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1
Game Reports / Figuring out the golden deck here
« on: January 10, 2018, 08:59:26 am »
Today I played a very interesting game against Angalagon91. Unfortunately, he had to leave and the game was really going to be a slow one, but I'd have loved to play it out.
The game number is 10475297. Unfortunately my subscription has run out so I cannot load it, but going by memory:



Not entirely sure about mine, but it's irrelevant.

We both stumbled a lot in the beginning, he tried to curse me with IGG-Catapult (which is definitely inefficient thanks to Donate) and I bought cards a bit randomly before spotting the triple Goons golden deck. (Donating each turn, and ending the game on Estate, Curse and Chapel/Beggar)
As I was getting ready to fire the deck, Angalagon had to leave.
Now the interesting part: the simple Dip-Goon golden deck needs your opponent to play Goons to work. So, I believe an appropriate response for Angalagon would have been to stop playing goons and switch to Wild Hunt-Money. He was ahead on points so he might have been able to put toghether the golden deck before I caught up, I'm not sure. I got ready to make the switch to WH, but I don't think it was the right move.

After the game I noticed that using Artificer, the golden deck wouldn't need the opponent's goons. So I think the deck here is 3x Goons, 2x Diplomat, 1x Artificer and a Gold which is not strictly necessary but speeds up the endgame.
Still, it was a fun board to try and figure out.

Edit: fixed IGG's image in kingdom

2
Hi there!
During the last two years I've been occasionally testing and refining a small set of fanmade card-shaped things. I never felt confident enough to post them all here, partly because they are still quite fluid in state.
Anyway, since some of the names (and mechanics, kinda) have been taken by nocturne, I guess I'll post them in their current state, before I figure out what to do with them. We haven't done any work on them in the last two months anyway. :/
I'll appreciate all criticism you will fire on them.
Some of these are quite "unconventional", but generally they stayed because we enjoyed them.
The flavor is in general wildlands/farmlands/vikings, and there is no mechanical theme except that I generally like cards that make decks more fluid, changing not only by accretion but also by replacement, like Procession, Swindler and Saboteur tend to do.

Hunter started as a "fix" to Saboteur before second edition existed. Then a couple others ended up being some sort of Woodcutter, Harvest, and Coppersmith variants, even though it wasn't the original intent.


The totems work like heirlooms, replacing one copper. At the start of the game each player receives one each of the three totems, secretly chooses one and returns the others face-down to the box. The chosen totem replaces a starting Copper.
Courage got a buff (there used to be no discard-for-benefit clause), and is still untested in its current form. I predict it'll still be the most situational of the bunch.
Patience might be a bit too good too often. Check what it does to Provinces.
We don't have rules for including them. They used to be linked to Shaman (just like heirlooms do, funnily) but Shaman was terrible and we don't use it any more. Totems are fun and we use them.


Hunter is the Sab replacement. Doesn't stack, and being a cantrip fits more easily into a deck. It wants to keep the fun decision of "what do I want to replace my card with". It created messy tracking issues with Durations (eg itself), so we simply decided that those are immune.


Raiders' Village is the dreaded Mirror Reaction, except that it works. Not very often relevant, but I'm fine with that on a village.


Rush used to say "up to 4$". Then, "up to 5". Then we decided that we just wanted to Rush University in one game, and the limit was lifted altogether.


Abbey has been around, like, forever.


This one has been tested quite a lot and we're still struggling to find the right format. It's a cute "friendly player interaction" one, except having you try and burn as many fields as possible after your turn. We use Plow tiles from Agricola for this one, and in the current version they are limited to 5 or 6.


Rare Spices is the card introducing drugs to Dominion. It's weak, but it makes you build fun and unique decks. We might have to add a +Buy here. It has one flavourful combo with Herbalist.


Shepherd introduces sex to Dominion! It started as two different cards: a coppersmith variant for +Cards and a Workshop variant. It's not amazing but it's fun to build draw engines out of it. I'm considering swapping its price with Farmer.


Seer is a cute early game junker for 4$, trying to have the victims make some painful decisions like Torturer does.


Slavery and Revolt is a two-face Event. I'm fine with Slavery, but Revolt will change sooner or later.


Ascend is still very experimental. Kinda replaced by Dominate, too.


Tulip Field was inspired by a thread by someone else here in the subforum. It was then adjusted to the version you see, which was pretty weak. The last games we played it as "Trash this or an Estate from the Supply..." and that was fine, and probably needed to keep Tulips vaguely competitive with pretty much any other +Buy.


Druid is sorta redundant now, what with official Druid, Boons, and Necromancer. Still, it's a very fun card, if quite whacky and a tad random. My little sister had asked for a "common deck" and that's what I came up with.

3
...not to mention validity.  ;D

I compiled these charts for fun a few months ago. Yesterday I was cleaning my desktop and found it and they were an interesting read so I updated them and thought maybe they'll be interesting to you too.
I believe I started working on this as a response to Dingan's excellent post: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=15011.msg582479#msg582479. The idea is the same (describe card distribution over time), but I'm analyzing it cumulatively instead of expansion-by-expansion.
I got somewhat carried over and I described a few quite hard-to-define cathegories (eg: remodelers, virtual Buy, Gainers...), so the data carry a big dose of subjectivity. But we're here for fun, so I hope you don't mind. I'll try to post the file so that you can have your own subjective version too.
Split piles are considered singularily, Prizes are ignored, upgraded cards (travellers, Urchin and so on) are counted as one card.
All graphs are cumulative, i.e. they describe how the total base of cards has changed over time. With the second edition, the 12 removed cards are thrown out of the analysis.
On the x axis are expansions, and promos released near them.

So, let me show you how I waste my time!

Here is the obvious one. Note that Actions are out of scale, I had to divide them by ten to make you see the interesting stuff happening.
You can clearly see alt-treasure and alt-vp being geared up in their respective expansions, and then Victory declining slightly as time goes by (but Landmarks and vp token cards are not considered), while treasures staying constant after Prosperity.
Donald has said several times that he had to lower the percentage of attacks in each set to cater to his fans, and we see the effects here. I didn't do a "nonAttack interaction" line but it would be interesting.


Here you can see the cards divided by cost. The "Other" cathegory is essentially made up of Potions, Debt, and Peddler. I translated them to coins to have a cleaner graph:

We can see how ers cards are steadily taking over the once much more common ers.
The other three lines have been very constant since Prosperity, after some turbulence due to Seaside and Intrigue's cheapness that was then balanced by Prosperity's spendiness. (in this chart Alchemy also boosts -costers at the expense of -costers due to how I translated potion)

Now, let's delve into the subjective charts:

Thinners. I divided them into mass thinners (can do 2 or more cards at once), single thinners, and remodels (can't usually trash without gaining). I put Trader as remodel and sentry as single. Events are counted as things. Total is the sum of all three groups.
Anyway, Total has gone somewhat up, and we're glad for that because thinners are cool.
After an early disappearance, Remodelers went back to being a common card paradigm, wich is nice.


This is probably my favorite chart.
I divided cards into terminals and villages (the uncounted cathegory being nonterminal actions, treasures, and victory). Some cards are only sometimes terminal (like Conspirator, Ironworks, or Nobles), and some are villages with significant twists (like Cotr, Throne Room, or Nobles). These make up the dotted lines.
Anyway, wow. 68% to 45% is a huge fall.
And on the subject of terminality:

Reliable Lab variants are cards that you can use to draw in most games. Unreliable Lab variants include Menagerie (*dodges rotten tomatoes*), Herald, Magpie, Vagrant, you get the general idea.
Menagerie should probably be reliable, and maybe Page/Warrior too, but that's what I did 6 months ago.
Anyway, look at all that terminal drawness drowning in nonterminalness. It seems that drawing one's deck has become much more about adapting to the perks of the Lab of the day than about lining up a Village and a Smithy.

A flexible gainer is something that lets you choose what you gain. Limited gainers are stuff that goes "gain a Gold", "gain a Magpie", "gain one of the trashed cards", you know who I'm referring to.
True +Buy says +Buy, virtual +Buy gives you cards according to how much money you can field, like Haggler, or it gives you extra turns to buy more cards using the money you (or someone else) can field, like Outpost. Black market and Ball also ended up here.
This one's quite messy.


Attacks.
I went with:
Discard attacks hurt the opponent's economy next turn, like Militia, Minion and Bridge troll (I bet you didn't expect that)
Topdecking attacks hurt the opponent's turn after the next, or their ability to draw useful cards next turn, like Rabble, Relic, and Spy.
Junking attacks and Trashing attacks are exactly what you expect.
Stuff like Torturer, Sea Hag and Ghost Ship got several classes, and also the Combined class.
Junkers got a big boost in the first expansions, and then kept their position as the most common attacks out there. Topdeckers and Trashers seem to be in decline, the latter of which is a shame if you ask me. Sab and Spy leaving unreplaced made a significant dent in the respective populations.


And lastly, for something a bit different, I wondered about power level in expansions.

I chose the quartile because I felt that that's where the set-definers started for most cost levels.
Unfortunately, I didn't think about finding over-/underrepresentation. I'll just say that Cornucopia's share is pretty impressive. Base seems to be suffering a bit, and Adventure and Dark Ages might be just benefitting from having more content than the others. Overall, the split is much more even than I expected.
Alchemy is not present because most of its cards are ranked separately.


And here is the bottom decile, which is where I felt laid the pity boundary.
Honorable mention to the absent: Dark Ages, Guilds, and Adventures, which interestingly are the most recent expansions.
Base takes a quarter of the pie, the other early expansions split the rest quite evenly. Which is surprising, I was expecting to see Intrigue dominate a bit more.
Removed cards make up for about a third of the cards, which means that we can look forward to a bottom decile smaller by 33%, how great is that!  ;D ;D ;D

So, I hope this was interesting. Thanks for your attention.

No, I wasn't serious about the decile.


Edit: trying to attach the file. If you have suggestions for stuff to plot, I can try and make it happen if it's reasonably simple.

Edit2: New file with expansions in the correct order!

4
Variants and Fan Cards / Turning Champion upside-down
« on: September 20, 2016, 11:55:00 am »
I've now played at least a couple hundred games with Adventures. I like the page line. I've yet to witness a game where "the Warrior Strategy" dominated, but I've seen several games with strong, chainable attacks (Torturer, Rabble, Witch, Giant, even Saboteur), where the game was a race to get a Champion in play and wreck havoc for as long as possible before the opponent managed to play their own Champion, or resigned. All in all, I feel Champion becomes way too good with that kind of Attacks, and it comes with a weaker version of them built-in (but I feel it's Champion's fault, not Warrior's).
It's probably important for the Page line to provide some form of defence from attacks, given the potential pains caused by Champion and Torturer together.
Here's an idea for a different, probably somewhat more balanced, Champion:

+1 Action
For the rest of the game, when you play an Attack, it doesn't affect the other players, and when you play an Action, +1 Action.
(This stays in play. This is not in the Supply.)

What do you think? Are there any changes you would make to the Page line? (I suspect a favorite is to have Warrior leave Travellers alone).
I don't own Adventures IRL, so I don't think I'll test this any time soon, I just wanted to hear what you thought.  :)

5
Introductions / A wild Accatitippi appears!
« on: September 14, 2016, 05:25:29 am »
I've never gotten around doing this, so here I come!

Hi!
I'm a male Italian medical student, 22. I study in Italy but usually spend the summers in Norway. I don't have a favorite game but some come close, Dominion being one of them. Huge Terry Pratchett fan, but I read a bit of many genres. I don't watch TV shows. My favorite flavor of Dominion is 2p, mixing all expansions available, no bans nor veto. Black Market should be unrestricted. My favorite Harry Potter character is Hermione, my favorite starter pokemon is Charmender, my overall favorite pokemon is probably Alakazam, or used to be, anyway. Mighthyena comes a close second though. My favorite shape of pasta is tagliatelle, while my favorite pålegg is makrell i tomat (mackerel in tomato sauce, to be eaten on bread). My favorite Werewolf role is Villager, I don't know how that translates into mafia (Townsperson?). Before you ask, I've found out that I cannot play mafia/WW online and pass exams at the same time, sorry. My favorite weak Dominion card is Pirate Ship. My least favorite powerful Dominion card is King's Court. I think I use way too many parentheses when I write. Accatitippi is http spelled in Italian, a residue of the time when I wanted to do programming when I grew up. I kept it because it sounds fun and anyway it has really grown on me.
So, I'm very excited of having found this forum, I hope we'll get on well.  ;)

6
Variants and Fan Cards / Pawn Shop, an event idea - is it worth making?
« on: September 11, 2016, 03:13:33 am »
Pawn Shop - 1c Event
Once per turn, choose one:
+1 Buy, trash a card from your hand, +coins equal to its cost in coins, or
+2 coins, buy a card costing more than 0 from the Trash.

This is the general idea. You may Salvage cards automagically (at a lower benefit than Salvager, no +Buy), but you offer your opponents an opportunity to buy them back first from the trash (-1 coin, not too shabby, yes I think I'll take it).
This has surely a number of issues, I've thought of some of them but I've surely missed some:
1.it becomes a free Borrow when the Trash is empty of gainable cards.
2.players may not want to use it for fear of helping the next player, or conversely the trashing part may be too dominant over the gaining part.
3.could lead to endless games with Bishop and, to a lesser extent, other vp cards.
4.obscure (to me) rule interactions

#1 could be solved by seeding the trash at the start of the game, adding some sort of IF clause or making it trash something (Silver?) from Supply on use (so that you must buy that card - bar cost reduction and weird things).
#2 is hard to see if this is real without testing
#3 I'm inclined to not worry about this too much, but again trashing a card on use could do wonders here, as you'll have a net null effect on trash size.

So yeah, this is the fix I've been thinking about:
Pawn Shop - 1c Event
Once per turn, choose one:
+1 Buy, trash a card from your hand, +coins equal to its cost in coins, or
+2 coins, trash a Silver from the Supply, if you did, buy a card costing more than 0 from the Trash.

...but this long and very obscure, and it's still a free Borrow when you've got exactly one coin.

Fun (?) interactions: buying Vineyards and Trasmutes from the trash generates one coin. Fortress is a 4$ Gold. You can't buy back lost Prizes, but you can buy back that Champion that just got Swindled.

So uh, I really like the idea in principle, but I'm not sure it's feasible and fun, so your opinions and suggestions on the matter would be of great help. :)

7
Other Games / Tropico 4 free on humble bundle till tomorrow
« on: September 08, 2016, 03:05:01 pm »
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/tropico-4-free-game

Just about what the title says. It's a great RTS (with pause mode) game, and it's good and it's fun and hey it's free.
I can't recommend it enough.

8
Goko Dominion Online / Proxying Empires stuff on MF
« on: May 25, 2016, 09:31:44 am »
Seven long Empireless months await us, but hey! If you are really impatient about trying the new stuff, you can proxy all the previewed Landmarks and a few of the vp cards and Events, with solutions of varying degrees of complexity.

Wolf Den, Keep and Fountain are the most simple - just compute the point totals at the end of the game.
Tomb and Battlefield will require you to do some bookkeeping in chat, but they are still easy peasy. :)
Dominate is also quite easy with a bit of bookkeeping. Just pay 14 for a Province and mark 9 extra vp. (it's not perfect due to stuff like Mission, Contraband, and Swamp Hag, but it's close enough)
Groundskeeper can be replaced by Baker, if you don't spend coin tokens.

We could organize some friendly games to try some of these out. I'll be available for a couple of games until 2 hours from now.  :)

9
Variants and Fan Cards / Restricting cards in Black Market
« on: May 23, 2016, 08:40:19 am »
There should be a list of banned BM cards, because this is just silly.
I don't always play physical games with Black Market...

...but when I do, I make sure the Black Market doesn't contain

Cultist
Fairgrounds
Fool's Gold
Knights
Magpie
Page
Peasant
Peddler
Port
Rats
Tournament
Transmute
Treasure Map

(This list is probably not exhaustive and will probably increase tremendously with Empires. Also, it is meaningless until I actually get a Black Market.)

I'm moving this discussion here since it's probably more appropriate.

My thoughts about a possible ban list:

Tournament in the BM can be really annoying. 100% agree on banning.

I think that the some of the worst black market offenders are vp-token cards, since they create a virtually infinite pool of vp for only one player. So I think I'd ban Goons, Monument, and Bishop. But after Empires, vp tokens might become so common in games that this won't be a problem any more, assuming it's a problem now. ;)

Attacks are really annoying when in the BM, in particular junkers if they have no relatives on the board (Witch without other cursers, Cultist without Marauder). Trashers and hand attacks are ok I think.

There's a case for banning Tactician: Tactician-BM is fun and everything, but combos involving Black Market tend to happen often due to the size of the Black market, and banning Tac would not curb it, rather make the combo more rare and availlable to everybody when it happens.

Dud cards in the BM are fine, it's not like BM needs buffing anyway. So I'd keep all the little Pages, Peddlers, Fool's Golds, Magpies, Ports, and such. I see no reason at all to ban Peasant (except rule clarity issues), since its +Buy might be what you sorely need sometimes. We find that Treasure Map is hylarious when in the Black Market.

Rats is probably ok, since it's just a cheap Junk dealer. It becomes a very different card but not a radically broken one (like Tactician arguably does). Compare with Ratcatcher and Raze, who are not mandatory trashing and are cheaper.

My list tentatively includes:
Tournament
Tactician
Cultist
Goons
Monument
Bishop

(my list is also mostly meaningless, until I get my own physical copies of Cornucopia, Prosperity and Dark Ages - I do ban Tactician)

10
Game Reports / the Mississippi Queen - a weird game
« on: May 23, 2016, 07:30:56 am »
I'd like to receive some opinions about this game. I considered posting this in the Help! board, but while I definitely would do with some help here, I think it's an interesting enough board to be here. :)

Kingdom:


Code: [Select]
Ferry, Ball, Coin of the Realm, Shanty Town, Militia, Navigator, Spy, Worker's Village, Rabble, Royal Carriage, Swamp Hag, Hireling
Log:
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160523/log.0.1464000691920.txt


Ok, so, a Swamp Hag Kingdom with no trashing, multiple buys, an Engine on board, Royal Carriage, Ball and Ferry. I'm pretty proud of the title of this thread.

Neither of us is willing to take the curses, so we do a weird game of ferrying stuff and then Balling it in. I win the Royal Carriage split 7-3, sacrificing draw, and the game punishes me by letting him have two Swampless windows to buy Provinces, while I only got one. (actually, I got another and didn't take it!)

With the three pile around the corner, I hope he'll dud next turn and buy two Provinces (and 6 Curses come for free), tieing him.
My opponent had a guaranteed 8 in next turn (9 from Swampies -1 from Ball), and my desperate hope was that he wouldn't gather the 4 coins and the buy to get the last Worker's village. As a matter of fact, he did, but didn't see the forced win, which I took one turn later. With 8 new dead cards, my deck sucked, but Swamp Hag's money was enough there.

What would you do?
Also, how would you deal with the end game? I'm pretty sure there was a better solution than mine.

I think my worst tactical error is skipping the Province on turn 13. Hireling was good because I desperately needed reliability, but those -6 points could have cost me the game. So, probably I should have Ferried the Hireling and gotten them the "usual" way, instead getting a Province there?

11
Forum Games / Let's count ourselves!
« on: May 17, 2016, 06:58:03 pm »
Counting each other didn't exactly work out as intended, so let's try out the same concept on a more limited scope.
Count how many of yourself there are. That's the number of people between the chair(s) and the keyboard, or holding the smartphone, or looking out of your eyes.
You are free to post in this thread as many times as you wish, to follow the number of you over time. You may even want to draw a nice #you/time plot.

So, let me kickstart this:
1.


"Det som du er, vær fullt og helt, og ikke stykkevis og delt."

Henrik Ibsen

12
Variants and Fan Cards / Slaves - a double-sided Event
« on: May 12, 2016, 07:40:17 am »
Lately I've been trying to find a format to make my auto-attacking event idea (Wolf Packs) work without the Seasons board.
Flipping the Event card is an idea I got yesterday, while trying to find a way to track the trigger event. The front is a Villa/Champion-ish effect which may or may not be good. (I think it is nice, but I can't exclude it might be broken)

front:
Quote
Slaves - 0$ - Event
Once per turn:
+1 Buy
+3 Actions
Return to your Action phase.

When any player gains a Province, flip this Event.

back:
Quote
Rebels - 1$ - Event
+1 Buy
At the end of every turn in which you didn't buy this, trash a card from your hand (after drawing).


So, what do you think?
Are the Events priced right? I put Slaves at 0 because it comes with the cost of suddently leaving you without villages and a deck that might not be ready to stand on its own legs, but I could see the point of adding some real cost to using it.
2$ could be too much for Rebels, so I conservatively put it at 1.
I like this Event pair, and I'm definitely going to print and test them.

13
Goko Dominion Online / Dominion Online 2p players demographics
« on: April 14, 2016, 07:55:42 am »
Some of the recent discussion on Stef and SCSN's great news thread left me wondering about what Dominion's player base looks like.
I ran some elementary analyses on the full unfiltered Isotropish leaderboard for Dominion 2.0 (as of 13th of April 2016), this means that I took into account:
- 2p games only (which may mask/underrate players who play mostly 3p+)
- Only botless games.
- Isotropish level (mu-3sigma) rather than mu, which will severely underrate players with a low volume of plays. I also compared functions of number of plays with Isotropish level (also a function of play number), so some analyses might be skewed. Also, Isotropish level is a the result of an algorythm I don't know much about, but I suspect some of the results are artifacts due to how TrueSkill works.
- Only games played since Goko 2.0 went online (around June 2015, I believe) were taken into account.
I'm no statistician, and this was the first time I used array formula in excel, so if anybody spots errrors or has suggestions, please speak up!
Anyway, to the numbers!

Since June 2015, 36296 players have played 1787686 2-player games of Dominion Online. Of these players, only 12,174 played at least 20 games, which drops to 5,892 if you set the inactivity treshold to 100 games.
Minimum level is -75, maximum is 65.
As you might expect, median and average level are very low in this population since it contains a lot of extremely-low volume players (in addition to being inexperienced ones). The mean is -22, median is -26. (incidentally, these are very similar to starting values of mu-3sigma=0-25, is that significant? Who knows.)

Trying to get more useful data out of the leaderboard, I tried to calculate the mean after filtering the values by minimum number of plays:
Treshold  Mean
20          2,57
50          8,21
100         11,98
500         18,48
The mean grows slowly even when applying quite strict filters.

Weighting the mean by number of plays, we get 13.
I believe that the most interesting parameter of this set is the median Iso level calculated on the "gameplays" population. It returns 15. This means that half of the games played on MF were played by players with a level lower than 15.
When I calculated the proportion of games played by players with level above a treshold of 30 (where I arbitrarily drew the line for "competitivish" players), I got 18%.
The player mode is an exhilarating -54, most likely due to how Trueskill makes players with very few (losing) plays converge.

I also made a couple simple distribution histograms for players, plays, and play density on Iso level:

I scaled plays number to get both histograms on the same picture.
The player distribution is frankly multimodal, with peaks at -54, -33 and 0. This is probably due to artifacts from the Trueskill algorythm (players with one or two losing games might converge here?). Anyway, the curve is quite far to the left.
The plays distribution looks nearly normal, I haven't had time to try and model it, but I might try to do that.
The big difference in the curve locations inspired me to do another histogram:

It seems that playing more dominion makes you better at it.  :o But also, it makes your rating better by lowering your sigma.
I suspect this "sigma effect" might be more pronounced around the level interval between 0 and 20, while skill matters more for higher levels. The far right region gets more erratic due to low player density.

So, conclusions.
It was fun to make this simple analysis. It seems like there's plenty of people who play a lot of 2p online dominion while not being very good at it, I guess.
I'd write more, but I really have to go.
Extra chart:

14
Variants and Fan Cards / Farming Village-inspired idea
« on: April 11, 2016, 01:05:46 pm »
Here is an idea inspired by the recent talk about how dull Farming Village is compared to pretty much any other card in Dominion - Scout at least has character, Woodcutter has nostalgia, and Chancellor has chin.
It's a sifting village, like FaV, but unlike FaV it has a very restricted set of cards it can draw.

Quote
Forest Village - 4c Action
+2 Actions

Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a card costing exactly 3c. Put that card into your hand and discard the other cards.

I've thought about several cost-target combinations, and I think cost 4-target 3 is the most interesting. C4-T4 would be hylarious (play all the villages!) but ultimately yucky, C3-T4 is cool with smithy but likely too dependent on having decent 4c actions (or 4c cards at all, for that matter), even though I liked the interaction with Potion. C6-T5 I suspect would be way too good way too often.
I like the interaction with Silver, guaranteeing you have at least one decent card to hit, giving you the option to fall back to buyless Festival in case nothing else is going on (or you can always do mandatory-Chancelling-Necropolis, if you really need one). Strong threes will of course make this card shine, in particular drawing and attacking ones. It might be too obvious of an interaction, though, but threes are generally so harmless that I hope that even the strongest combo cards won't become a dumb dominant strategy. Forest village+Oracle is a Lab-plus in two cheap pieces, but Labs alone won't bring you very far.

Woodcutters of course like themselves in Forest Villages.
(still a worse combo than Festival)
(Festival-what?)
(Festival-nothing.)

Anyhow, am I onto something, or is this too clunky?

Harvest! Harvest is more dull than Farming Village.

15
General Discussion / Favorite Random Thing Bracket - We have a winner!
« on: April 08, 2016, 06:18:11 am »
You might have noticed the recent trend of making brackets out of stuff and then voting on it. Or maybe you haven't, if you live in a deep cave or in the Random Stuff thread. Anyway, brackets.
I am more of a tier person, but I digress.

So the idea here is, I took a PRNG, drew 16 random pages from the Random Stuff threads, and included the first eligible thing I found there.
Seeding is in random order, ties will be resolved randomly.

1. Booze & donuts
2. Explaining inside jokes

3. Computer viruses
4. 7-11

5. The metric system
6. Cookie clicker

7. Poker
8. Peanut Butter

9. Goko Salvager
10. Cheese quesadillas

11. Maths
12. Candles

13. Yoko Ono
14. Goat meat

15. Return of the Jedi
16. Parks and Recreation

Vote on!

16
Feedback / "recent unread topics" disappeared? - Solved
« on: March 21, 2016, 06:04:11 am »
Since this morning I can't see my Avatar at the top left of the page, and the links to recent unread topics and replies to my posts have disappeared. It just says "Hello Accatitippi".
Is anybody experiencing this? Is it on my end? I doubt it is because I didn't change anything since yesterday - I didn't even turn off the computer actually.

17
Game Reports / And Thief saves the day!
« on: February 18, 2016, 08:30:51 am »
I'm posting this here because it was a hilariously tense game, and I feel entitled to boast a bit if only just for not resigning this game, but if you want to see good Dominion, you probably want to visit many of the other threads on f:ds. :)
On the other hand, if you have any thoughts on my plays or on this board, and how you'd have played it (or I should have played it), I'd be happy to hear them! (it's against a bot)
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160217/log.0.1455729101587.txt
Kingdom:
Shanty Town, Steward, Workshop, Cutpurse, Militia, Quarry, Thief, Bazaar, Library, Rabble, Colony
(how does one post all the images like everyone else does? I found a broken link in an old thread but noting more)

I go for the Engine, even though the components are expensive and there's no +Buy, hoping it will work out thanks to Militia and then Rabbles (Workshop could gain Shanties here, but I don't think it would work out?). I suspect I should have bought another Militia in the early game to keep my opponent at bay while I built, but one way or the other, my opponent had a very high quality deck and 40-ish points by the time I could attack him consistently with 3 Rabbles, and I realized that 2-3 card hands are plenty when your treasures are mostly Platina and Golds. (luckily there was no risk for a three pile). With no +Buy, I had to buy green one piece at a time so it looked very bleak for me.
In desperation I changed direction and focused on playing three Thieves a turn, hoping to stall him hard enough to get essentially all the remaining green on the board. Long story short, it worked, I made him trash a total of 7 Platina and 7 Golds, never gaining them. He spiked a Province and a Duchy during his decline but I got him with only 2 Duchies and an Estate left on the board as leeway. (and a Colony, but I couldn't gain both it and the Province).
Of course mostly playing against bots leaves me wondering whether some of my plans would ever work against a competent opponent.

18
Variants and Fan Cards / Sorcerer - a weird attacking Event idea
« on: January 30, 2016, 03:51:39 am »
Sorcerer - tentatively 4c event
Choose one: either you take your Frog token, or every other player does.
(while a player has their Frog token in front of them, all the Action cards they play are treated as if they read: "+1 Action. discard this. You may trash a card from your hand, you may return your Frog token.")

Does it work as intended? Is it too powerful? Too weak? The fact that it has a Pillagey effect scares me a bit, but the fact that it helps people thin their deck and stuff might even make it too helpful to be used as an attack? Is the opportunity cost too high, in particular in absence of +buy? (i think so but I'm having trouble thinking of a format for the effect that doesn't get as chronically annoying as having it on a card - suggestions are very welcome!)
Do you think that unlimited availability might make it problematic? If so I think I'd have the activator gain an Estate or a Curse on buy, and have the rest of the effect conditional on that.
So, what do you think? :)

19
Variants and Fan Cards / Abbey, a mass trash for benefit à la Forge
« on: January 07, 2016, 07:23:59 am »
I got this idea recently, what do you think about it?

Quote
Cloister - 4c Action
You may trash an Action card, a Treasure card, and/or a Victory card from your hand.
If you trashed three cards, gain a Province.

Wording:
The effect I want is:
You may trash an Action card from your hand. You may trash a Treasure card from your hand. You may trash a Victory card from your hand.
Does this wording work? Alternatively, I have "You may trash any combination of one T, one A, and one V from your hand"
Or a "Choose up to three" thing too.
Any suggestions?

Effect: is it worth having (do you like it)? Is it balanced at 4? The obvious comparisons here are Forge and Remodels, this one is a worse gainer than most remodelers but it compensates by clearing junk at almost-Steward speed.
I'd also consider letting Curses in as an additional type, so that it becomes a marginally more useful trasher and gainer in cursing games.

UPDATE: current state of the card:

20
Variants and Fan Cards / Exercise of thought about a Kind Witch.
« on: November 10, 2015, 12:38:29 pm »
This might be one for the RBCI thread, but Deadlock's post in the contest thread got me thinking (duck!):
Do I win the contest?

Tailor
$0 Reaction
When another player plays an Attack Card, you may set this aside.

What if a curser let other players get rid of curses?

Kind Witch
?!?
Every other player gains a Curse and may trash a Curse from their hand.

What would you put as cost and additional effects to make the attack kinda balanced and fun?
The best I could conjure was Lab's effect (2cards 1action) at 5, but I'm not sure about how that would compare with Lab.
Would you ever stop playing it to avoid helping your opponent (after the curses are empty, but before they trash away their curses); or change significantly your buy pattern compared to Lab? Because I fear it's just too similar to Lab to be worth making.
How would you make such a card work, if it can work at all?

21
Here I am again, with yet another idea that gives you a use out of Curses. I know the usual counterargument "Curses are supposed to be bad", and I see the point, but doing cool stuff with curses is nice and you get to try to avoid obsoleting cursers which is a good challenge. :) And having counters to the most powerful kind of attack is not bad either.

Fairy Village - Action - 5c
+3 Cards
Discard a Curse or Gain a Curse.
If you did, +2 Actions.

Now three cards may seem a lot, but your net gain in cards is actually +1 or +2 and gain a Curse, so it's in the same league as activated City with regard to sheer amount of cards. It offers some extra sifting which only works with Curses.
What do you think? Is it balanced? Interesting? Should it cost 4?

22
Hi,
do you think this card would work?

Lieutenant - Action Duration (6)
Put a card from your hand face up on top of your Lieutenant deck.
At the start of your turn for the rest of the game, you may put one copy of the top card of your Lieutenant deck from your hand to the Lieutenant deck.

Rules: the lieutenant deck is a deck of face up cards on your lieutenant mat.
I think it might be too powerful for 6, and it has quite a lot of text for a pretty simple effect. Do you have any suggestion on how to shorten it?

23
So, I recently bought RL Alchemy and I love it! But I think its worst weakness is that there are too few interesting and fun Potion cards (I play full random) - and in particular too few potion cards actually care about potions, or would be any different without them. Since I have a few spare, proxiable cards, I thought of making another fan card for my physical set (after Holy Cow, which I still use handdrawn proxies for, and needs work).
I have thought about this:

Druid - Action
Cost: 4$ OR 2P
Trash two cards from your hand.
If you Trashed two Potions this way, Gain as many Golds as there are Potions in the Trash.
Every player (including you) Gains a Potion.

I also made tentative card art (in Italian):


Before printing, I'd like opinions (as usual) about:
- is it awfully, blatantly broken? (awfully, subtly broken is appreciated as well)
- does it look fun?
- is cost ok?
- will it scale ok?
- Is gaining craploads of Gold broken? My thought is that it's harder to pull off than Treasure Maps, and the payback is lower unless you do some setup.
- I'm also considering making trashing optional, to make it more Golem-friendly.

The reason for the double cost is that you avoid having to specify that "in games with this, Potion is in the supply".
If somebody could also point me to fan cards that care about Potions, I'd appreciate that. :)

24
Variants and Fan Cards / Holy Cow
« on: April 29, 2015, 01:28:37 pm »
Hi, I'm a quite old but still fairly inexperienced player who mostly plays against AI due to convenience (and internet gaming shyness).
I have this weird card idea, which I only playtested once against myself, I know it sounds pitiful but I don't play much f2f dominion since my group is pretty "meh" on it.
So, before bothering to switch from really-tiny-scale playtesting to very-small-scale playtesting, I'd like to know if you think that the card has any issues that would make it worthless to playtest.

Action, cost 4$. Holy Cow
+1 Action
+1 Buy

At the end of the game, if you have at least as many Holy Cows as you have Curses, your Curses are worth 3vp instead of -1vp.

The name is a placeholder, I like animal-themed cards but I think something religious like Shrine or Indulgence would be more appropriate.
The idea is that it can provide an alt-vp strategy on its own (with an inbuilt counter: if your opponent goes for the same strategy - or actually if he buys even just one Holy Cow, you'll have to find a way to trash a Curse to end the game on piles)
If you're running an Engine for Provinces/Colonies it should be able to compete with other +buys - it's really weak for its price but it is not terminal and it will give you a single free out-of-supply duchy at some point during the game.
If cursers are on the board, stuff gets a bit more complex, but I don't think it hard counters most cursers, since buying Holy Cows will slow down your deck even more (and then the +buy is worthless). Still I think they might be worth going for.

After my really very extensive and thorough playtesting I'd consider adding a Chancellor effect to avoid it getting trivial: on the last run through your deck, every time you draw Cow, buy a Curse. With a shuffle, those curses would have time to hurt you, and managing to play many Cows in the very last turn would be rewarded (a sort of Curse Frenzy megaturn).
I'm not really sure about how many VPs it should give for curses.
Thoughts?

(Edit: words. They are hard)

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