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26

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Card ideas from Jeebus

« on: December 12, 2018, 02:10:29 pm »

I agree that this looks very weak. The problem is that the weakest terminal sifter, Young Witch, is extremly weak (ignoring the cursing) while the strongest one, Embassy, is so good that it is often a BM-enabler. Probably very hard to find something vanilla-ish in between, flexible support cards like Dungeon and Warehouse thrive because they are non-terminal.

27

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Is this a good card?

« on: December 12, 2018, 02:03:34 pm »

Is this better?


Paranormal Investigator
- Action Attack
Choose one: Each player gains a Curse; or every player reveals their hand, trashes all revealed curses. You get +3 per Curse revealed

Also, would it be better worth and

This is harder to judge. Just keep in mind when playing with this idea that this does nothing positive for you which is harsh for the attacking player; we know that from Sea Hag and Saboteur. Also note that this becomes better in multiplayer.
About Potion costs, don't do them willy-nilly but when you have issues pricing a card well (if a card is e.g. too good for $4 but too weak for $5, $2P might do the tirkc). Also keep in mind that most of the official Potions cards are strong in multiples which is why most of them are non-terminal.

28

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 12, 2018, 01:56:00 pm »

Why bother starting with a small bid and then gradually increasing it, until one player is no longer willing to pay that much? Surely both players should just be bidding the correct amount to start with.

Great post. I'd like to add that it also depends on the precise rules of the auction and on how granular the currency is. If we stick with your Power Grid example, what also comes into play is that the worth of a power planet is not equal for all players. Well, that's also so in the real world, here the marginal benefit of getting an asset also differs among people which is why it would be stupid to immediately bid your willing to pay. That Picasso might be worth 5 for you but if everybody else is unwilling to pay more than 1 a starting bid of 5 would unnecesarily cost you 4.

29

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 12, 2018, 01:49:56 pm »

By your own admission, you did not answer my challenge:
"Not at the very moment I have to make the choice, then I am pissed."

You seemingly missed the part where I pointed out that at the end of the game, retroactively, in hindsight, you might realize that this lack of an option was good you as it prevented you from making a mistake.

You are totally right that from a game theoretical perspective more options are usually (the obvious exception are prisoner dilemmas and other cooperation issues) good. But if you lack perfect knowledge less options can be useful. Which is why seatbealts are mandatory and we take try to take away the option from running over the street without looking left and right via teaching our children to do so. I even sometimes reduce my options of eating crisps via not buying them as lacking the option to eat more crap than I already do is beneficial for me.

Your chess analogy is irrelevant. I make no claims about number of options available. Only about when the options available in one state are a superset of the options available in another state.

Sure, some stupid mathematical sophistry (dude, any sane person would interpret what you wrote in your challenge as: "one extra option") is more important while talking about Dominion than insights from another game.

30

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Is this a good card?

« on: December 12, 2018, 07:53:07 am »

Probably not. Sea Hag shows that pure Cursing is worth less than $4 and it is debatable whether the second option helps you or them more.

31

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 12, 2018, 06:05:46 am »

Ok, to anyone who believes paying minimum amount is not optimal, I offer a challenge:

Assume that $1 is the minimum amount you can pay for bottle imp.
Construct ANY scenario where your opponent has bottle imp, you have played cursed bottle, and would be happier if your opponent had paid $1 for bottle imp than if they had paid >$1.

Hard mode: Same as the above, but you are playing open-hand dominion, where you can always see your opponent's hand.

I believe normal mode to already be very difficult and to have no solutions which are not extreme edge cases. Prove me wrong.

Actually, I believe both modes to be impossible without assuming that you are a bad player

That's super easy. If I misevaluated the strength of Bottle Imp, not having the option to get it is actually good. Not at the very moment I have to make the choice, then I am pissed. But if I win the game due to this lack of an option I see that it was in hindsight good.

It is like playing with people who have never played with Thief or Pirate Ship. Suppose you play a variant in which they get the option to use Pirate Ship and Thief as two extra, private piles. Of course they are happy, more choice is never a bad thing according to you, right? But because they are unfamiliar with the cards they overvalue Treasure-trashing and lose the game.

Now I guess you would label them bad players but they aren't, they are just unfamiliar with a particular category of cards.
Bottle Imp is also a new card and like with all new cards even good players will frequently misevaluate their strength until they have enough experience.
I totally agree with you that if the game consists of good players who have played often enough (and given how complex it is and how harsh the -13VPs are, 2 or 3 games will definitely not suffice!) with Bottle Imp and rarely misevaluate it, paying more than the minimum amount is probably wrong.
But if you are unsure about it and would like it most to only get a few plays out of Bottle Imp and then hope to get rid of it, creating the option for your opponent to make you achieve that very goal isn't bad play but good play. Other factors like psychology and his deck state also influence this decision. If he is in dire need of gaining and if you can "read" (we are human beings and prone to biases, I know e.g. whose players in my gaming group are village piel drivers and this knowledge informs my play) him and know that he will go for Bottle Imp, paying $1 or $2 extra for Bottle Imp could be a smart gamble.

So yeah, it looks like this entire argument boils down to differences of perspective: theoretical or pragmatic. As God isn't in my playing group I have little interest in hypertheoretical arguments that assume perfect play.

Do you play chess or are you married? These are the most obvious examples that illustrate why lack of options isn't automatically bad. While a chess engine only cares about finding the best move according to its evaluation function a real human player sometimes plays a slightly inferior move that creates options for his opponent to go wrong or a very inferior move that creates the option for this opponent to go very wrong aka a trap. So even a deterministic game like chess features risk management.

32

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 12, 2018, 05:36:03 am »

This is the most novel idea and I like it for that.

In a 2P game this is a free lunch for the opponent (unless there is Relic and Villa in the Kingdom) unless you get a second Mason's Guild. So this creates an incentive to get slightly more drawing Workshops than you would usually want and it could lead to crazy pile-driving (if the opponent "retaliates" and also gets a second one).
In a 3P mirror game free lunch is prevented without somebody having to get a second copy. So I think that overall this works slightly better in 3P games.

33

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 12, 2018, 02:19:22 am »

you should always pay the minimum amount.

Perhaps this is indeed the dominant strategy. I seriously doubt it given that you don't consider the trade-offs of the card at all but whatever, perhaps it is.

Via paying more you might give your opponents a noose to hang themselves in. It is like trap moves in chess, they are never the best moves on a hypertheoretical level but I am not God playing against God, I am a flawed human playing against other flawed humans and in real games, depending on my opponent, playing for trap moves could actually lead to a higher win percentage than playing the theoretically best move.
If you think e.g. that the best play for you would be to use of Bottle Imp is for just a few turns (because then the marginal benefit of extra cards diminshes while the -13VPs loom larger) and if you think at the same time that your opponent thinks otherwise (you can perhaps tell from his play,  he might have no other gainers) you can try to exploit that.

So this is not even necessarily a trap move but just the natural reaction to observing your opponent.

You argument basically boils down to the claim that giving your opponent fewer options is good. Well, no. We can take chess again and pick a not-so-bad player, the current World champion. He actually often does play theoretically inferior moves and tries to create problems for the opponent, mostly in endgame positions. If the other guy has little time on the clock giving him a simple choice is a worse course than giving him a complicated choice, even if the latter is slightly inferior on hypertheoretical level.

34

Dominion FAQ / Re: Playing with 8P

« on: December 11, 2018, 03:38:03 pm »

Social deduction games are the only boardgames which function well at this player count.

Can you back that statement up?

You can do the footwork yourself and look at the actual games that work with 8 players. You won't find a lot of Euros among them (nowadays 5 is a lot of a Euro), Ameritrash doesn't scale that much higher and most wargames cap at 6.
So we are left with the not-so-serious stuff: social deduction games plus the other stuff that has already been mentioned like party or trick-taking games.

I think you would have gotten less pushback if you had said "social deduction and party games". And included the word "generally".

Somehow I don't worry about having ignored the likes of Monopoly, Risk and 6 nimmt. I wonder why. Perhaps because such a high player count comes at the cost of a fluffy game and if the game is moderately serious it cannot be really interactive E.g. if memory serves 7 Wonders makes you only care about your neighbours as you cannot keep the entire tableau of numerous other players in mind.

Even the shining gem of Ameritrash, Twilight Imperium, which needs a lot of players (ideally 5-7) sucks at 8 due to the presence of every of the 8 roles in each round.

Which brings us to why simultaneous action selection doesn't solve scaling issues:

No. Social deduction games are the only boardgames which function well at this player count.

Games which allow simultaneous action by multiple players are another obvious category that scales well to high player counts.

I already mentioned Twilight Imperium but this also applies for all other games which use this very mechanic from Puero Rico like Race for the Galaxy or Tiny Epic Kingdoms : just because the mechanic keeps downtime low doesn't mean that you can scale all the variables of a game well from 2 to 8 players.
 
5-6 is as high as it usually gets with non-non-serious games. And Dominion, arguably, sucks at a player count above 3. At least if badly scaling cards like Ambassador are around.

35

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 11, 2018, 02:59:51 pm »

I like the idea a lot, despite being just a smithy at first glance, I think people will buy it at 5$, too. But I think it would be better to reduce it to the villager gain. It’s simplier, and also I believe that it’s stronger that way, because the moment where your opponents stall will come earlier.

This actually was initially just about (discard anything for) Villagers but I feared that it would be too dominant. You can discard the junk for Villagers on your/their turn and then play your Cabins as Double Labs. That felt like a too powerful sifting/draw/village mixture.
The current version makes it much harder to use this non-terminally and the stuff you want to discard most often yields the token which is worth the least in quantities.

36

Dominion FAQ / Re: Playing with 8P

« on: December 11, 2018, 02:51:56 pm »

Social deduction games are the only boardgames which function well at this player count.

Can you back that statement up?

You can do the footwork yourself and look at the actual games that work with 8 players. You won't find a lot of Euros among them (nowadays 5 is a lot of a Euro), Ameritrash doesn't scale that much higher and most wargames cap at 6.
So we are left with the not-so-serious stuff: social deduction games plus the other stuff that has already been mentioned like party or trick-taking games.

37

Dominion FAQ / Re: Playing with 8P

« on: December 11, 2018, 07:57:43 am »

Could you play a normally paced game with 8p?

No. Social deduction games are the only boardgames which function well at this player count. Dominion would just be a tedious game with a lot of downtime at this player count. Also, getting hit 7 times by a Witch until it is your turn again doesn't sound like a fun experience.

38

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 11, 2018, 07:46:05 am »

Name: Philosopher
Cost: $4
Types: Action
+1 card
+1 action
When you gain this, choose a token (+1 Card, or +1 Action, or +1 Buy, or +$1). Each player (including you) removes all of their tokens from the Philosopher pile and adds the chosen token to the Philosopher pile.

I like this, it is a very interactive card with a nice mini-game around gaining (you want a lot of them but not too many lest one the other players who have fewer gain the last one and convert your nice Labs into Market Squares).

39

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest Thread

« on: December 11, 2018, 07:42:44 am »

Terminal draw coupled with discard for benefit puts a cap on the usefulness (after several plays) of this for the opponents.
Among the 'party for everybody cards' we mainly had draw with Council Room and Governor as the 3 other vanilla thingies are not savable but with tokens they are.
Marketeers are Buy tokens; VP tokens could be easily broken in overdrawing engines.

40

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 10, 2018, 08:29:00 pm »

Or like Jimmmmmmm said, giving your opponent a choice is always worse than not giving them a choice.
If my opponent can choose to take the imp away for $1, $2, or $3, or not take the imp, that is better for them than being able to take the imp away for either $1 or $2 (or not taking it), which is better than only being able to take the imp away for $1 (or not), which is better for them than not being able to take the imp.

You ignore the -13VPs as well as the fact that paying $0 destroys not just options for your opponent but also for you.

If you pay $2 you always have the option of getting rid of Bottle Imp. Your opponent might not have Cursed Bottle or his evaluation of the strength of Bottle Imp might change because the game is nearing the end.

Dominion is not a static game, evaluations of card strength change all the time. You cannot simply ignore such dynamic aspects.

41

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 10, 2018, 07:38:23 pm »

My mistake. The general point still stands though, you ignore time and the very real possibility of high initial prices for Bottle Imp because nobody wants to end up with those -13VPs. The strength of Bottle Imp changes over time, from being very valuable early in the game towards being progressively worse and then sharply becoming a very bad card at the end of the game. This means that strength evaluation changes over the course of the game and thus will its ownership.

You are simply wrong about this being good/bad in a particular Kingdom. It is like pretending that Hireling is always good/bad in Kingdom ABC while ignoring time, while ignoring that it is much stronger early on.

42

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 10, 2018, 07:00:30 pm »

The paradox is based on humans behaving irrationally. If humans behaved rationally, then there is no paradox. It is just obviously correct to never take the bottle in the story. I expect good dominion players to also behave rationally if they are trying to win the game.

You ignore time and player interaction:
Paying a lot for Bottle Imp can prevent the opponent from going for Cursed Bottle at all respectively make it temporarily unable (depending on how good his economy is) for him to get Bottle Imp while you could later pay for it again, but then e.g. $0.

43

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 10, 2018, 11:27:42 am »

I think heron is right - giving your opponent a choice is strictly worse than not giving them that choice.

In non-mirrors, choosing -13VPs is strictly worse than choosing 0VPs.

If the card is simple you can analyse theoretically and come up with a clear result without having ever played with the card. This is not one of those simples cases though. The best strategy depends on VP sources, the moment when you gain Cursed Bottle and when you play it, the number of opponents, whether and if how many of your opponents have Cursed Bottles, how long the game will still take which determines the relative worth of an auto-Wish each turn and numerous other factors.

So authoritative, general, black-and-white statements about these cards are impossible without having actually played with them in at least 5-10 games.

44

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why is Possession hated so much?

« on: December 10, 2018, 11:26:35 am »

Any board with coin tokens or villagers: always spend all of your opponent's tokens so they can never do anything.

I understand that post-Empires rule change but previously Possession was much more fun as there were such soft counters in the presence of Coin and VP token gaining cards.

45

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Asper's Cards

« on: December 10, 2018, 11:14:01 am »

I don't like the idea of Bureaucracy being triggered by other players. A better way would be to make it sometimes beneficial.

How about " When you gain a Victory card, gain it to your hand,  then put a card from your hand onto your deck"

Well, that doesn't solve the forgetting issue. Although as I said, I think it's less of a problem for Edicts, because they are harder to overlook. Perhaps I should just remove it.

It doesn't solve it, but it motivates people to remember

Depends in your playing group. I don't play with folks who are prone to cheating and it feels kind of weird to have a card with political vibes in a hardcore non-political game. The wording does imply something like, "dudes, create alliances!". Not that this would actually work technically (if Alice and Bob created such an alliance Carol can always make them topdeck) but the vibes are there nonetheless.

By the way, I like the new blue!

46

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: December 10, 2018, 11:06:31 am »

What you seem to mean is that you can view the issue as two-dimensional with one dimension being elementary card categories like terminal draws, villages, trashers, sifters, gainers, junkers and so on and the other dimension being new mechanisms added to it like Durations, Reserves, Night cards, etc.
When combined, they lead to something like a Reserve trasher (Ratcatcher), Duration payload (Merchant Ship) or Coffers militia (Villain). And what you argue for is to not throw too much stuff from the second dimension onto one card as it is the case with 3 above examples.

This is a fair point but as you mentioned Scholar let's stick with the other terminal draw cards from the new expansion that is intentionally as simple as possible: Donald made a nice example with a card that is probably not perceived as overly complex, namely Silk Merchant, which does add FOUR things second-dimension-wise. I seriously doubt that the card would be more fun if you castrated it and put some of those 4 mechanisms out.
Swashbuckler also does 3 extra things: Coffers, Artifacts, interaction with the discard.
Lackeys does 2 things, on gain and Villagers.

Would any of these cards be better if they were simpler like e.g "+x Cards +y Coffers" instead of Swashbuckler? There is only so much you can do without making cards boring (or inexistent, byebye Night-Durations) if one always only does what you seem to advocate: only add one new mechanic at at time.
I wonder whether anybody did protest back in the day when Goons threw Woodcutter, Militia and VPs together.

I think this illustrates that Scholar or Seer-like designs are extremly rare to come up with and that what we might perceive as simple, e.g. Lackeys, actually isn't because we have become used to mechanisms like on-gain from previous expansions. While DXV has shown with this expansion that he cares about keeping complexity creep as low as possible the trend towards more complexity is simply inevitable.

47

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cursed Bottle / Bottle Imp

« on: December 10, 2018, 05:42:31 am »

I don't really see many situations where you would pay more than 0 for this. Either it's good to have so why would I want to pay more for it / let my opponent take it or it's bad so why would I take it at all.

Because it's better to have it for a while and then lose it than it is to have it forever.

I don't really see it. When would it be good to buy bottle imp for 1? Either my opponent will take it from me very soon because bottle imp is good, and I will never get it back, or I should never have bought bottle imp at all.

In other words, if it is good for my opponent to take bottle imp for 0, why wasn't it good for me?

GendoIkari made a pointed which is generally correct whereas you assumed somehow willy-nilly that 1 is the only potentially optimal deviation from your suggested dominant strategy of always paying 0. This is probably only the case in non-mirrors; with opponents also going for Cursed Bottle it is easy to imagine situations in which prices around 3-6 will get paid for Bottle Imp.
In general the strength of Bottle Imp depends on how early you get it and its weakness is dependent on whether there are alternative sources of VPs and, as already discussed, how many opponents went for Cursed Bottle. If nobody goes for it your suggested dominant strategy of paying $0 is obviously braindead.

I totally agree with faust that one has to watch out for this not being broken because it might be too often the optimal strategy to pay $0 and deal with the negative VPs. But your claim that 0 is always optimal seems highly dubious without any playtesting experience to back it up.

I like the card(s) a lot. Even though I don't know the short story it sounds incredibly thematic and the inverse auction seems pretty interesting. Not that it is strictly necessary as players would do something like this automatically but instead of the "amount of Coins last paid for it" I would try a wording with tokens that remain on Bottle Imp in order to track the previous price.

48

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Online-Only Cards: can they happen?

« on: December 10, 2018, 05:26:26 am »

How about a treasure that's worth the average $value of the cards in your deck?

Venture already does that to some degree.

49

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why is Possession hated so much?

« on: December 09, 2018, 11:28:38 am »

I dislike it because I simply don't understand it, it went through numerous rule changes and is by far the most complicated Dominion card (and I love complex cards).
I guess most folks who dislike it do so because the card allows somebody else to do something with THEIR deck.

50

Dominion FAQ / Re: What's the best card?

« on: December 09, 2018, 10:56:53 am »

Is there any kingdom card that would help any strategy? Or would that be overpowered?

Scout. Totally crazy.