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Author Topic: Interview with Donald X.  (Read 2127899 times)

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scott_pilgrim

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2900 on: March 20, 2016, 12:44:36 am »
0

Why is there a line on Farmland?  Shouldn't both of the effects be "below-the-line" effects?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2901 on: March 20, 2016, 12:50:32 am »
+5

Why is there a line on Farmland?  Shouldn't both of the effects be "below-the-line" effects?
The abilities happen at different times. The 2 VP is at the end of the game; the when-buy is when you buy it.
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werothegreat

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2902 on: March 26, 2016, 04:21:28 pm »
+2

What would you say is the likelihood of ever getting a card type with a black banner color, say with white text?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2903 on: March 26, 2016, 05:09:47 pm »
+8

What would you say is the likelihood of ever getting a card type with a black banner color, say with white text?
Is it time for Empires previews already? No, I know when those will be, I will go post it in the other thread.

It doesn't seem like much of a spoiler but I don't like encouraging these kinds of questions. I can talk about Adventures. For Adventures, we needed a new border color for Reserves. What about tan? I tried tan and was happy with it. I said "make 'em tan" and they're tan.
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Asper

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2904 on: March 26, 2016, 05:31:46 pm »
+3

Do you think small expansions are a reasonable design choice sometimes, like when you think an idea can be used for only a bunch of cards? Or would you try to avoid them in the future? I'm not exactly sure how much influence HiG, who apparently pushed for small expansions, had during the development of Guilds. Also, do you think any of the small ones would have become a big set if you hadn't had to deliver them small (and quick, fot Alchemy)?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2905 on: March 26, 2016, 05:58:55 pm »
+11

Do you think small expansions are a reasonable design choice sometimes, like when you think an idea can be used for only a bunch of cards? Or would you try to avoid them in the future? I'm not exactly sure how much influence HiG, who apparently pushed for small expansions, had during the development of Guilds. Also, do you think any of the small ones would have become a big set if you hadn't had to deliver them small (and quick, fot Alchemy)?
I picked 20 cards as the default expansion size, with 25 cards for the main set. Jay wanted Intrigue to have more cards due to getting particular price quotes for particular numbers of cards. So it was 25 and then that was the default size.

HiG wanted small expansions. They envisioned a cheap impulse-buy option, something like 5 cards. I didn't want to go that low due to wanting a good mix of effects regardless of which expansions you owned. The smaller the sets, the worse you do there. I agreed to half the usual size. So Alchemy is 13 (counting Potion).

Then it seemed like we would alternate. So Cornucopia is also small.

Later on there was the issue of, Dominion and Intrigue were 500 cards, Seaside and Prosperity were 300 cards but had extra bits. Could a set be 300 cards with no bits and just be cheaper, or what? I made Dark Ages 500 cards with no bits to solve the problem there, and the tentative plan was for Hinterlands to be a standalone and thus 500 cards. Jay went back and forth there but ended with Hinterlands at 300 cards, no bits, slightly cheaper.

Guilds existed just to go between Hinterlands and Dark Ages, but Base Cards came out and delayed it, and one small set in a year didn't seem as nice as one gigantic set in a year, so I switched the order. In the end HiG did not get to put out Guilds due to their ending of doing business with RGG. They had no influence on it other than that small expansions only existed because of them.

With Adventures I had more than enough stuff, and was eating up a bunch of space on the Travellers. I decided to go for 400 cards and Jay okay'd it.

Okay so that is the story of the sizes of the expansions to date.

I think bigger is better. There's the reason already stated, that you want a good mix of villages and +Buys and things no matter what group of expansions someone owns. But also, it turns out people didn't like the small expansions as much as the big ones (and not just because of Alchemy's problems). So there's just no push towards small expansions. I might do one if I felt like there was demand for expansions that I couldn't ignore but I only felt up for making a small one. But uh. If it's just, an idea only goes so far, well, an expansion can have more than one idea.

If I hadn't been asked for small sets, then Alchemy would have been a large set. It's hard to say what the rest of it would look like since it had been cannibalized; possibly somewhat like Cornucopia since that's what I ended up with that at all relates to the remaining unmoved Alchemy cards. A big thing there is, there might have been one or two cards that interacted with potions (e.g. +Potion on something), but I bet there would have been no additional potion-costing cards. When Alchemy was big and hadn't been cannibalized, it had even fewer potion-costing cards.

If small sets hadn't been called for then I wouldn't have made Guilds when I did. The ideas were in the file and so I probably would have turned to them first when making Adventures. I don't know what that set would have looked like; some mix of those things and whatever things those things suggested. There probably would have been a few more cards that produced coin tokens, but probably not much more overpay, maybe one card. Overpay was not trivial to do. A large version of Guilds thus would probably have had another mechanic to go with overpay and coin tokens.
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RevanFan

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2906 on: March 26, 2016, 07:42:12 pm »
0

Do you think you'd ever consider releasing a sort of "Alchemy II", that would include cards that interact with potions in better ways? I know you'd have to include potions in the set, so that may be a mark against it, but I know I'd personally like the potion mechanic more if it were more thoroughly supported.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2907 on: March 26, 2016, 07:44:09 pm »
0

Who is this mysterious Jay?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2908 on: March 26, 2016, 07:48:59 pm »
+3

Do you think you'd ever consider releasing a sort of "Alchemy II", that would include cards that interact with potions in better ways? I know you'd have to include potions in the set, so that may be a mark against it, but I know I'd personally like the potion mechanic more if it were more thoroughly supported.
No, it doesn't make sense as a project. The time spent on that could be time spent on some other project that wouldn't automatically have people who didn't want it.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2909 on: March 26, 2016, 07:49:25 pm »
+9

Who is this mysterious Jay?
Rio Grande Games is one guy, Jay Tummelson. As he puts it, "I also do the windows."
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Roadrunner7671

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2910 on: March 26, 2016, 08:00:06 pm »
0

Who is this mysterious Jay?
Rio Grande Games is one guy, Jay Tummelson. As he puts it, "I also do the windows."
A follow up question: Does he have an account on this forum?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2911 on: March 26, 2016, 09:51:26 pm »
0

Who is this mysterious Jay?
Rio Grande Games is one guy, Jay Tummelson. As he puts it, "I also do the windows."
A follow up question: Does he have an account on this forum?
I doubt it. He has an account on BGG, clearly identified as him.
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Asper

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2912 on: March 26, 2016, 10:59:28 pm »
0

Wow Donald, thanks for that elaborate answer :)
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navical

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2913 on: April 04, 2016, 08:47:59 pm »
+1

Is it deliberate that a Knight isn't allowed to kill a Squire?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2914 on: April 05, 2016, 03:24:59 am »
+5

Is it deliberate that a Knight isn't allowed to kill a Squire?
Not really.

Originally Squire was "+1 Card +1 Action, you may play an Attack." It specifically was a village for Attacks only. Then it got a Buy for Treasures only in case the game had no Attacks. Anyway it always played Knights.

Knights however started as "each other player trashes the top card of their deck." They could kill whatever, including Squires.

Later on, with the cards as printed, it was certainly visible that Squires were immune to Knights. It wasn't a premise of the card though.
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werothegreat

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2915 on: April 05, 2016, 10:15:45 am »
0

Originally Squire was "+1 Card +1 Action, you may play an Attack." It specifically was a village for Attacks only.

That would have been hilarious with Relic.
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Seprix

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2916 on: April 05, 2016, 10:17:52 am »
+1

Originally Squire was "+1 Card +1 Action, you may play an Attack." It specifically was a village for Attacks only.

That would have been hilarious with Relic.

NO.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2917 on: April 05, 2016, 12:50:08 pm »
0

Originally Squire was "+1 Card +1 Action, you may play an Attack." It specifically was a village for Attacks only.

That would have been hilarious with Relic.

Am I missing something?  Wouldn't that be a waste of the village effect?  I don't see why it's hilarious.
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Accatitippi

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2918 on: April 05, 2016, 01:26:37 pm »
0

So, what do you think is the best village?
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werothegreat

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2919 on: April 05, 2016, 04:49:03 pm »
0

Originally Squire was "+1 Card +1 Action, you may play an Attack." It specifically was a village for Attacks only.

That would have been hilarious with Relic.

Am I missing something?  Wouldn't that be a waste of the village effect?  I don't see why it's hilarious.

Just more ways to play Treasures during your Action phase.  And Squire is cheaper than Storyteller (and doesn't use up your ), so it might have been easier to pull off shenanigans with the -1 Card token in between Lost City gains or Council Room plays.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2920 on: April 05, 2016, 06:11:37 pm »
+8

So, what do you think is the best village?
There are just so many ways you could mean that. The one I enjoy the most is probably Fortress.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2921 on: April 05, 2016, 06:12:17 pm »
+6

What do you think is the best list of villages?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2922 on: April 05, 2016, 06:30:04 pm »
+38

What do you think is the best list of villages?
It was Kenya. 1947. Ernest Hemingway and I had been wandering around near Kilimanjaro for what seemed like months. We needed a donkey, or just any roughly donkey-like pack animal. We would have settled for a trained duiker. But each village would just send us to the next village; oh yes, they have a donkey there. That's where the donkeys are. But there was never a donkey.

Hemingway became convinced we'd already seen all of the villages, that we were just going in circles. So he made a list of all the villages, noting which other village they'd sent us to, drawing an arrow between them. It was a complex pattern that he came to believe held great significance. I felt like each village had just sent us randomly to another nearby one. I made my own list and drew in random arrows, to see if I could fool him with it. He wasn't fooled. "That gibberish will never get us a donkey," he said. Still I was proud of it.
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Witherweaver

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2923 on: April 05, 2016, 06:31:46 pm »
+3

What do you think is the best list of villages?
It was Kenya. 1947. Ernest Hemingway and I had been wandering around near Kilimanjaro for what seemed like months. We needed a donkey, or just any roughly donkey-like pack animal. We would have settled for a trained duiker. But each village would just send us to the next village; oh yes, they have a donkey there. That's where the donkeys are. But there was never a donkey.

Hemingway became convinced we'd already seen all of the villages, that we were just going in circles. So he made a list of all the villages, noting which other village they'd sent us to, drawing an arrow between them. It was a complex pattern that he came to believe held great significance. I felt like each village had just sent us randomly to another nearby one. I made my own list and drew in random arrows, to see if I could fool him with it. He wasn't fooled. "That gibberish will never get us a donkey," he said. Still I was proud of it.

Correct.
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Seprix

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #2924 on: April 05, 2016, 06:43:42 pm »
0

What do you think is the best list of villages?
It was Kenya. 1947. Ernest Hemingway and I had been wandering around near Kilimanjaro for what seemed like months. We needed a donkey, or just any roughly donkey-like pack animal. We would have settled for a trained duiker. But each village would just send us to the next village; oh yes, they have a donkey there. That's where the donkeys are. But there was never a donkey.

Hemingway became convinced we'd already seen all of the villages, that we were just going in circles. So he made a list of all the villages, noting which other village they'd sent us to, drawing an arrow between them. It was a complex pattern that he came to believe held great significance. I felt like each village had just sent us randomly to another nearby one. I made my own list and drew in random arrows, to see if I could fool him with it. He wasn't fooled. "That gibberish will never get us a donkey," he said. Still I was proud of it.

There's a short story Hemingway wrote about Kilimanjaro.
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