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Author Topic: Dominion: Vegas!  (Read 3988 times)

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play2draw

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Dominion: Vegas!
« on: August 09, 2011, 01:13:03 pm »
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I was bored yesterday and, after making a quick jibe about Hinterlands being the dice expansion, I decided to see if I could make a dice expansion that actually wouldn't feel out-of-place in a game of Dominion. It includes a mechanism that helps to mitigate bad dice rolls and encourage a strong ROI for those who invest.

The setup is as such: if a card that has one roll a die is in the kingdom, an additional supply pile of dice is added. You may purchase a die during your turn just as you would purchase any other card (priced at $4?). This is indeed a supply pile, and depleting the pile of dice counts toward ending the game (I'm thinking maybe 15 dice in a 2-player game). You can technically buy dice without ever buying the cards that use them, and you can buy dice cards without gaining a die at all (not that you'd want to). When you gain a die, it is placed next to your discard pile; it cannot be used until you reshuffle, whereupon the die is placed next to your draw pile.

So you play a dice card, roll a die, and do what the card says. Any die you roll is "in play", and discarded upon clean-up. Why would you buy more dice than you do cards? If you don't like the number you rolled, you can roll any number of additional dice, one at a time, and attempt to roll a better number. Only the number on the last die rolled is used.

On to the cards!


Gambling Hall
$3 Action
Roll a die.
If you do so, you may gain a card costing at most the number rolled. Otherwise, gain a die.

High Roller
$7 Treasure
Roll a die.
+coins for the number rolled

Lady Luck
$6 Action
Roll a die.
Choose, based on the number of the die rolled:
+1 card
+1 action
+1 coin
+1 buy
You may not choose more than two of any type.

Dealer
$4 Action
Roll a die.
+cards for the number rolled.

Card Counter
$5 Action
+1 Action
Roll a die.
Reveal a number of cards, equal to the number rolled, from the top of your deck. Choose one card and put it in your hand. You may discard all the remaining cards or place all the remaining cards back on your deck in any order.

Trick Dice
$4 Action - Attack
+1 card, +1 coin
Roll a die. Every other player, based on the number rolled:
if it is odd, discards down to three cards in hand
if it is even, gains a curse
if it is six, discards down to three cards in hand

Payout
$5 Victory
At the end of the game, roll from your deck a number of dice equal to the number of Payout cards in your deck. You may trash any number of the rolled dice and roll additional dice in their places. Add the total on all the dice to your VP total.


The prices are probably all wrong and the cards are probably unbalanced (as they are completely unplaytested :D ). Also, I couldn't think of the right wording on the cards to describe re-rolling in a concise way.

Thoughts?
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rinkworks

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #1 on: August 09, 2011, 01:40:01 pm »
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Wow.  That is a seriously cool idea.  It's high-variance as heck, but the option to reroll bad rolls actually mitigates this somewhat.  If you buy enough dice, the expected rate of return narrows toward the high end of the 1-6 range, rather than averaging in the middle.  I like that.

One card idea to supplement here is something that, rather than using the number rolled outright, uses it as an index into a list of predefined benefits.  You already sort of do this with Trick Dice (and possibly Lady Luck, but I don't quite understand how that one works).

Something on the order of:

If you roll a 1, do this.
If you roll a 2, do this.
Etc.

Those options could be correlated, but it might make for some interesting tactical decisions if they were completely unrelated -- like, one is a monetary bonus, another is an attack, a third is a trash-for-benefit, etc.  If you roll an option that's decent but not your first choice, do you reroll?

Anyway, it's very Dominionesque to buy dice out of supply piles and sync them to the reshuffle.  Nicely done.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #2 on: August 09, 2011, 02:03:57 pm »
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I think in Lady Luck he intends you to do one of those things for every number you roll, i.e. roll a 1, you get either a card, action, money or buy; roll a two, and it's a pawn where you can take two options that are the same; roll a three and you get a non-terminal silver, or a woodcutter, a terminal silver that draws a card, a lab, a village, a cantrip that gives you a buy, a peddler, etc.; and on and on with more. With 5 you can make festival or grand market; with 6 you can make something even better.

play2draw

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #3 on: August 09, 2011, 02:05:54 pm »
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Thanks!

Yep, Lady Luck is supposed to be like a Pawn or Trusty Steed (where those say "Choose two"; admittedly the wording needs to be improved). If you roll a 3, it can be a village, a laboratory, a woodcutter, a peddler, etc. Roll a 6 and it can be a level 3 city. The "choose only two of one type" is a constraint to prevent the card from getting too out-of-hand and too powerful (+1 action, +5 cards, or +1 buy, +5 coin). It is still very strong, as 2/3 of the time it's at least a laboratory, and half the time it's better.

I thought about the "predefined benefits" card, but I think the biggest problem is that there might be too much text on the cards. "Trick Dice" and "Gambling Hall" started that way, but it became too wordy.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #4 on: August 09, 2011, 02:10:58 pm »
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6 different outcomes is probably too many, too. 2-3 is fine.

I want to say I love the concept, but I think for practical purposes, this would be what Donald X. refers to as a spin-off rather than an actual expansion.

play2draw

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #5 on: August 18, 2011, 03:21:41 pm »
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I want to say I love the concept, but I think for practical purposes, this would be what Donald X. refers to as a spin-off rather than an actual expansion.

Wouldn't spin-off imply that a set is related to Dominion somehow, but is inconsistent with and separate from the original game? The way I wrote the above the dice act more like tokens or potions.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #6 on: August 18, 2011, 03:55:17 pm »
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Actually, how I've read Donald before, it wasn't so much that it was inconsistent, just that they wouldn't really mesh together for some reason, but they would in fact use the same basis. I think his example was like an actual game board. And to be really enjoyable, I think you want to have high density of cards that do stuff with dice. But maybe you're right, maybe it's like potions. On the other hand, I think you can make a great argument that potions should have been a spin-off too.

Davio

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #7 on: August 18, 2011, 06:27:43 pm »
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While I like the idea of adding dice (and randomness), I think this will be served better as a spin-off rather than an expansion.

This is because the cards with needed dice don't mix well with the other cards.
The Alchemy cards have something about them that you say: "Well, I'm willing to buy a Potion, because they are just that good!"

I don't see this happening much with the dice cards.
The High Roller for example, you spend $7 to get an average of $3.5, but have to have bought one or more dice somewhere along the line.
This makes it much much worse than a plain Silver and Gold in a normal Province game.
Turns and buys are precious in Dominion, so you may want to think carefully before wasting them on dice.

I think it's a good idea to either:
- Expand the number of cards so this can be played as a full fledged spin-off with dice-only cards
- Increase the usefulness of the cards so players will actually invest in dice
- Lower the cost of dice (to $2?) so players can pick them up more easily with +Buys for example
- Give players a die everytime they gain a dice card, this preserves a 1:1 Card to Die ratio, but allows players to choose whether to sacrifice dice and have some dead cards later. The rolled dice would have to be discarded next to the discard pile and become active on reshuffles. TR'd and KC'd dice cards will just use the same die multiple times, but if the die is substituted after a bad roll, the new die is used for subsequent rolls and the old die is discarded as usual.
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DG

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #8 on: August 18, 2011, 08:55:28 pm »
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There will be some serious problems from having dice in the game. Firstly it will be too luck driven when combining both rolls and draws. Secondly it will be too slow. Dice games need to be fast: roll, lose, forget it, play again. Thirdly it'll be hard to record events and count actions, buys, and gains unless you have an awful lot of dice to hand, especially once you use king's courts. Finally, it'll be almost impossible to make quality decisions on card play as the effects will be too random. It's bad enough deciding when to use a tribute already.

Good luck solving those problems!
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sherwinpr

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #9 on: August 18, 2011, 10:29:14 pm »
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This idea is so great and so terrifying at the same time!  It seems really well-designed and thought of, play2draw, but DG's criticisms about playing with this in practice seem very valid.  I think I'd want to play Dominion like this maybe four times and then probably never again, haha.  It just seems too fiddly, too easy to mess up which pile the dice are in, etc.

But, all that said, I'll play a long.  How about this?

Reversal of Fortune
$3 Action - Reaction
For remainder of turn, all your die rolls are +1 (but no more than 6) this turn.
---
If a player just rolled a die, reveal this card to reroll the die; the final result may not be rerolled any further. Then +1 card and discard this card.
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play2draw

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #10 on: August 18, 2011, 10:32:22 pm »
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I think it's a good idea to either:
- Expand the number of cards so this can be played as a full fledged spin-off with dice-only cards
- Increase the usefulness of the cards so players will actually invest in dice
- Lower the cost of dice (to $2?) so players can pick them up more easily with +Buys for example
- Give players a die everytime they gain a dice card, this preserves a 1:1 Card to Die ratio, but allows players to choose whether to sacrifice dice and have some dead cards later. The rolled dice would have to be discarded next to the discard pile and become active on reshuffles. TR'd and KC'd dice cards will just use the same die multiple times, but if the die is substituted after a bad roll, the new die is used for subsequent rolls and the old die is discarded as usual.

This sounds reasonable to me. What I wrote was the summation of a lazy afternoon of daydreaming, so everything is up to change. Also, I don't have a gaming group willing to play such fan expansions/spin-offs/whathaveyou, so whatever "balancing" there was to a card's power/value was pure estimation. Pricing, for example, was only based on comparable cards (e.g. 2/3 of the time High Roller is at least a gold... Gambling Hall is comparable to Smugglers). Gaining a die when you buy a dice card and lowering the price of dice seem to be good decisions too.

More dice cards would be helpful, yes, but I couldn't think of many other cards to fill-out the set (aside from a version of Remodel/Expand; turn a Dutchy into a Colony? Aww yeea!).

I don't suspect the set is too slow; I doubt it's anywhere near as slow as a Scrying Pool chain drawing a bunch of Hamlets and Philosopher's Stones. Most of the cards are just "roll the die and if you don't like it roll another one". Lady Luck is only card that has the slowness problem (as well as being the only card that would make recording +actions/+buys/+$ difficult). The limit of up to +2 per type was in part a way to make things simpler in your head (so that there's nothing like "did I take four actions, and two buys or three actions and three buys?")... but yes that card would still be pretty difficult to handle.

As far as the set being too random and lacking strategic depth... well yes, of course - it's a silly dice expansion! That's the point 8) Let it ride!
« Last Edit: August 18, 2011, 10:41:14 pm by play2draw »
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DsnowMan

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Re: Dominion: Vegas!
« Reply #11 on: August 19, 2011, 09:18:16 am »
+1

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