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[SirPeebles]

This is a bit of an offshoot from an economics statement made over on the RSP board, in which Peddlers were given as an example of something free which one only wants in limited amounts.  I don't want to bring any of that discussion here since it belongs on RSP, but I pointed out that Peddlers are never free, since they always cost a Buy, and Buys are a limited resource.

As I thought about this some more, I've realized that Buys are, effectively, just a third currency on an equal footing with Coin and Potion.  The difference is you start every turn with 1 Buy, whereas you begin with 0 Coin and 0 Potion.  Second, every card has an implicit cost component of 1 Buy.  Village costs 3 Coin and 1 Buy; Vineyard costs 1 Potion and 1 Buy; Familiar costs 3 Coin, 1 Potion, and 1 Buy;  Copper costs 1 Buy.  Once you view Buys as currency, you can remove the rule limiting the number of purchases per turn.

Sorry if this was already obvious to some of you.  Also, any edge cases showing that this viewpoint breaks down somewhere?

[heron]

Talisman sort of breaks the rule, but I've never really thought about buys this way. Thanks for the new viewpoint.

[SirPeebles]

A few cards which refer to costs would need to have the obvious adjustment, which I don't think counts.

A bigger exception that I just thought of is the ever wonky Black Market.

Edit:  More specifically, any card which refers to an absolute cost (Talisman, Workshop, Feast, Altar, etc) would need to have the implicit "1 Buy" added on.  That should fix everything but Black Market?

[clb]

You perhaps could just re-word BM to indicate that playing BM reduces the cost of cards in the BM deck by 1 "buy".

Edit: nevermind - you would then buy multiple BM cards which is wrong

[serakfalcon]

Black market is definitely wonky, but could be considered "Reveal the top 3 cards of the Black Market deck. You may buy one of them immediately. If you do, +1 Buy"
In a sense it's a resource but in a sense it's not really, its having an opportunity. If you extend the logic, Actions are resources, which are used up before purchasing, but in both cases, nothing 'costs' 2 buys, or 2 actions...

Edit: I don't think talisman etc. need to be reworked. Its not an extra buy, its more use out of a single buy, you can't use talisman to get a different card than what you bought with the initial buy

[SirPeebles]

Black market is definitely wonky, but could be considered "Reveal the top 3 cards of the Black Market deck. You may buy one of them immediately. If you do, +1 Buy"
In a sense it's a resource but in a sense it's not really, its having an opportunity. If you extend the logic, Actions are resources, which are used up before purchasing, but in both cases, nothing 'costs' 2 buys, or 2 actions...

Edit: I don't think talisman etc. need to be reworked. Its not an extra buy, its more use out of a single buy, you can't use talisman to get a different card than what you bought with the initial buy

The issue with Talisman is that, in the framework I presented, nothing costs 4 coin or less.  In the same sense that Golem does not cost 4 coin or less in the standard framework.

Opportunities are resources.  Actions are resources.  But Actions are not spent when buying cards.

[qmech]

If you extend the logic, Actions are resources, which are used up before purchasing, but in both cases, nothing 'costs' 2 buys, or 2 actions...

I've chased this around a bit before, and you can certainly phrase a lot of Dominion this way.

Imagine a game where each card has two sets of symbols on it: a set of costs above the line, and a set of rewards below the line.  For example, something like Festival might be represented ▶/▶▶●●■.  Taking this a step further, why have cards at all?  We can introduce a new resource—"Festival cards", F—and have the move F▶/▶▶●●■ available at all times (so that we can get the Festival effect whenever we have a Festival card and an Action to play it).

What about the action phase/buy phase transition?  Introduce 2 new resource, ◐ and ◑, representing the action and buy phases respectively.  Every Action card both requires and produces ◐; very Treasure card requires and produces ◑.  The move ◐/◑ is always available.

Any completely deterministic game can be coded up this way (although it won't usually be pretty).  To get Dominion you'd need to introduce non-deterministic moves, with fixed costs but random effects.

Thinking in terms of resources is a useful thing to do, as long as you don't take things too far.