Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

126

Puzzles and Challenges / Are there any other cards that can...?

« on: August 21, 2012, 10:13:07 pm »

Masquerade, Possession, and Fortress all have the property of enabling you to acquire or re-acquire a card that (at the moment) doesn't belong to you without a "gain" taking place. (Masq moves a card from your opponent's hand to your hand; Possession moves trashed cards from the trash to set-aside-cards-land to your discard pile; Fortress moves itself from the trash to your hand.) Are there any other cards that can do this? This would be a what's-missing puzzle, except I don't know if anything's missing; I guess it's more an am-I-missing-something? puzzle.

127

Puzzles and Challenges / Now that the Dark Ages cards are revealed... What's missing?

« on: August 16, 2012, 07:20:41 pm »

Here's a What's Missing where I think the pattern will be fairly easy to spot, but the missing card might be a little harder to identify.

Counterfeit
Cultist
Golem
King's Court
Procession
Throne Room
Venture

Honorable mention: Band of Misfits

What's missing? (The correct answer is not necessarily from Dark Ages.)

...And now, Herald and Prince as well!

128

Game Reports / Duke deck with no Dukes

« on: August 09, 2012, 09:19:21 pm »

Here's a game I won in a different way than I expected:

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201208/09/game-20120809-122232-d5d224e3.html

Duke, Embassy, Hoard, Lookout, Merchant Ship, Minion, Mint, Monument, Thief, and Warehouse

My opponent went Lookout/Minion. I decided to go Hoard/Duke: buy Hoard on $6 if no Hoard in hand, and Duchies with Hoard in hand up to about 5 of them, at which point I'd start picking up Dukes as well. I ignored Minion altogether.

I never got to the Dukes. Enough Gold was coming in from my Hoard-aided Duchy purchases that even after being attacked by Minion I could hit $8 with some regularity and I figured, hey, why not run out the provinces while I'm in the lead? So the game ended when I had five Duchies and three Provinces; I never actually got around to buying Dukes in my Duke-centric strategy.

129

Game Reports / Scrying Pool / Treasure Map

« on: July 26, 2012, 01:02:42 am »

So here's an interesting game I just played with Robz888:

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201207/25/game-20120725-210336-237cb7cf.html

The kingdom was as follows:
Bishop, Coppersmith, Forge, Militia, Pawn, Quarry, Scrying Pool, Torturer, Treasure Map, Workshop

I looked at it and didn't see a lot of engine potential—Scrying Pool was there but no villages or other non-terminals except Pawn, and I've been trying to get out of a bad habit of buying Scrying Pool when the board doesn't support it—so I was thinking maybe I'd just go, like, Militia or Torturer / Big Money? But I had the good fortune(?) to be in second position so I could react to what Robz did, and when I saw him open Potion, I figured (1) if he's going Scrying Pool, Militia's a bad opening for me, since it won't stop him from getting Scrying Pools, and (2) if he's going Scrying Pool, he must have a good reason for it, so I'd better open Potion to stop him from getting all ten.

So I opened Silver/Potion, and Robz opened Potion/Workshop, which totally didn't occur to me but allowed him to flood his deck with Pawns pretty fast and get nice big draws out of his Scrying Pools. Meanwhile, I was basically playing Scrying Pool + one Bishop + Big Money, which is not that great a strategy but got me my first Province a turn before Robz revealed what his actual strategy was: use his Scrying Pools and Pawn-flooded deck in order to make a pair of Treasure Maps line up. So at the end of his turn 13, I had three Golds and a Province, and he had four Golds and a stronger overall Scrying Pool deck since he could draw his Pawns for big handsize and then use them as cantrips to try and draw into Gold if necessary. His engine payoff came at turn 16 with a double-Province turn, tying up the Province race and leaving him in the lead overall by way of Bishop points, dropping the game into Duchy dancing for a while.

His one major misstep, which might have been what allowed me to pull off the win in the end (well, that plus my lucky shuffle on turn 19), was having bought a Torturer. Terminal draw was not what his village-free Scrying Pool deck needed; and the attack didn't hurt me very much since I was using my Scrying Pools to draw into larger hands anyway, and I had a Bishop in my deck so I could get away with taking a Curse if I needed to. If he had Bishoped his Torturer on turn 16, I probably wouldn't have won.

We were both kind of thinking of buying Forges but never really got around to it—by the time Robz's economy was in shape to do so, I was already leaning heavily enough on the Provinces that it wasn't obviously feasible. Maybe I'd have been in better shape if I bought a Forge instead of a Province on turn 9 though? I dunno.

130

Puzzles and Challenges / An exception to the rule

« on: July 25, 2012, 09:10:47 am »

It's a two-player game. Your opponent has one Curse in hand, and plays an Ambassador to send that Curse to you. You have a Trader in hand, but you opt not to reveal it—that is, you decide you'd rather take the Curse than trade it for a Silver. Why?

I have one answer in mind, but I'm interested in seeing if there are others.

131

Puzzles and Challenges / Not really a what's missing

« on: July 24, 2012, 10:11:02 pm »

Fortune Teller is one of only two cards that mention the word "curse" on them but aren't capable of making someone gain a Curse. What is the other?

The other one is Curse.

Edit: And now Vagrant as well!

132

Puzzles and Challenges / Yet another What's missing?:

« on: July 16, 2012, 05:43:23 pm »

Here are some cards! What one other card can be added that will make the list complete?

Counting House
Explorer
Ironworks
Jack of All Trades
Library
Pawn
Watchtower

Honorable mention: Ill-Gotten Gains

EDIT: Also Ruined Library! And Band of Misfits, I guess.

133

Dominion Isotropic / Does Isotropic misplay Inn?

« on: June 25, 2012, 11:46:53 am »

Inn has you "reveal any number of Action cards" from your discard pile and shuffle them into your deck. Does Isotropic reveal the cards that get so transferred? I have the impression that it doesn't—i.e., that, to the opponent, it says "...shuffling four cards into the deck", not "...shuffling an Inn, two Torturers, and a Worker's Village into the deck". Is this the case?

134

Game Reports / Wharf-BM beats engine, even in a long game

« on: June 21, 2012, 02:19:08 am »

This game is an interesting case study because it was a three-player game, but then one player dropped out after turn 8, leaving it a two-player game with 12 provinces in the supply. I opened Ambassador but moved pretty quickly into Wharf–Big Money; my (remaining) opponent went for an insane Native Village–Wharf engine.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201206/20/game-20120620-223245-bfc9400b.html

If it had been a standard two-player game, it would have been no contest: by the time blah blah's engine kicked in, I already had five provinces and bought a sixth on the next turn. But since there were 12 provinces in the game, blah blah had time to start making up points rapidly, drawing the deck and Ambassadoring me multiple curses each turn. Despite cursing and double-Province buys on turns 19 and 20, though, the engine made up impressive ground, but still wasn't quite enough to close the gap, and I won with a final score of 49–40. The engine's performance was very impressive, closing to 49–40 from a score gap of 24–0 before turn 19; but Wharf-BM is just that good.

It helped that, although I was sent eight curses after blah blah's engine kicked in, all but the first of those were after my last reshuffle—so although they hurt my score, I never saw any of them.

135

Game Reports / Cute final score

« on: April 23, 2012, 11:44:42 pm »

So, I just won the following game going for Dukes vs. my opponent's Fairgrounds / Black Market:

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120423-203817-c48463c4.html

I'm not going to claim I played particularly well—I think Jack of Knaves might have won easily if he'd bought a second Black Market early on, sniped some Duchies, or slowed down my green-filled deck with Bureaucrat. The only reason I'm posting this game is because of my final score, which I think is delightful and deserves to be shared:

AJD: 88 points (8 Dukes, 8 Duchies, 8 Estates, and 8 Curses)

136

Variants and Fan Cards / Young Witch hypothetical

« on: April 23, 2012, 10:04:02 pm »

So, as we know, when Young Witch is in the Black Market deck, you put a Bane in the supply from the get-go, just in case. You don't wait until someone gains Young Witch before designating a Bane card.

If you did, though, that would have some sneaky consequences if you bought Young Witch from the Black Market deck with Highways or Bridges in play.

137

Dominion General Discussion / IGG/City?

« on: March 30, 2012, 01:54:48 pm »

Discussion topic:

In an IGG game with City on the board, should you buy City? If so, when?

138

Game Reports / Tournament / Silk Road

« on: March 25, 2012, 07:29:48 pm »

A game I decided to play in a very silly way, and eked out a win I didn't deserve by the turn-count tiebreaker:

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201203/25/game-20120325-162441-b9cd8a00.html

It's not often you see Tournament on the board and decide to use it as a facilitator for Silk Roads. But, you know—Tournament can gain free Duchies; Followers gains free Estates; and Great Hall was on the board to boost the value of Silk Road as well. I don't pretend that my Tournament / Silk Road strategy was anything like optimal—and I probably should have lost—but man was it fun to try.

139

Rules Questions / Possession un-trashing

« on: March 14, 2012, 10:56:43 pm »

So if a possessed player trashes cards, the trashed cards are returned to their discard pile... after they draw their next had at the end of the turn, is that right?

Ordinarily I think of trashing a possessed player's good cards (for no immediate benefit) as more or less a noob move brought about by not remembering that they won't stay trashed. (Make me Chapel my Platinum on a Possessed turn—what are you hoping to accomplish with that?) But it just occurred to me that this could in some cases be a devious way to make good cards miss the reshuffle: if I need to reshuffle in the cleanup phase of this Possession turn, the Platinum's still going to be set aside when that happens.

140

Puzzles and Challenges / Simultaneity

« on: March 12, 2012, 03:46:48 pm »

So we all know that two things never happen at the same time in Dominion: when two effects are triggered at the same time, they activate in turn order of the players that they affect, and if there's still ambiguity, the active player chooses the order.

There is one card which violates this principle: it causes multiple things to happen actually simultaneously, without being broken down in either of the aforementioned ways. What is it?

141

Dominion General Discussion / What cards benefit the most/least from the sets they appear in?

« on: March 01, 2012, 02:01:27 pm »

It's often commented that Scout is a weak card, but it's a lot stronger within the context of Intrigue. If the cards you're picking up with Scout are Harems and Nobles, it's—well, it's still not that strong (notwithstanding this surprisingly decent Scout/Harem deck I put together not too long ago), but it's a lot more useful than if you're just picking up, say, Fairgrounds with it.

So this started me wondering: what cards are a lot less effective if you're playing them in a game made up of mostly cards from the same expansion than with an average random set? For instance, consider Philosopher's Stone: Alchemy has a lot of cards which increase handsize and/or encourage long action chains, but doing either of these weakens Philosopher's Stone. So Philosopher's Stone is probably on average more useful with non-Alchemy cards in the kingdom than with other Alchemy cards (though its Herbalist combo is pretty good). Similarly, University is not all that much use in a kingdom full of Potion-costing non-terminal actions.

142

Game Reports / The megaturn that didn't happen

« on: February 29, 2012, 11:03:42 am »

A kind of amusing Sea Hag / City game between me and Cruton:

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120227-190319-5176e1b1.html

So okay, a Sea Hag game means the Curses are likely to run out, so Cities are valuable. Universities are a useful way of acquiring Cities because it's arguably easier to hit $2P than $5 consistently in a heavy Sea Hag cursing game. Toward the midgame, Cruton starts using University to snarf up a bunch of Council Rooms. Clearly this is leading up to some megaturn where Cruton uses fully-powered-up Cities to play a bunch of Council Rooms and then grab several Provinces.

But our decks are so clogged up that what actually happens is this: after the last City is gained, there is exactly one turn on which a level-2 City is played. That's the turn on which the last Curse is gained. Cities are now fully-powered! But neither of us ever gets any Cities in hand after that; instead, Cruton buys the last University on the next turn to end the game on piles. Final score: 2 to –2.

143

Dominion General Discussion / How thematic are the expansions?

« on: February 24, 2012, 03:16:26 am »

So, each box of Dominion cards is associated with one or more structural gameplay themes. It just occurred to me to wonder how thoroughly each collection is shaped by its theme(s): how many cards actually fit in?

Basic Dominion:
About 13 out of 25 cards are the simplest way to accomplish some basic Dominion task. (Chapel, Gardens, Laboratory, Militia, Moat, Smithy, Spy, Village, Witch, Woodcutter, Workshop, arguably Cellar and Remodel.)

Intrigue:
About 7 out of 25 cards offer a choice of multiple distinct effects. (Ironworks, Minion, Nobles, Pawn, Steward, Torturer, and for Tribute the choice is random.)
4 more have variable effects in other ways. (Baron and Mining Village let the player choose whether to activate their abilities; Conspirator and Shanty Town have different effects depending on the circumstances in which they're played.)
3 out of 25 are playable Victory cards. (Great Hall, Harem, Nobles.)

Seaside:
8 out of 26 are Duration cards. (Caravan, Fishing Village, Haven, Lighthouse, Merchant Ship, Outpost, Tactician, Wharf.)
7 more have effects on the next turn by setting up the top of the deck. (Ghost Ship, Lookout, Navigator, Pearl Diver, Sea Hag, Treasure Map, Treasury.)

Alchemy:
10 out of 12 require Potions to purchase. (Alchemist, Apothecary, Familiar, Golem, Philosopher's Stone, Possession, Scrying Pool, Transmute, University, Vineyard.)
4 out of 12 interact in some special way with Action cards. (Golem, Scrying Pool, University, Vineyard.)

Prosperity:
3 out of 25 give Victory tokens. (Bishop, Goons, Monument.)
8 out of 25 cost $6 or more. (Bank, Expand, Forge, Goons, Grand Market, Hoard, King's Court, Peddler.)
8 out of 25 are special Treasures. (Bank, Contraband, Hoard, Loan, Quarry, Royal Seal, Talisman, Venture.)
5 out of 25 are obviously bigger and badder versions of cards from the basic set. (City, Expand, Goons, Grand Market, King's Court; plus honorable mention to Platinum and Colony.)

Cornucopia:
5 out of 13 interact in a special way with having a variety of cards. (Fairgrounds, Harvest, Horn of Plenty, Hunting Party, Menagerie.)
2 more increase the variety of cards available in the game. (Tournament, Young Witch.)

Hinterlands:
9 out of 26 do something special when you buy or gain them. (Border Village, Cache, Embassy, Farmland, Ill-Gotten Gains, Inn, Mandarin, Noble Brigand, Nomad Camp.)
4 more have effects that are triggered when another card is bought or gained. (Duchess, Fool's Gold, Haggler, Trader.)

So obviously Alchemy has the highest percentage of cards that are on-theme in some way, by virtue of the very large number of Potion cards; but its structural theme of Actions is a fairly small subset of the expansion. Prosperity has multiple quasi-related themes, and 17 out of its 25 Kingdom cards participate in at least one of them. Seaside's "next-turn" theme has the highest percentage for a single identifiable theme other than Potions, with 15 out of 26 cards.

Finally, Intrigue and Hinterlands both have a subtheme of Kingdom cards which are or interact in a special way with Victory cards. (Baron, Duke, Great Hall, Harem, Nobles, Scout; Crossroads, Duchess, Farmland, Fool's Gold, Silk Road, Tunnel.) Since they both fit this theme to the same extent, you can't really count it as a specific expansion theme for either of them; but it is striking.

EDIT: Let's add Dark Ages!
7.1 out of 35 Kingdom cards do something when trashed. (Catacombs, Cultist, Feodum, Fortress, Hunting Grounds, Rats, Sir Vander, Squire; plus Overgrown Estate.)
13 out of 35 trash other cards. (Altar, Count, Counterfeit, Death Cart, Forager, Graverobber, Hermit, Junk Dealer, Knights, Procession, Rats, Rebuild, Rogue; plus Mercenary.)
4 out of 35 trash themselves. (Hermit, Knights, Pillage, Urchin; plus Hovel.)
4 out of 35 interact with the trash or trashing in other ways. (Forager, Graverobber, Market Square, Rogue.)

144

Variants and Fan Cards / Hidden Village: an after-the-fact village

« on: February 21, 2012, 02:54:34 am »

Picking this up from a discussion in an unrelated thread, here's my idea for an after-the-fact village:

Hidden Village
$4: Action-Reaction
+1 card
+1 action
----------
During your Action phase, if you have 0 actions remaining, you may reveal this from your hand and play it.

(Thanks to Robz888 for thinking of the name "Hidden Village".)

The idea is that playing a terminal draw action and then revealing Hidden Village has the same effect as playing Village and then your Smithy (or whatever), but Hidden Village is easier to use because you're more likely to have it in your hand when you need it. Pst suggests a variety of other minor ways it may be more useful than regular Village, which seems to justify the $4 price point; but it's not strictly better, so a $3 price could be justifiable too.

145

Dominion General Discussion / Pivoting out of Fool's Gold?

« on: February 11, 2012, 02:08:56 pm »

So I played a game with Nomad Camp / Fool's Gold, but no trashing or Warehouse-style filtering or whatever. In a situation like that, I feel like you have to buy Fool's Gold, since if your opponent gets all ten they'll probably dominate and can do it pretty fast; but a 5/5 Fool's Gold split (which is what we got) leaves neither deck with enough to be able to line them up reliably. So—once the Fool's Gold stack is empty, you've got a pretty weak deck. I spent a while not buying Silver after that, since I didn't want to further reduce the probability of my Fool's Golds lining up, but should I have given it up as a lost cause and started buying Silver immediately to pivot into, say, an Oracle/Big-Money deck? (Actually, what I probably should have pivoted into was Nomad Camp / Silk Road, but that won't always be on the board.)

This is actually an actual example of the Prisoner's Dilemma in Dominion: if neither of us buys Fool's Gold, we'll both have better decks than if both of us buy Fool's Gold; but if one buys Fool's Gold and the other doesn't it's very powerful. Or am I wrong about the value of even ten Fool's Golds in an untrimmed deck?

146

Game Reports / Fun Inn tricks

« on: January 24, 2012, 08:26:44 pm »

<a href="http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201201/24/game-20120124-172239-ebfe1b22.html">For the annals of fun Inn tricks</a> to perform at the bottom of a shuffle:

— AJD's turn 10 —
AJD plays [a bunch of Actions that add up to $8 and some +buys]
AJD plays a University.
... getting +2 actions.
... gaining a Treasure Map.
AJD plays 2 Coppers.
AJD buys a Treasure Map.
AJD buys an Inn.
... shuffling 2 cards into the draw pile.
(AJD reshuffles.)
(AJD draws: 2 Treasure Maps, a Festival, a Gold, and a Silver.)

147

Variants and Fan Cards / Copper-scaled victory

« on: January 07, 2012, 02:22:59 am »

Okay, so there's Vineyard (Action-scaled Victory) and Silk Road (Victory-scaled Victory). Occasionally in this forum people suggest a Treasure-scaled Victory card, and the answer is usually that that wouldn't be interestingly different from a Province game, since getting as many Treasure cards as possible seems to enable Province acquisition pretty well already.

But: could a Copper-scaled Victory card be feasible?

There are two different ways to do it, I guess. One is to make it like Silk Road and Gardens, and be fairly easy to acquire with a deck full of Copper and green:

$4
Worth 1 VP for every 3 Coppers in your deck

...In which case you'd rush them while trying to get as much Copper as possible, not too different from the way you build a Gardens deck. This is probably overpowered since you can grow its value a lot faster than Gardens, although you have to sidetrack yourself from Copper-gaining in order to end the game on piles.

The other possibility strikes me as more interesting, but conceivably also broken in some way:

$6
Worth 1 VP for every 2 Coppers in your deck

This version introduces some tension: You want a lot of Copper in order to boost their value, but flooding your deck with Copper actually makes this card harder to buy (unlike the $4 version), so you have to thread the needle of boosting your Copper density, but not so fast as to make the $6 victory card unaffordable.

Thoughts?

148

Dominion General Discussion / Quadratic cards

« on: December 26, 2011, 03:44:53 am »

So, the typical Dominion card, if you play n copies of it, you get its benefit n times. Monument is a good example. Play one Monument, get $2 and 1 VP; play two, get $4 and 2 VP; and so on.

Some cards have diminishing returns from multiple copies. With Margrave, each one you play gives you +3 cards and +1 buy, but while the first one you play attacks your opponents, the additional copies actually on average help them. So the benefit of playing n Margraves is less than n times the benefit of playing one Margrave.

But a few cards have benefits that not only increase if you play multiple copies of them, but increase quadratically. A couple of these are obvious and fairly well-known:

• If you play one Goons, you can get 2 VP if you use both your buys. If you play two Goons, you can get 6 VP. If you play n Goons, then if you use all your buys you get n² + Bn VP, where B is the number of buys you have from other sources than Goons.
• If you play one Bridge, then if you use both your buys your total purchasing power increases by $3 in face value. (I.e., you get +$1, buy one card at a $1 discount, and buy a second card at a $1 discount.) But if you play n Bridges, your face-value purchase power increases by n² + (B+1)n coins.

These are quadratic cards because they give you both an extra buy and some other bonus that operates on a per-buy basis. Thus playing more of them both increases the number of times you get the bonus and the amount each instance of the bonus is worth.

A less obvious quadratic card is Bank: playing n Banks gives you n²/2 + (T+1/2)n coins. This one is less useful because T is usually substantially larger than n, whereas for Goons and Bridge B is usually 1. But it's quadratic for the same reason: it both puts a Treasure into play and gives you a per-Treasure bonus.

What other cards have quadratically increasing effects?

149

Game Reports / Missed opportunity for double-Outpost?

« on: December 25, 2011, 04:38:23 pm »

So I just played this nifty game where the key cards were Minion, Scheme, and Outpost:

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201112/25/game-20111225-131150-9dabbf62.html

It went about as you might expect with those three cards; play a basic Minion strategy and then use Scheme to topdeck a bunch of Minions for your Outpost turn. I think the reason I won is because after the Minions ran out I used a couple of $5 buys on Treasuries, whereas my opponent got a Margrave; cantrip money beats terminal +cards in a Minion game with no villages.

But it occurred to me near the end of the game—could this possibly be a rare case where double-Outpost has a chance at success? Ordinarily, obviously, you don't want to double-Outpost because that leaves you with not only three-card bonus turns but also three-card regular turns. But maybe the combination of Scheme and Minion makes it worth it? To wit:

Ordinarily Scheme's not great in Minion games because whatever cards you top-deck your opponent will just discard. Outpost mitigates that, since you get a free turn in between when your opponent doesn't have a chance to attack you. But having a three-card Outpost hand makes you immune to Minion even if it's not a bonus Outpost turn! So, you play Outpost on an Outpost turn, use Scheme to top-deck whatever you want, and then you have your three-Minion hand (or whatever) set up for next turn and your opponent can't do anything about it. Three actions of your choice is probably better than four cards at random, which is what you'd have without double-Outpost.

Does this have a chance of success, or am I overthinking it? Obviously having no villages makes it harder to pull off anyway, since you can't play your Outpost and then keep fishing for Minions and Schemes afterward.

150

Dominion General Discussion / Trader/Steward opening

« on: December 14, 2011, 11:07:52 pm »

Just wanted to comment on a cool synergy I noticed in a game I just played. My opponent had a 2/5 opening with Witch on the board, so I opened Trader/Steward for defense and trashing. Ordinarily I don't like to open two terminals in case they collide—and in this case indeed they did collide, but this is an okay terminal clash. Ordinarily a Turn 3 where you use Steward to trash is more or less shot as far as buying is concerned, but in this case I was able to trash two cards and then buy a copper and Trader it for a silver. So Trader/Steward made for a pretty nice opening (well, especially when my opponent's first Witch play matched with my Trader in hand as well).