Dominion Online can be difficult for beginners. Below are several suggestions to help address this, with links to ShuffleIT’s forums where I’ve posted about items there. Thoughts, comments, and further suggestions appreciated.
Items implemented since this post first mentioned them: Create an official FAQ and guidelines about how to use the client, building on Chris’s excellent (but now outdated)
unofficial FAQ.
Edit: werothegreat has posted an
official FAQ Create a “new to Dominion” page in the game client that links to one or more video tutorials about how to play Dominion, to the Dominion wiki so that players can look up FAQs for cards that they are unfamiliar with, and perhaps links to the Dominion Strategy blog’s “New to Dominion” page as well.
Edit: werothegreat has posted an
official Welcome to Dominion online post.
Remind players of duration attacks, and show -Card and -Coin tokens.
Add a
see Kingdom feature, including Kingcard cards (including ones not on top of split piles) / events/ landmarks / boons / hexes / states / non-Kingdom cards. This is particularly important for newer players. Implemented
as originally developed by IceHawk78 in his "King's Courtier" Chrome plugin.
Improve the visual interface of the game, so that reliance on the game log is not required and things are easier to follow for beginners.
Easy to implement ways:Rename “practice” games to “unrated” games. The term "practice game" seems problematic, because it may imply that the games aren't expected to be taken seriously, which reduces player interest in these unrated games. I believe that the term "unrated game" is both more accurate and avoids this negative connotation. And unrated games help new players to learn new cards at their desired pace, and may provide some people with a less stressful experience.
Create an option to
avoid opponents subscribed to more cards. This lets new players avoid running into kingdoms in which almost every card is unfamiliar to them, and there are many new mechanics.
A “Copper” subscription that adds only Intrigue and Seaside. The current smallest subscription option, “Silver,” adds Intrigue, Seaside, Prosperity, Cornucopia, Hinterlands and Guilds, which may be too much for a new player to learn at once. I eventually bought all sets on the previous online implementation but did so gradually because I was new to the game and that made it easier to learn.
Allow a player to "deactivate" the sets that they have subscribed to, so that they can, for example, still play rated games as if they only had the base set, but can mix in other sets when they want to. By far the fastest way to find a game is to use the automatch feature to find rated games. Burning Skull had to create a separate account ("Drowning Skull") for his great "How to Base Dominion" video series because it is much harder to get a game with only the base dominion set if you are a subscriber.
Update the wording of Black Market
to match the current implementation (probably not as important for new players because they're less likely to see it, but this is a simple change that will reduce confusion).
Harder to implement ways:There should be a well-formatted log available after Dominion Online games to anyone with the hyperlink, regardless of subscription (like the old log prettifier). Having available game logs would make it easier for new players to analyze games, and to get feedback on their games. There should also be a search feature that allows game logs to be looked up later, like the old Goko Salvager website (the closest thing right now is to look up game IDs for recent
rated games on
Dominion Scavenger, which you can then load with the "load old games" Dominion Online feature if you subscribe to the cards used in that game).
"Game does mandatory actions for me" should be an option that needs to be enabled. So, by default, the game should show animations when Advisor reveals three coppers, etc.
Add an in-client tutorial about how to play Dominion
Improve the play of the bots. Campaigns (potentially available both online and offline) designed to teach new sets one at a time may also be useful.
Note: This post was inspired by Polk’s excellent post that lays out
the case for pessimism about Dominion’s future, in large part that full random Dominion has become more complicated over time and so it’s harder to add new players.