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176

Rules Questions / Re: Enchantress on a Ghosted Enchantress

« on: February 09, 2018, 01:02:24 am »

The part below the line isn't the "instructions" referred to by Enchantress. There's no more in-depth answer.

I meant more why the part below the line doesn't count as instructions. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy that I get VP for Groundskeeper despite the attack, but I don't exactly understand why. I'm guessing it's the same reason that Throne Rooms don't affect anything below the line?

It's not that the text below the line doesn't count as instructions. It's that the text below the line represents instructions to be followed at a time other than playing the card. The rulebook for the 2nd edition of the base set clearly says this.

Enchantress talks about doing something else instead of following a card's instructions when the card is played. It says absolutely nothing about following (or not following) instructions on the card in any other situation, so Enchantress doesn't affect the functionality of the other instructions whatsoever.

177

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: January 08, 2018, 11:10:17 pm »

Will you or have you ever considered putting a question mark or exclamation point in any card-shape-thing text? If so, what would it take?

178

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Christmas Kingdoms 2017

« on: December 26, 2017, 07:22:56 pm »

Speaking of Masquerade, does your relative sit to your left?

179

Rules Questions / Re: Pay order mechanics

« on: December 26, 2017, 07:10:01 pm »

Your example doesn't work...

You're right; my example didn't quite do what I wanted. Your fix does.

It's just that all other abilities given on cards have a timing for when they kick in, so this kind of ability would be unique in that sense.

I consider Gardens, for instance, to have an ongoing effect that's always on. But I know we've disagreed in the past about what could/should be described as an ongoing effect.

If it ever matters, we'll find out at that point!

Indeed!

180

Rules Questions / Re: Pay order mechanics

« on: December 26, 2017, 04:09:12 pm »

I think "would-gain" actually is the correct timing of Nomad Camp and Ghost Town now. They modify the upcoming gain, changing it so that you gain to your deck/hand, but only if you were already gaining to your discard pile, exactly as they say. So these abilities could be ordered with other would-gain abilities like Trader and Possession; it's just that it doesn't make any difference.

Based on its phrasing and on Donald's description (quoted below), I was interpreting "is gained to" as an always-on effect that continually modifies the card's "preferred" gain destination, meaning the effect never needs to trigger at all, and there is no "timing" to speak of. (So if there were an effect that said, "When you would gain a card to your hand, gain a Gold instead," you couldn't reorder that with Ghost Town's effect to decide between gaining it and Gold; you'd just be stuck gaining the Gold.)

(Contrast Champion, which could have just said "you're unaffected by attacks played by other players" and had it be an always-on thing, but instead phrases it as a triggered thing. So if there were an effect that said, "When another player plays an attack, if you're unaffected by it, gain a Gold," you could order the effects so you effectively choose whether to gain a Gold.)

Nomad Camp and Ghost Town specify a not-usual gain-destination.

Cobbler and Armory over the gain-destination of a card and put it somewhere else.

181

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Christmas Kingdoms 2017

« on: December 26, 2017, 03:32:26 pm »

We would need a clarification on what happens if Relatives play Visit.

"If it's not their turn" is supposed to clarify that.

Ah, but when you're taking your relative's turn for them, shouldn't the sense of "you" actually be your relative? (I mean, when it talks about "your hand," it's really talking about their hand.) So playing Visit should have your relative's relative (presumably you, if the symmetric property of relatedness holds) take an extra turn. So infinite turns!

182

Rules Questions / Re: Pay order mechanics

« on: December 26, 2017, 03:01:36 pm »

Thats why i asked if i try buying GM with debt tokens to take the debt and pay it off with copper in play, and buy GM later. (Without copper in play)
Did i get it right, that we pay coins and potion *before* buying and *debt* after?

It is an illegal move to buy a Grand Market while Copper is in play. You can't even "try and fail." It would be like trying to buy a $6 Grand Market when you only have $3; it's just not something you're ever allowed to do or even attempt to do. So, no, you can't attempt to buy Grand Market with Copper in play just because you want to get the debt for some reason.

One of the "when you buy" effects that always triggers is "gain that card you pointed at".

No, gaining the card is not a when-buy effect, at least not what is normally referred to by that term. It doesn't have the same timing as things that happen "when you buy X"; it always occurs after all those effects. (I suppose you could think of it the one and only "after-buy" effect, though.)

So, correct me, if i'm wrong, each time i play a treasure in buy phase, i check things i can and cannot buy, after i finished playing treasures i choose something to buy from thing i can buy, then coins and potion gets substracted from my count, then i trigger on-buys and everything goes after?

You "check" at all moments the game allows you to buy something (i.e. when it's during your buy phase and you have buys remaining (or when something else like Black Market tells you to buy something) and don't have any debt); in practice, you would wait until you'd played all treasures you were planning to before checking, but you could examine your options after each treasure you play, sure. At the moment you check, in addition to the requirements of the card needing to exist as the top card of a supply pile (or be allowed by Black Market), and you needing to have enough coins and potions to afford its cost, there may be any number of effects (Grand Market, Contraband, Mission, all "once-per-turn" events, Deluded...) that make a certain choice illegal.

When you make a (legal) choice of a thing to buy, you lose the +buy, the coins, and the potions, and you take the debt tokens, all according to the card's cost. (Losing the +buy is actually slightly different from those other things; the others happen any time you buy a card, but losing the +buy is specifically part of normal buying during the buy phase and doesn't occur when buying from Black Market.)

(If the thing you bought was an event, then its effect occurs here. The rest applies only to buying cards.)

Then you trigger "when-buy" effects. (Tax's debt-taking happens here, in contrast to the debt-taking that happens when you buy a card with debt cost.)

Then you would gain a card with the same name that the card you bought had at the time you bought it. (That convolution is required because the when-buy effects may have moved the exact card (see Talisman), so it might end up that you would gain a different individual card than the one you bought. And it may be determined that there is no card that you would gain at this point, like if you bought Sir Martin with Talisman out, in which case no "would-gain" effects would occur here.) Any "would-gain" effects happen here; those include effects on Trader and Possession (but does not include cards like Nomad Camp and Ghost Town stating that they are gained to alternate locations... those just modify how the gain occurs when the gain instruction does not specify a destination, and they cannot be reordered like when-gain effects). If a would-gain effect causes something to happen "instead" of the gain, then the next paragraph gets skipped.

Finally, you gain the card it was determined that you "would gain" in the last paragraph. Again, if a would-gain caused something else to happen instead, you skip this part.

Then "when-gain" effects happen.

183

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: December 22, 2017, 11:37:43 pm »

Yeah, I tried to reproduce the Duplicate bug, but I can't figure out what happened.  I swear it happened and I have no idea how or why.

I guess they'll have to mark it as "Cannot Duplicate" in their issue-tracking system.

184

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Avoiding 3-pile wins -- is that a thing?

« on: December 18, 2017, 05:40:09 pm »

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=9952.0

(I noticed something while reading that ancient thread, and I don't want to bump it, so I'll just post this stupid conspiracy theory joke here):


Can this be a coincidence...?

If there were an attack card that gave someone a curse every time they bought something during their turn, I would be satisfied.

Release: April 2015

Last Active: April 14, 2015, 07:08:27 pm

... or did he leave after finally being satisfied that there was a way to properly defend against premature three-piling?

185

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 13, 2017, 02:45:11 pm »

How come many apparently simple potential card names haven't been used yet, when so many more obscure words and phrases have seen the light of day?

Looking back at the outtakes there are a bunch of names like Cavalry, Servant, Battlements, Barbarian, Butler, Poison, Academy, etc. which you were once considering.

Also, statues have been mentioned in the intro text for two expansions now, but we still don't have a Statue, let alone one that comes to life. (-8

The goal is never "make sure I get these simple potential card names used." The goal is always to have names that fit the cards and expansion well. So I mean. There's no mystery here.

As noted Guardian is a statue that comes to life.

But it's not made of baklava, which is only slightly disappointing.

??

I will explain the joke by directing you to the flavor text for Prosperity.

186

Rules Questions / Re: Smugglers / Changeling targeting a card not available any more

« on: December 13, 2017, 01:52:47 pm »

Hmm, maybe this is a way to make it work: The card you pick has to be one that was gained, i.e. based on the name of a gained card. But the copy of that card has to cost $6 or less. So...

Gain a copy of [a card that the player to your right gained on their last turn] costing up to $6.

Yup, that's where I have my mental parentheses.

187

Rules Questions / Re: Smugglers / Changeling targeting a card not available any more

« on: December 13, 2017, 10:29:28 am »

It must be more like you're picking a memory of a card they gained at the time they gained it. Similar to what Treasure Map and Ritual look at.

How does the same issue arise with Treasure Map and Ritual?

Play BoM as Treasure Map; trash it and trash a "real" Treasure Map from your hand. You get four Golds because, regardless of what one of those cards looks like now (a BoM), it was a Treasure Map at the time you trashed it, and Treasure map is checking the memory of what the cards were at the time you trashed them.

Inherit Village. Play Quarry; your Estates cost $0. Buy Ritual, trashing your $0 Estate. The Estate stops being yours, so it stops being an action, so it changes to costing $2. But Ritual says "per $1 it cost" (past tense), so it's been ruled that Ritual checks the memory of what the card looked like at the time you trashed it. You get 0VP instead of 2VP.

These examples are in contrast to how everything else works in Dominion: you check what the card looks like right now; you don't care what it looked like at the moment you trashed it or whatever. So, in the case for Ritual above, if you had instead Villa'd back and trashed the Estate with Remodel (which uses present tense), it wouldn't care that what you trashed used to cost $0; the card you trashed now costs $2, so you can turn it into a $4.

(The fact that the rules work as described in the previous paragraph is my Dominion pet peeve. Nothing's broken yet, but it seems liable to create situations that lead to, as you called them, unresolvable tracking issues.)

EDIT:
Some trivia: M:tG has a concept of looking at the "memory" of an object; it's called "last known information." I think I read in an interview somewhere that Donald was somehow the one who proposed that idea.

188

Rules Questions / Re: Smugglers / Changeling targeting a card not available any more

« on: December 12, 2017, 11:32:59 am »

The tricky part is that they say "a copy of a card..." and the ruling is that what you are picking is the "a card" not the "a copy." You can pick the card even though the copy isn't available.

Of course, you can't really be picking an actual card they gained, not as it currently exists. If they gained a BoM and played it later that turn as Caravan, then (I presume) you can't gain Caravan even though the card they gained happens to currently be a Caravan. (And, in general, you have no way of knowing what the card they gained currently even looks like.)

It must be more like you're picking a memory of a card they gained at the time they gained it. Similar to what Treasure Map and Ritual look at.

189

Rules Questions / Re: Charm + Inn

« on: December 11, 2017, 09:15:08 pm »

This thread sounds like it should be about a brand of toilet paper.

190

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New German Promo 'Abbruch'

« on: December 09, 2017, 12:49:22 pm »

If you can write such an extension, you should get in touch with AI developers, I hear they are stuck with NLP algorithms :p

Having an AI search through these jokes would raise ethical concerns. The poor machine.

The Dutch translation of mining village, when pronounced, is a homonym for 'my village'.
Nearly every time someone plays a mining village someone will ask 'whose village'?

Dutch mining village reskin please.

Every year at my wife's family reunion, we play Bingo. Every time B4 is called out, the older members shout out "Before what?"

Naturally, this has led the sarcastic younger members to start doing it for everything except B4, as in "B6 what?", etc. The sarcastic response was funny for a while, but now it's just as stale as the B4 thing. As is always the case with a sarcasm arms race, it got ramped up to such absurd levels that now some people do it for every letter/number, like "I18 what?"

As if Bingo wasn't a bad enough game already...

"You sunk my Battleship^®!"

EDIT: In reference to the first part of this:

191

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Empires cards I still don't get

« on: December 09, 2017, 11:31:36 am »

But how much debt is the 'shuffle up to 5 cards from your discard pile into your deck' worth? How much of the $3 debt you get can you pay off with those five shuffled cards?

(Annex has you pick up to five cards to leave in your discard pile. And shuffle the rest into your deck. You mentioned Dutch cards in another thread, so I'm wondering if there's a mistranslation.)

192

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New German Promo 'Abbruch'

« on: December 08, 2017, 09:55:07 am »

If anybody were to make a browser extension that removes these puns, I'd like to know what your solution to the Scunthorpe Problem is

Yeah, that might undermine attempts to naively search for a list of predetermined words. There's a potential minefield of issues to avoid, so you'd probably have to examine a lot of cases and hope for that to illumine some of the imminent pitfalls; then use that data to find the preeminent solution. A determined programmer could get it done without experiencing too much gloominess, but I wouldn't want to be the nominee.

193

Dominion General Discussion / Re: if you think about it

« on: December 05, 2017, 02:32:37 am »

A working Vassal is like a gimped Grand Market where a working Conclave is like a gimped Festival. A failing Vassal is a bit like a Duchess while a failing Conclave is something similar to a Silver. Also, you know which way Conclave is going to work before you play it, but Vassal is often a surprise.

194

Rules Questions / Re: Trashing several cards with Monastery

« on: December 03, 2017, 07:29:31 pm »

Should the log also show all discarded cards of my opponent then? I thought that it was fine to discard down to 3 and only show one card (new top of discard pile) to my opponent, if I don't want to trigger reactions.

From a post in a different thread (the bolding is mine (Mine is in Prosperity)):

I'd rather not have a special ruling and with no special ruling and nothing in the rulebooks, "discard down to 3" sounds to me like I keep discarding until I have 3 (or fewer dammit). However you don't need to reveal the cards below the top one because somehow the rulebook says this.

I've taken that ruling to mean you actually get to discard the cards in batches of 1–X where X is the maximum you could (must) still discard. So you can dump them all at once and reveal only the top one if there's nothing tricky going on. But you could also do it in batches of 1 and show them everything if you wanted to. Or something.

(Or else you're allowed to hide your discard pile while you discard things one by one, but I think it was ruled elsewhere that letting you hide your piles from your opponent would be a bad idea.)

When applied to Monastery, the grouping doesn't matter for information purposes (everyone gets to see all the cards that end up in the trash no matter how you do it), but Catacombs and other problem cards must be the last in a batch. So, I think, once you've included a Catacombs in the cards you've selected to trash with Monastery, instead of letting you add more cards to the selection, it should somehow say, "Hey, before you select more cards, let's go ahead and submit this batch now so we can handle tricky stuff. It's ok; you'll get to come back and pick the rest in a sec." Of course, it should still let you remove cards from the selection (EDIT: actually, I guess it doesn't let you remove things now, but just lets you undo the entire selection). And if you remove the Catacombs, it should stop telling you you can't select more right now. And once you do submit a batch with a Catacombs, the Catacombs should always be implicitly processed last because clearly the player didn't select any new cards after that one.

The thing I don't like about Donald's suggestion of "select a bunch and then if something triggers, throw out all the other choices" is that someone who doesn't care too much about all of this is going to try to trash a Catacombs and some Coppers and then they'll be like, "Man, this game is broken; I told it to trash these Coppers and here they still are." It's best not to even let the player think they can tell the game to do something if that thing is not going to end up working.

195

Rules Questions / Re: Trashing several cards with Monastery

« on: December 02, 2017, 03:39:14 pm »

It seems like this situation is similar to discarding down to X, where you should technically discard one at a time, (so Tunnel/Watchtower), but I know that the online Militia normally has you discard multiple cards at once.

So how does the game handle Militia with Tunnel/Watchtower? For the sake of consistency, however it handles that might also be generally how it should handle Monastery.

It would be vice-versa - for the sake of consistency, Militia / Tunnel could be changed to match this. Monastery / Overgrown Estate is an interaction that makes us need Monastery to work some way that handles it; I don't think Militia / Tunnel has such an case, which is why it hasn't been an issue. It hypothetically could though.

I thought Militia+Tunnel+Watchtower was the case where it mattered.  You have to be able to discard Tunnel for Gold, reveal Watchtower on the Gold, then still be able to discard that Watchtower. So it needs to accommodate one-at-a-time discarding.

Note that I don't really play online, so I really have no idea how that interaction gets handled currently. Maybe it's not being handled, in which case I agree: discard-down-to should probably end up matching whatever gets done here.

196

Rules Questions / Re: Trashing several cards with Monastery

« on: December 02, 2017, 11:31:58 am »

It seems like this situation is similar to discarding down to X, where you should technically discard one at a time, (so Tunnel/Watchtower), but I know that the online Militia normally has you discard multiple cards at once.

So how does the game handle Militia with Tunnel/Watchtower? For the sake of consistency, however it handles that might also be generally how it should handle Monastery.

197

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Dominion Engine Alignment Chart

« on: November 30, 2017, 09:48:52 am »

Where was that discussion with the user arguing that everyone used the term "engine" wrong based on what other board games refer to as "engine"?

In the "Dominion 101: What is an Engine?" article.

198

Dominion Articles / Re: Pre-Game Analysis

« on: November 27, 2017, 01:49:17 pm »

Finally, don’t be afraid to change gears mid game.

That, in its generality, is some really bad advice.

Well, it probably depends on what you want to change your Gears into.

199

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 22, 2017, 06:22:14 pm »

Talking about nonsense, you wrote stuff like: "With Haunted Woods, you get +3 cards at the beginning of the turn, and then you later pay the cost of -1 card -1 action."

I remember, when he said that, I thought it was really insightful and highlighted the distinction between Smithy and (the relevant parts of) Haunted Woods.

Having two Haunted Woodses and playing them on alternating turns is a lot like having one Smithy and playing it every turn. Either way, you pay -1 Card and -1 Action each turn, and you get +3 Cards per turn. But with the Smithy, you have to pay the cost before you get the benefit, and with the Haunted Woodses, you get the benefit upfront and get to pay the cost later on. You get to use the benefit to make sure you're able to pay the cost.

Sure, the cost on a turn is not actually connected to the benefit you got earlier that turn. And if you ever fail to play a Haunted Woods on a turn, the analogy falls apart. So it's not literally true. But it's a great way to describe what's happening, and I certainly wouldn't call it nonsense.

200

Dominion: Nocturne Previews / Re: Nocturne Initial Impressions

« on: November 18, 2017, 02:09:24 pm »

There's an interesting subtheme of "can't play the same card twice", isn't there? Imp, Necromancer, and now Conclave.

Well, Necromancer isn't really like the other two; it doesn't stop you from playing a copy of a card you've already played this turn.  Necromancer is just the same "can't play an individual card more than once per turn" that's been in the game all along. Like, playing an individual Village and moving it into play "uses it up" and, barring the exceptions I don't need to list, you don't get to play it a second time this turn. Necromancer turning cards face down is just its version of "using up" the cards so you can't play them a second time, but it accomplishes it without moving the card into play.

EDIT: Or were you just saying that Necromancer plays nicely with Imp and Conclave because playing a card with Necromancer doesn't stop you from playing a copy of that card with one of those two?

EDIT2: Actually, I'd say the subtheme is more like "cards in play matter." A lot of Night cards either care about or affect cards in play (e.g. Changeling, Raider, Crypt). Then there are Imp and Conclave. And Tormentor. Idol. Leprechaun and Magic Lamp.