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Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #131: Novel Ways to Overpay
« on: October 11, 2021, 03:00:04 pm »I totally disagree. Absent trashing attacks, your card is strictly better than Province.This looks too good relative to Province.
Let us assume an average of 4 Provinces per player. This is the same as buying Topiary Gardens 4 times while overpaying 5 each time such that there are 60 tokens on the mat. Now the Topiary Gardens are worth as many VPs as Provinces with the additional feature that you can buy further 6VP cards for $3.
It's true that buying 4 of these at $8 makes them worth the number of VP as a Province (and creates the opportunity to buy another at $3), but I disagree that this makes them better. When you buy a Province you have a guaranteed 6VP (absent it getting Swindled into a Peddler or Prince; Topiary Garden is much more vulnerable to Swindler). With this, the first 3 TGs you buy at $8 are not guaranteed to end up being worth 6VP, which makes buying one instead of a Province a potentially risky prospect. And because in 2 or 3 player games there are 4 TGs per player (and fewer games with more players), there is a non-negligible chance that you will not get the chance to buy a 5th one (or even a 4th).
Also, think about how this would happen practically. Imagine we are playing a 2 player game and you and I each have bought 3 Provinces at $8. If I hit $7, what am I going to do? Buy a Gold? A Duchy? I have an extremely strong incentive to buy a 4th TG at $7. Now, if you buy a 4th for $8, I've got a pretty big problem, but I would have had that anyway unless I was going to hit $8 on the following turn. If you don't hit $8 the turn after I buy the penultimate TG, you nevertheless have an extremely strong incentive to buy one at whatever you can spend, because if I buy that 5th one at $4, I now have 5 TGs worth 6 VP each. Thus, I think actually getting 4 TGs at $8 is going to be extremely rare.
So it will be very centralizing in nearly all Kingdoms, i.e. players will build up their engines more than in an ordinary Kingdom and then try to massively overpay for Topiary Gardens (a player overpaying less than $5 for them is not a strategic equilibrium as the other players can simply go for Provinces then)-
There is no reason to go initially for the inferior and less flexible Provinces.
This does not lead to good play. It is called alt-VP for a reason, it should be a real choice and not a virtually always mandatory strategic path.
You will also need a lot of tokens, won't be better to adjust the numbers to gain less tokens when overpaying?