Title's a bit of a misnomer here, admittedly (unless you get the reference, in which case you know exactly how I feel about it).
See, Adam Horton and I are doing a card-by-card Nocturne discussion/review for the next episode of the podcast (if you haven't checked it out yet, here's the latest episode: ).
I try to keep opinions concise if they don't relate to maximizing chances of victory, because how you feel about a card is, most of the time, just a distraction in-game. So next week's episode I'll go into this much more briefly so we can focus on the cards themselves and how to use them.
That said, let's talk about the impact Hexes have on the game. Firstly, I do not have some inexplicable aversion to attack mechanics in Dominion (as if buying the last Highway or winning the Wharf split is less of an attack than playing a militia). In fact, I think an attack in the mix usually makes the game more interesting and dynamic in decision making.
Frankly, everything people are afraid of boons doing that they don't actually do, unpredictable swingy outcomes disproportionately rewarding or punishing one player over another and edging out skill in favor of rng, can actually come true through the Hex deck. And it does way too often.
So what makes hexers so different from booners?
For one thing, if inconsistency is a problem for your strategy, you just don’t invest in the booners. But the hexes are usually forced on you. Getting hit with poverty right after your Expedition turn, or Envious/Misery near the end of the duchy dance, when all that happened to your opponent was milling a card from famine or randomly shuffling his deck from bad omens --- oooh scary--- doesn’t teach you anything about Dominion, doesn’t encourage clean or optimized play, doesn’t really measure player skill very well, and most importantly, it just feels bad.
If Haunted Woods effectively makes your opponent skip his every other turn, you feel clever for identifying that and setting it up, and your opponent learns one more new thing about Dominion. You might be frustrated getting locked down by Knights spam or being hit by Legionary every turn, but hopefully you can at least appreciate your opponent’s play. Hopefully you can focus on how to avoid it in the future or how to win anyway. Not with Hexes. You’ve really got no recourse to the hex deck or metric of what you can do to mitigate its impact, or if you even need to. You just need to cross your fingers and hope for the best.
And it doesn’t feel nearly so good being on the other end of it, especially in a mirror.
You don’t feel clever, you feel lucky. Would you really rather feel lucky than clever?
Admittedly, hexes are contextual in their effectiveness, but that makes them worse, not better. Getting Locusts or War in the first few turns is brutal. Getting Bad Omens could even be helpful. Giving out a lucky Misery in an otherwise even game can help you clutch out the penultimate province with impunity. And what could your opponent have done to stop any of that? Pretty much nothing, all else being equal.
The other problem with the high variance of hexes is that they’re usually given out by attacks.
Every attack in the game is balanced around doing less for you than a similar card of the same cost because part of the payload is a negative impact on your opponent.
That means these random jabs demand you to commit resources to them before you can reasonably predict what they’re going to do. So you’re invested in this rng in the form of an otherwise weak terminal, reducing your hand size, etc.
That might even be okay if they were generally low-impact like the boons are, you could weigh out your options and decide in context whether or not it’s worth the investment. You could even do the same thing if they were all high-impact. But the hex deck is polarized between doing nothing at all and hitting you right between the legs. It might also be okay if there was some unifying theme in what the hexes did, like, "oh hexes tend to give out junk, can I deal with that," or "hexes tend to make your next hand worse," can I ignore those? But no. They’re all over the map so you have no idea what this card is that you’re choosing whether to commit to or ignore.
If you ignore Ambassador and get snowballed, or didn’t properly support your witches and lose the curse split, at least those cards are staring up at you telling you what you did wrong. At least you know you made a mistake. But the hexers? Your opponent just flips a coin at you every turn and you pray it doesn’t hit you in the eye.
Look, I know there will typically be several far more important factors deciding any given game than who got which hex. Shuffle tracking, prioritization, strategic flexibility and a smarter endgame will usually trump rng in any game of Dominion, hexes or no.
So aside from the whining, what can you take away from this to get better at Dominion, where's the insight? Maybe it's that you need to focus and play a cleaner game when hexes are out. Maybe you need to get thinner and keep better control of your deck than you'd normally care to. Maybe you need to assume at any given time that you opponent has two more points than he does (for fear of Misery) and make your endgame buys accordingly. Maybe you need to avoid going too light on payload for fear of War or Locusts stalling you a turn. It's probably just to know what you're getting into beforehand and play the best you can with how it shuffles out.
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Topic: How I Learned to Quit Bellyaching and Love the Hex (Read 2644 times)