an Urchin every turn!

996

Dominion Articles / Re: Turbo-Treasure-Map Combo: Plan+Engineer

« on: January 30, 2018, 07:23:10 pm »

But... Plan doesn't thin your deck. The only way to trash a card is to buy a card.

I can see the usefulness of getting an early Treasure Map collision. But if the best way to trash a starting Copper is to buy an Engineer, shuffle, play the Engineer for two Treasure Maps, shuffle, then play those two Treasure Maps for no benefit, I think it's time to consider the possibility that it's better to put up with the copper in your deck. Especially as the Treasure Maps will run out half-way through trashing your starting deck.

Come to think of it, surely it would be better to skip the Engineer step and put Plan directly on Treasure Map?

997

Dominion Articles / Re: Archive: Learning to Work with What You’ve Got

« on: January 30, 2018, 07:11:29 pm »

Archive plays as a strong cantrip the turn you play it, a strong Laboratory the second turn, and a weaker Laboratory on the third

...or any other combination.

You might instead choose to have a weak cantrip, followed by a mediocre Laboratory, followed by an excellent Laboratory, for example.

998

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Right way to play when you can’t win?

« on: January 29, 2018, 09:19:38 pm »

6. Resign and inspect the snacks.

A proper games player (by which I mean one of my lamentable girth) can win Dominion and inspect the snacks simultaneously.

999

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Right way to play when you can’t win?

« on: January 29, 2018, 09:29:39 am »

Was there a possible path for you to find to victory?  If so, pursue that path, even should it have little chance of success. If there is literally no way left for you to win, then end the game as quickly as possible.

Seems reasonable.

The more awkward question - and it's one I've been on the sharp end of a couple of times - is what about kingmaking? You realise you're not going to win, but one line of play would favour player A and another would favour player B. Now what?

1000

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Favorite Expansions in 2018

« on: January 27, 2018, 09:19:02 pm »

Personally, I feel people forget just how good first-edition Base was. OK, so we've all played it into the ground by now, but that doesn't mean it's objectively become worse.

Even now, I hanker after a real Village, a real Smithy, a real Laboratory, a real Witch once in a while. (-8

Also: Chapel!