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6576

Other Games / Eminent Domain

« on: October 09, 2014, 01:21:34 am »

Just learned and played this tonight. 2 player game; used the simplified variation since we were self-teaching.

Anyway, it's basically like someone took Dominion and Race for the Galaxy, and put them in a blender. But it's definitely more Race than Dominion. Seems like a fun game. It has a really neat concept of forcing you to add a given card to your deck you want to perform that card's action. Imagine if Smithy said "+3 cards. Gain a Smithy". Except of course that would totally suck, while Eminent Domain is built around that concept.

6577

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: October 08, 2014, 12:18:29 am »

Hellscout

Action - $4

+1 Action

The cost of all cards is reduced to $0 until you play another card. Set aside your hand. Draw 4 cards, then put cards on top of your deck until there are no non-victory cards in your hand. Put the set aside cards in your hand. Trash this. Gain a card from the trash costing from $3 to $6. Put it in your hand unless you have drawn any victory cards this turn.
---------------------
The cost of this card cannot be reduced.

This seems like it's meant to play exactly like Scout, but with more tedious execution. However, it enables a mega turn in which you produce many +Buy and then play this. You play nothing else after and drain all the VP easily.  Intended loophole?

It also allows you to play infinite cards on your if none of the top 4 cards of your deck are victory cards.

It only allows to play itself again when it fails, doesn't it? It doesn't play any card, and doesn't draw any non-green non-Scout. There's no useful infinite-play possibility AFAICS.

No, no useful infinite-play. But still infinite play, of the same card as many times as you want.

6578

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: October 07, 2014, 01:29:31 pm »

Hellscout

Action - $4

+1 Action

The cost of all cards is reduced to $0 until you play another card. Set aside your hand. Draw 4 cards, then put cards on top of your deck until there are no non-victory cards in your hand. Put the set aside cards in your hand. Trash this. Gain a card from the trash costing from $3 to $6. Put it in your hand unless you have drawn any victory cards this turn.
---------------------
The cost of this card cannot be reduced.

This seems like it's meant to play exactly like Scout, but with more tedious execution. However, it enables a mega turn in which you produce many +Buy and then play this. You play nothing else after and drain all the VP easily.  Intended loophole?

It also allows you to play infinite cards on your if none of the top 4 cards of your deck are victory cards.

6579

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: October 07, 2014, 01:24:20 pm »

the passing from masq is positive utility. if it didn't have it, it'd be weaker. and 100 times better. that's how it should be. but it'd be weaker.

Perhaps, but "+2 cards. You may trash a card from your hand." is just so boring..

Edge case puzzle! Find a situation where you'd rather have that version of Masq in your hand than a real Masq. I can think of a couple...

Is this really a puzzle that needs edge cases?  You'd rather have the non-passing version any time your hand is full of good cards.

Yeah, somehow I didn't think of the obvious in-your-face situation of having all good cards in hand. The situations I were thinking of involved having a bad card that you wanted to trash, but didn't want your opponent to have. Which could happen easily with Fairgrounds, perhaps giving your opponent an Estate or Copper (or even Curse) could boost his Fairgrounds. Or even if you're just building a different deck than your opponent; you might want to trash Silver because you have a good engine; but you don't want to give your opponent Silver.

6580

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: October 07, 2014, 01:25:51 am »

^ Yes I do

Has anyone done this yet?

Someone explain this one?

Don't you know 'The Hunger Games"-trilogy?

Ah, thanks. Yeah, haven't read/seen them yet.

I would say read them before watching them.

This is from someone who watched only the 2nd movie and nothing else. My feeling is that it ran into the same problem a lot of adaptations have - clumsy ways to get around all the thinking the book character does, and characters acting in ways that don't make sense/are contradictory, which probably weren't that way in the book.

Actually I'll put it another way, the Harry Potter movies are pretty good if you're a fan of the books and know what's going to happen, but I'm astounded people who haven't read the books like them. The Hunger Games movies are likely to be similar.

I just recently watched all the HP movies for the first time; having never read the books. I thought they were just fine; they can't all be the best movie ever.

6581

Other Games / Great game of Puerto Rico with jonts

« on: October 06, 2014, 11:52:34 pm »

So I met jonts in person today; though we didn't play any Dominion. We did have one of the best games of Puerto Rico I've played though.

4 person game. Normally I'm a heavy builder type player. Get coins build, repeat. End the game before much else happens. But I decided to be different today... went all corn, all the time. Up until the last couple rounds, all I had were 5 corn plantations, a sugar plantation, a small sugar mill, and a small warehouse. Almost never got any money. Just chose craftsmen, then captain, then craftsmen, then captain. By the very end I managed to buy a Wharf, but it was too late to ever get it manned.

Jonts ended up winning with 46 points to my 45 (the other 2 players were in the 30s). What's sad is that there were a couple different things that I could have done on my last couple turns to get just 1 more point, but I chose not to because I didn't think 1 point would be likely to matter; instead I did craftsman on the off-chance that I'd be able to ship again for a bunch of more points (even though I knew it was very unlikely that I'd get any points out of it. Figured it was better to have a tiny chance at 6 more points than a guaranteed 1 more point). Had I gone the other way, I'd have won.

Still, before tonight I wouldn't have thought it was realistic to try to win with only a couple buildings; no bonus buildings. Definitely a strategy I'll want to try again sometime.

6582

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: October 06, 2014, 01:05:28 pm »

^ Yes I do

Has anyone done this yet?

Someone explain this one?

Don't you know 'The Hunger Games"-trilogy?

Ah, thanks. Yeah, haven't read/seen them yet.

6583

General Discussion / Re: Brag Board

« on: October 06, 2014, 12:58:10 pm »

the processional march was from the Final Fantasy X soundtrack.

This was the processional march for my wedding:



Though it was more like this, which was arranged for a wedding:

6584

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: October 06, 2014, 12:36:45 pm »

^ Yes I do

Has anyone done this yet?

Someone explain this one?

6585

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: October 06, 2014, 12:31:01 pm »

the passing from masq is positive utility. if it didn't have it, it'd be weaker. and 100 times better. that's how it should be. but it'd be weaker.

Perhaps, but "+2 cards. You may trash a card from your hand." is just so boring..

Edge case puzzle! Find a situation where you'd rather have that version of Masq in your hand than a real Masq. I can think of a couple...

6586

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: October 06, 2014, 12:29:07 pm »

the passing from masq is positive utility. if it didn't have it, it'd be weaker. and 100 times better. that's how it should be. but it'd be weaker.

Perhaps, but "+2 cards. You may trash a card from your hand." is just so boring..

6587

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Magic mirror

« on: October 05, 2014, 12:18:46 am »

This is one of those very few places where Ascension did better.

"Copy the effect of another [card] you played this turn."

Pleasingly simple, yet frustrating to do in Dominion.

Let me guess. Ascension only has one copy of that card?

At least the base set only has one, but I don't see an issue if there were multiple really. So you play C1, then later play C2, and you choose C1 as the card to copy. This means that you must now choose a card to copy, because that's the effect you're copying. So you must now "copy the effect of another card you played this turn". So you choose C1 again (which is still "another card" from C2, at least that's how I read it). So yeah, you can technically keep choosing C1 forever. So what? It's no different from how you can keep revealing Moat forever in Dominion.

I'm just saying that it's only pleasingly simple because there's a single copy of the card, that's all. It's an easy out.

So Throne Room should have been a prize!

6588

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Magic mirror

« on: October 04, 2014, 11:40:19 pm »

This is one of those very few places where Ascension did better.

"Copy the effect of another [card] you played this turn."

Pleasingly simple, yet frustrating to do in Dominion.

Let me guess. Ascension only has one copy of that card?

At least the base set only has one, but I don't see an issue if there were multiple really. So you play C1, then later play C2, and you choose C1 as the card to copy. This means that you must now choose a card to copy, because that's the effect you're copying. So you must now "copy the effect of another card you played this turn". So you choose C1 again (which is still "another card" from C2, at least that's how I read it). So yeah, you can technically keep choosing C1 forever. So what? It's no different from how you can keep revealing Moat forever in Dominion.

6589

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: October 02, 2014, 01:55:52 pm »

Why should it be broken? It's just a slightly more reliable Lookout with the +1 Action replaced by some inverse Pearl Diving

...and a +card.

Right, I missed the extra card draw.  That makes Inspire indeed much stronger, but still not "obviously broken" IMO.

Let's compare it with Masquerade, one of the strongest cards in the game:

Masquerade:
 + Safer (chooses the worst one out of 6 cards to trash, know 4 options before playing the card)
 + Can sometimes luck out and receive a good card in exchange for a bad card

Inspire:
 + Leaves you with a better hand for this turn
 + Smaller chance of terminal collision
 + Leaves you with a better deck for the remaining turns this shuffle
 + Some control over getting a good turn now vs. getting a good turn next turn
 + Cycles more cards
 + Triggers more wanted reshuffles
 - Triggers more unwanted reshuffles

Looks like broken.

You're missing the fact that Masq's trashing is optional, Inspire's isn't, so Inspire is often dead in the late game, and you can't use it for +2 cards in an engine. Also, Masq is a great counter for junking attacks.
Each of Inspire's "+"es is rather small in comparison (you can only cycle/discard a single bad card, and make another likely to miss a reshuffle.) It's probably a bit stronger than Masq overall, but I think it should work as a strong $4 (or possibly a weak $5).

Masq's "trashing" may be optional, but passing a card is not, and passing a card is just like trashing. So Masq does force you to remove a card from your deck even if you don't want to.

6590

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Strictly better than....

« on: October 02, 2014, 09:58:27 am »

When does Mystic become worse than GM? Just give me a specific scenario. And for Kings Court > Throne Room as well.

Mystic < GM when you want to be sure to draw a card or want to have +Buy... KC > TR when you want to play a card one extra time....

Or maybe you actually mean, when is Mystic better and when is TR > KC.  For both, you can create scenarios with reshuffles.

Mystic > GM when there is 1 card left in your deck, you don't want to trigger a reshuffle and you have it in hand with TR.  TR-GM would cause a reshuffle, but TR-Mystic would not if you purposefully name an impossible card both times.

TR > KC when you play it on a draw card and KC would cause an unwanted shuffle on the third play.

Actually with TR+Mystic, you can name the correct card the second time without triggering the reshuffle.

With TR > KC, you might have 2 bad cards and a trasher in hand; you don't want to play the trasher 3 times.

6591

Other Games / Re: General Other Board Games topic

« on: October 02, 2014, 12:02:35 am »

I think I have 3 answers.

Terra Mystica - learned it at BGG.con last year, instantly loved it. Played probably 10 times now, want to play more. Excited for the expansion.

Russian Railroads - new favorite worker placement game.

No Thanks! - Super-short game; so hard to compare to something like TM. But I've played at least 10 times already over just a couple weeks.

6592

Dominion General Discussion / Re: I'm regressing into a dominion noob

« on: October 01, 2014, 05:13:38 pm »

I'm sort of the same now. Almost the only time I ever play anymore is every once in a while on the base-only, terrible-AI, iPad Dominion app. And when I mean terrible AI, I mean really terrible. I've seen him open Duchy/Nothing on a Witch/Chapel board. But I'll still lose almost a quarter of the time because I just want to try whatever random crazy fun thing there is, instead of really playing to win.

6593

Rules Questions / Re: Haggler, Farmland, Border Village

« on: October 01, 2014, 01:10:06 pm »

Yeah, Quarry's what I was getting at.  I can't think of an edge case that does not involve Quarry.

Pretty sure there can't be one. Once you rule out victory cards and Quarry, you are asking "name a case where you would rather gain a card costing $5 or less before you gain a card costing $5 or less."

6594

General Discussion / Re: Baseball!

« on: September 30, 2014, 02:25:16 pm »

Without the Red Sox, I have very little interest in the playoffs. But I'll be rooting for the Nats, as I did grow up in DC.

6595

Other Games / Re: "Bare-bones" games sporting a single mechanic

« on: September 29, 2014, 10:40:28 am »

Pretty much any eurogame that uses bidding doesn't have bluffing.

Or at least where bluffing isn't the main thing. Like in Tikal, you bid points for turn order (basically), and sure, you can sometimes bid higher than you're actually willing to pay so that someones pays more, but that's not the point of the mechanic in the game, if that makes sense.

Same in something like Evo or Cyclades.

Five Tribes has bidding for turn order and no bluffing at all.

This isn't my experience... if I think of bidding in Euro games, I think of Power Grid, For Sale, No Thanks, High Society, Princes of Florence... all of them have bluffing. Not bluffing like in Poker where you pretend to have better stuff hidden than you really do, but bluffing in terms of making it look like you want to win the auction when perhaps you really don't want to win (you just wanted to make it more expensive).

6596

Other Games / Re: "Bare-bones" games sporting a single mechanic

« on: September 29, 2014, 10:38:15 am »

I wouldn't call the announcing of Spades (or Hearts) bidding as there is no special reward for the highest bid.

Bridge is special as it normally hurts more to confound your partner than it helps to confound your opponents.

Disclaimer: I never played Spades and just looked up the rules.

You're still bidding in Spades, even though there's no exclusive benefit to bidding highest. I suppose the terminology should shift toward auctioning, as that is what bidding in many board games really boils down to.

And if we go that route, then I would tend to agree that it's hard to have auctioning without bluffing. I brought up Spades as an example of bidding without bluffing, but bidding is perhaps too broad of a term here.

While it is called "bidding" in spades, I believe that this is a completely different definition of the word than is used in other game contexts. In spades, "bidding" really just means "guessing". The "bid" is just your best estimate at how many tricks you will take. But in general, when talking about "bidding" in board games, I think of an auction, where your bid is an amount you are willing to pay to get a reward.

Now, Pinochle sort of combines these 2 things. In Pinochle, you bid on how many points you think you can take, but you are also auctioning against the other players, to see who is willing to bid the highest. Like a traditional auction, only the highest bidder gets the reward (getting to choose trumps, and getting the kitty in a 3-player game), but like Spades, his bid also serves a guess as to how many points he thinks he can make.

6597

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: September 28, 2014, 02:25:37 pm »

Someone made the same reference way back but I still upvoted your post because that song is in fact the greatest.

I just found a "greatest song in the world" card in the very bad card ideas thread, but no image or anything.

6598

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: September 28, 2014, 11:42:04 am »

Hope this hasn't been done...

6599

Other Games / Idle games

« on: September 28, 2014, 11:23:27 am »

So Cookie Clicker has it's own thread, but what about other idle games? I got bored with Cookie Clicker after a few days, and since then I've gotten hooked on a few other similar games.

Currently the only one I have running is AdVenture Capitalist (on Kongregate). I recently hit 2K of everything; 418 tredecillion angel investors.

At one point I had 3 separate games running though...  I played Idle Blacksmith up until I reached the max level of everything (before it starts just adding numbers to the names of the things). That one had some neat strategy of trying to even-out the levels of your different productions.

In terms of games that are somewhat idle, but have a lot more to offer... A Dark Room and Candy Box (and Candy Box 2) are all awesome games.

6600

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Resurgence: Library Adventurer's fan expansion (YAFE)

« on: September 27, 2014, 11:02:33 pm »

Making it cost $3 normally but $4 when it's in your deck just doesn't seem to add anything of value to the card. $3 and $4 are so close in price anyway... So if you want this card to be better for remodeling, then just make it cost $4. If you want a person to more easily grab multiples with  extra buys, and to double-open, make it cost $3. Changing the cost mid-game is just a extravagant effect that has very little impact on gameplay or card design.