Here's my "fix" for Scout:
Scout
Action 4$
+1 Action
Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck. Put the revealed Victory cards into your hand.
If none of the revealed cards were victory cards, put one of them into your hand.
Put the rest back in any order
So it's always at least a cantrip.
I guess the next question is, is there any kingdom with no non-terminal Actions in which Conspirator is a good buy?
I suppose you might want one copy of Conspirator in a kingdom with Fairgrounds and mostly Treasures.
I'd take Noble Brigand vs Thief over Hinting Party vs Laboratory in a contest for "closest to strictly better" any day. Lab can draw your whole deck, HP can't. HP requires a specific type of deck, one which is admittedly usually a powerful deck deck. But Lab works in essentially any deck (edge case: Philosopher's Stone). They each have their own situations where they're useful.I disagree, I have seen more games where Thief, in a special purpose, would have been better than NB.
One of the best uses for thief is with kingdom treasure cards, especially Fool's gold and IGG, so...
But anyway, I would say the closest to strictly better comparison is Wharf vs. Council room.
the second +action on card that give +2 actions is useless in a kingdom without terminals.
I know other people have suggested it already, but I think my favorite fix to Scout is to make it a Victory card worth 1VP.
Well, it's strictly worse than Estate, but at least it's an improvement.
Is that a joke? It would very much not be strictly worse...
Dominion cards are designed to be self-contained - e.g. Graverobber gives you a way to grab cards from the trash, so it also gives you a way to put cards in the trash that you'd like to grab.
It's not quite true that all cards need to be self-contained in that way—consider Conspirator.
I think the card will typically be terribly weak. Why? First of all, you usually don't want cards that are trashed. Without trash for benefit or trashing attack cards, the best this card could collect are Estates, which is not a good idea. As soon as another player plays GC, all your Estates go in the discard, greening your deck. For a terminal 6$, this is awful. Without TFB, this is about as good as a Ruins.
Should they discard their ship and avoid a curse, thus giving you +$2? Or should they take the curse, keep the ship, and rob you of the coin? In the games we've played with this, those curses add up quickly.
I believe you're mistaken, most people on Iso avoided lower-ranked players as well. As Kirian mentioned, they did this by setting a +/- rating limit for automatch.
All I know is that the higher my Iso ranking got, the more people rejected auto-matchups with me.
Oh, and since you deleted the first post, there's no more explanation of a Claim is
Fair enough. I've updated the top post (with the new version of Tax Collector).
Also, something you said earlier made me clarify Claim's text. You gain the Treasure when you play your second and subsequent Claims. You don't have to play three to have them activate.
Also: The various types of ruins all count toward variety too. And anything that counts toward variety for Fairgrounds also applies to Menagerie, Horn of Plenty, Harvest, and Hunting Party.
Ruins - keeping Hunting Party from being strictly better than Lab since 2012.
HP wasn't strictly better than Lab even before Ruins.
I know it's not strictly strictly better. But it's the closest any card comes to being strictly better than another one of the same cost. At least the Wiki sides with me. Only other would be Noble Brigand, but special Treasures are there what Ruins are for Hunting Party.
I guess there have been errata.The whole game has a bunch of different editions; I guess the latest is 3rd but 4th one is apparently coming.
I suffered one game through, just to be able to say that I've tried. It's not just the horrible balance, but already in that single game there were other clear design problems too, such as actions that are of the slowest possible kind ("go through the discard") without actually doing anything interesting. Also, with more than two players it's all about kingmaking due to the way the point system works. In other words, all kinds of issues that make the game opposite of fun, at least for me.
I think it needs a bit of a bonus to be playable. i wouldnt even buy this at 2$ most of the time.With +1 coin this is strictly better than Mine, though.
maybe a +1 coin or something and then its again maybe a reasonable 5$
No why?
if you thrash a Copper with mine you get basicly A Silver and +2$
if you trash a Silver you gain a Gold and +3$
With Overhaul you gain a Gold and +1$ (when trash a silver)
so its strictly worse than Mine when you choose the treasure option.
Think just a little harder about your statement.
When you trash a Copper and get a Silver, you lose $1 for the Copper and get $2 for the Silver (this turn)... same as +$1. Mine is only better if trading Gold for Platinum, then it's +$2.
no Mine is ALLWAYS better! you get the silver in hand for a Copper trashed so you loose 1$ and gain 2$ = +1$
when you trash a Copper with Overhaul you loose a Copper so 1$ and get +1$ = +0$
When you said with mine you get +$2 for Silver or +$3 for Gold, I didn't realize that you meant after you lost the value of whatever you trashed; I thought you meant total net benefit for the turn.
I think it needs a bit of a bonus to be playable. i wouldnt even buy this at 2$ most of the time.With +1 coin this is strictly better than Mine, though.
maybe a +1 coin or something and then its again maybe a reasonable 5$
No why?
if you thrash a Copper with mine you get basicly A Silver and +2$
if you trash a Silver you gain a Gold and +3$
With Overhaul you gain a Gold and +1$ (when trash a silver)
so its strictly worse than Mine when you choose the treasure option.
Think just a little harder about your statement.
When you trash a Copper and get a Silver, you lose $1 for the Copper and get $2 for the Silver (this turn)... same as +$1. Mine is only better if trading Gold for Platinum, then it's +$2.
Actually Mine is almost always better. +$1 only makes up for the copper you trashed at best.
I think it needs a bit of a bonus to be playable. i wouldnt even buy this at 2$ most of the time.With +1 coin this is strictly better than Mine, though.
maybe a +1 coin or something and then its again maybe a reasonable 5$
No why?
if you thrash a Copper with mine you get basicly A Silver and +2$
if you trash a Silver you gain a Gold and +3$
With Overhaul you gain a Gold and +1$ (when trash a silver)
so its strictly worse than Mine when you choose the treasure option.
Ooh, yeah, I didn't actually lay out the number of primes. That clue does lay out that you could only have 1/1/1/3/3. If I had considered that, then I wouldn't have looked at a column thinking, "Well, that could have 2 or 3 primes."
The Fibonacci clue was quite helpful.
I may have to redo this puzzle with the mindset that a square is solved only when I can rule out all other possibilities. It'd be interesting to see the progression of clues.
What if we replace the rating system with apples? After every game, 1 apple is distributed between all the winners. I don't think anyone would say that's unfair.
Too long. Just bridge would probably be fine.Isn't a Ruined Moat simply a Bridge?
When the Guild speculation brought up the card name Stonecutter, i tried to think of what that card would do, and a mix of Woodcutter and Quarry seemed logical. It had to be balanced, of course, so i thought "why not replace one of the +2$ from Woodcutter with a cost reduction like Quarry?" I ended up with this:
Stonecutter
Action, 4$
+1$
+1 Buy
All cards (including cards in the players hands) cost one less this turn.
Do you think that would be balanced?
Seems broken with KC. KC-KC-SCx3 would be instant 8 Provinces. But that's fairly difficult to achieve, so it's probably OK.
This card reminds me more of Moat than Quarry or Woodcutter. Maybe you should give it a name related to that instead. How about "Drawbridge"?
