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[Ozle]

Victory: Empty the Province Pile OR 3 Pile but the Dutchy Pile and the Estate Pile must be empty
Conditions: You are not allowed to buy or gain, or in any other way have one in your deck, Gold treasures. (So no Gold cards at all!)
Kingdom Cards: Horn of Plenty, Bureaucrat, Market, Moneylender, Woodcutter ,Horsetraders ,Haggler ,Nomad Camp ,Mining Village ,Vault
Colony and Platinum: No
Bonus Point: For three piling on Province, Dutchy and Estate ONLY
Time Limit: You have all weekend! Till 11pm BST Sunday!

How to Enter: Send me a PM with the heading Solo Challenge 10 -  XX Turns. And put your username, number of turns took, and link to the game log on the inside to make it easier for me to sort. You are only allowed ONE entry per Challenge, any further PMs will be ignored (This is to stop me getting spammed with better results)


Thoughts of Ozle X: So this is a reverse of one I went a few rounds ago, hence the name, and hopefully should be a bit harder to work out the right strategy. There are not a lot of +Actions in there, only mining village, but this will trash for money! And not much trashing unless you want to go down the moneylender route. Hopefully there will be multiple routes here, unlike the last one which was pretty obvious.

[Christal]

hmm, i'm missing the dukes?

[Ozle]

hmm, i'm missing the dukes?

Ahem *cough* pretty sure it says dutchy......*whistles*

[Thisisnotasmile]

No wonder I couldn't make any sense of the title... It is nothing like Spandau Ballet backwards.

[Ozle]

Aha! That's because it's not quite the reverse, but nearly! (plus I wrote this at 8am while half asleep and rushing out the door)

[Ozle]

Just to clairify, because had two entries that did. You are not allowed to use the Gold Treasure  at all in this challenge

[Ozle]

(Just bumping this above the other thread to make sure people look at the right one)

[Ozle]

Not many entries for this one, too boring or too hard?

[O]

For the requirement: do duchy and estate have to be empty only IF you 3-pile, or in both cases?

[Rabid]

I read it as:

to win end game on:
8 prov
or
8 etates + 8 duchy + any 3rd pile.

Bonus:

empty all 3 VP piles.

[GigaKnight]

I read it as "(Empty the Province Pile OR 3 Pile) but the Dutchy Pile and the Estate Pile must be empty".  So I assumed it was a requirement that both the Duchies and Estates be consumed.  I hope so because I'm pretty sure I could have done it faster if I just needed Provinces...  And, honestly, that's what I assumed made it especially interesting.

[RisingJaguar]

I read it as "(Empty the Province Pile OR 3 Pile) but the Dutchy Pile and the Estate Pile must be empty".  So I assumed it was a requirement that both the Duchies and Estates be consumed.  I hope so because I'm pretty sure I could have done it faster if I just needed Provinces...  And, honestly, that's what I assumed made it especially interesting.

That could be interpretted but considering that the bonus is empty all 3 piles (what you thought it meant), it seems redundant

[GigaKnight]

I read it as "(Empty the Province Pile OR 3 Pile) but the Dutchy Pile and the Estate Pile must be empty".  So I assumed it was a requirement that both the Duchies and Estates be consumed.  I hope so because I'm pretty sure I could have done it faster if I just needed Provinces...  And, honestly, that's what I assumed made it especially interesting.

That could be interpretted but considering that the bonus is empty all 3 piles (what you thought it meant), it seems redundant

Well, the bonus says for all three piles points "ONLY" (like, you can't deplete any other piles and still get bonus points).

EDIT: This also made sense to me because it forced you to use Haggler judiciously if you wanted a bonus.   I must have been way over-thinking all of this.

[Galzria]

I too, read the challenge as Giga did; Duchy and Estate must be empty in all cases, but if you end by emptying JUST the three victory piles, you earned the bonus point.

I'm fairly happy with my results on piles, but would likely be beat by a straight Province strategy.

[Ozle]

I read it as:

to win end game on:
8 prov
or
8 etates + 8 duchy + any 3rd pile.

Bonus:

empty all 3 VP piles.

This is the correct, I did put a pretty big OR there to seperate the two different options, and lack of comma should mean the Dutchy estate part only applies to the second part.

Also, it would have made the bonus point far too similar to the victory if it applied to all!

Results will be up later, bit busy at work today.

[Ozle]

I read it as "(Empty the Province Pile OR 3 Pile) but the Dutchy Pile and the Estate Pile must be empty".  So I assumed it was a requirement that both the Duchies and Estates be consumed.  I hope so because I'm pretty sure I could have done it faster if I just needed Provinces...  And, honestly, that's what I assumed made it especially interesting.

If there were brackets or other qualifiers in there then you would be right, But there are no brackets in there, so not sure why you would read it like that.

Sorry if this confused you, I didnt think it would be a problem!

[GigaKnight]

I read it as "(Empty the Province Pile OR 3 Pile) but the Dutchy Pile and the Estate Pile must be empty".  So I assumed it was a requirement that both the Duchies and Estates be consumed.  I hope so because I'm pretty sure I could have done it faster if I just needed Provinces...  And, honestly, that's what I assumed made it especially interesting.

If there were brackets or other qualifiers in there then you would be right, But there are no brackets in there, so not sure why you would read it like that.

Sorry if this confused you, I didnt think it would be a problem!

That's alright; I'll ask next time.  The capitalized OR should have been the giveaway, but I think I was looking for the requirements to be a bit more complicated than they actually were.  Although, if you had stated the requirements the way Rabid did, I don't think there would have been any ambiguity.

And, as I said before, the ONLY on the bonus contributed to the confusion.  Does the ONLY apply to the piles (i.e. no other piles can be depleted) or the ways to earn bonus points?  Probably the piles because otherwise it's redundant, although now that I see you confirmed Rabid's bonus description, I'm confused again; if Rabid is right, what purpose does the ONLY serve?

Sorry, not trying to complain because I do appreciate the effort you put into this.  I'll be sure I totally understand the rules before I attempt the next one.

[timchen]

I would say the difficulty comes more from logic than the ambiguity in words.

The logic is as follows: unless I missed some neat trick (which is actually quite likely!), it is significantly harder to empty the estate and the duchy with the Provinces. On the other hand, if you don't care about number of turns, it is probably not so hard. Therefore, in the correct challenge, one can choose either to give up on turns and get one point or just forget about the bonus. This doesn't sound so interesting; logically I would expect something different.

On the other hand, the other read does not do much better; a Province-Duchy-Estate 3 pile is probably much harder than any other X-duchy-estate 3-pile. So the problem persists either way.

The bottom line is I read it the same as GigaKnight.

[DG]

Perhaps Ozle can open it up for an extra day to allow legitimate entries.

[Galzria]

Perhaps Ozle can open it up for an extra day to allow legitimate entries.

I'm fine with him closing this one out. Yes, I misinterpreted his conditions, but he seems busy recently, and I don't want a challenge to get dragged out longer than necessary. I've clarified rules with him in the past when I was unsure, but failed to do so this time; I feel the onus is on me to make sure I understand fully, not him.

And honestly, I don't think there is that big of a difference *on this puzzle*. I've played a Province strategy that's 1 turn faster than I managed to 3-pile, and I can run the simulator to 2 turns faster. It's within a margin that I'm comfortable with. Besides, part of the fun is seeing inventive ways some of you come up with. So if I've missed the mark in either case by more than I expect, then hats off, and I'll look forward to the next challenge.

[GigaKnight]

I agree with Galzria.  I should have realized there were multiple interpretations and clarified.  There's nothing at stake other than bragging rights and I'm eager to see what the next challenge is.

[Ozle]

Sorry for delay, been stupidly busy week. Will update this evening I promise!

[Ozle]

Right, really sorry for the delay.

In third place with 19 turns we have:
GigaKnight      http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201204/01/game-20120401-005009-5b2e8c13.html

in second with 17 turns:
mazwa         http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201203/31/game-20120331-215347-24c01fbc.html

And in joint first with 16 turns:
Fate         http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201204/01/game-20120401-120738-a2092551.html
DG         http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201203/31/game-20120331-092958-dcc29ce3.html


And safe and sound with lots of turns, but a bonus point....Titandrake!


And so the leaderboard looks like this:

Fate   20
DG   17
jonts26    16
chwhite   12
magnetar   11
RisingJaguar    9
Gigaknight   9
RisingJaguar: 7   
Thisisnotasmile: 6   
Rabid: 5   
Razzishi 4   
Mazwa   4
Wandering Winder 3   
Galzria    3
Tmoiy   3
Green Opal   2
jtotheonah 2   
TitanDrake 3 
Voltaire: 1   
Lespute: 1   
kn1tt3r 1   
Tossk 1   
philosophyguy 1   
Stompy 1   
Dagenais   1
empra   1


There were a lot of different strategies used here, so if anybody who didn't get on the ladder wanted to share thiers, feel free!

[DG]

The gold restriction for this challenge actually helps the market/vault method used by myself and Fate.

[GigaKnight]

Fate and DG, you each had 1 Haggler; did either of you try buying more?  If so, why do you think that didn't work out?  I never went back and tried a Province-only strategy, but it seemed that multiple Hagglers would accelerate that strategy to a megaturn by the end.  Buy Market / Vault -> Free Mining Villages.  Buy Province -> Free Markets / Vaults / Mining Villages.  With most of the Markets / Mining Villages in your deck and only a few green cards, I figured finishing with a 3 or 4 Province turn would just happen.

Actually, looking at mazwa's game, turns 8, 9 and 16 were relatively useless and he still finished only 1 turn behind the lead.  I think you could have won, mazwa!

For my part, the awkward part of Haggler with my strategy was that the only card I could really happily Haggler was Mining Village, which ran out quickly.  I tried a bunch of variants on this but couldn't get it below 19, even though you can see from my turn 18 that, had the Hagglers been Woodcutters, I would have had it.

[dondon151]

The problem with multiple Hagglers is exactly as you say: when you run out of card that you want to gain, Haggler is either a dead card or you're forced to gain more dead cards.

[GigaKnight]

The problem with multiple Hagglers is exactly as you say: when you run out of card that you want to gain, Haggler is either a dead card or you're forced to gain more dead cards.

Right, but my point is that with a Province strategy on this board, I think you'll pretty much always have something good to gain.  The reason it didn't work perfectly for the Duchy/Estate strategy is because all the engine components AND primary point cards cost $5, meaning you can only Haggler $4 and less cards but you only really want Mining Villages at that cost.  Even with this "problem," I still found it more-effective to Haggler with Duchy/Estate since it built the engine that much faster.  With the Province strategy and enough Hagglers, I think greening should actually help you finish building your engine.

[DG]

You need the deck to cycle fast and you can't afford to have a moneylender and two hagglers. If you were looking to get to 15 turns I suspect you would add more vaults/markets/mining villages and plan for lucky series of 2 province turns to finish.

[Mazwa]

Yeah Giga, i thought about continuing to try to get better luck.  There's no reason I couldn't have drawn my turn 17 hand on turn 16 and ended it then.  I'm not sure I could have gotten 15 turns though without changing some strategy.  I had one attempt where I pulled the trigger on my big turn in turn 15 but fell $4-$5 or so short of the last province.  But there was only so many times I was willing to replay the game.  Ozle seems to like torturing us with games where we have to have to good fortune of pulling our whole hands using 2 card draws =).  This game felt a lot like the Festival/Oracle game from last week to me.

I liked double haggler better than one.  And the earlier you start greening, the better the haggler is.  I would have thought DG and fate would benefit more from the second haggler than I did since they started on provinces a few turns earlier.  It would clog the deck as DG said, but my guess is that to hit 15 turns you'd have to go double haggler, start greening earlier than I did, and hope for some good luck.

[GigaKnight]

I'm not sure I could have gotten 15 turns though without changing some strategy.

I'm pretty sure you could have (but maybe it wouldn't have been worth it).  The benefits of turns 8 and 9 could have easily been realized in one turn (trash a Copper, buy a Vault).  And 16 was just a no-op.  That's two strong indicators that there's good room for improvement.  If Ozle doesn't post a new challenge by tonight, maybe I'll play with this a bit myself.

Isotropic really needs a "restart game" button, btw...