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[schadd]

welcome to this one. cornucopia is my favorite expansion and well, no one else felt as strongly about one, so here we are.

i've spoken out about this one before. it's fun when you have 11 different cards anyway, but no buys, so fairgrounds gives you an excuse to do spice merchant-beggar because, eh, fairgrounds.

-where does this fit on the skill spectrum? as in, how hard is it to use perfectly compared to, like, oracle?

-do you ever buy ruins for fairgrounds points? (hint: yes)

-when do you start buying fairgrounds? ruins'll be there, but fairgrounds are flying off the shelves. or maybe the other way around.

-why is fairgroundslady so mournful?

[AJD]

-why is fairgroundslady so mournful?

Oh dear, what can the matter be?
Dear, dear, what can the matter be?

[werothegreat]

Bear in mind this will probably be caught short what with Empires previews starting in less than a week. 

-why is fairgroundslady so mournful?

Because she was drawn by Jessica Cox.  Seriously, look at all of her artwork.

[Seprix]

Hey, schadd. when you link your image, make it so that it's like this:

Code: [Select]

[img width=270]blahblahblah.jpg[/img]

This way, you can make the image smaller. Fairgrounds can easily become better than Duchy in the end game, so it is worth looking out for. Fairgrounds can also become just as good as Province, which leads me to my main point:

DO NOT GO FOR THE 8 POINT FAIRGROUNDS.

I know, crazy right? But seriously, it's not often worth it to get all those extra cards when you can be just scoring points. Be content with a $6 6 VP Fairgrounds. You're buying Province for cheaper than your opponent, and emptying the pile doesn't end the game on its own! Believe me, that is going to count big time for you in a close game.

[Witherweaver]

DO NOT GO FOR THE 8 POINT FAIRGROUNDS.

Instead, go for the 10-point Fairgrounds.

[McGarnacle]

-where does this fit on the skill spectrum? as in, how hard is it to use perfectly compared to, like, oracle?

I think it requires very little skill. Just buy a ton of different cards.

-why is fairgroundslady so mournful?

Because her card requires very little skill to use.

[JW]

-where does this fit on the skill spectrum? as in, how hard is it to use perfectly compared to, like, oracle?

A calculation by rrenard in 2012 found that Fairgrounds favors more skilled players more than the typical card (place 64 out of 159 for the Kingdom cards, not counting Colony/Platinum).

In general as players have gotten better at engine building I'd expect Fairgrounds has gotten more skill-intensive, because it favors engine strategies which are particularly skill-testing ("second pile of Provinces" if you make it worth 6).

[Accatitippi]

-why is fairgroundslady so mournful?

Her opponent just swindled her last Curse into a Copper, and her dream of getting 8 points per fairgrounds is gone forever.
She's heading home to a very disappointed family, and won't ever get a good husband now.

[McGarnacle]

-why is fairgroundslady so mournful?

Her opponent just swindled her last Curse into a Copper, and her dream of getting 8 points per fairgrounds is gone forever.
She's heading home to a very disappointed family, and won't ever get a good husband now.

Who knows how many tragic stories are behind all of the Dominion cards...

[Seprix]

-where does this fit on the skill spectrum? as in, how hard is it to use perfectly compared to, like, oracle?

I think it requires very little skill. Just buy a ton of different cards.

Oh, that's all it takes? Just buying different cards? There's no mental process to calculate which cards to get, or when to get them? Fairgrounds is a very high skill card. Using it effectively is not as easy as playing a Smithy and drawing 3 cards.

[jsh357]

Often, you win with Fairgrounds by continuing to build while the other player goes strictly for Provinces. Of course, it's easy to lose if they start contesting Fairgrounds once they catch on. It's a hard card to understand how to win with for some, I think.

[schadd]

Hey, schadd. when you link your image, make it so that it's like this:

Code: [Select]

[img width=270]blahblahblah.jpg[/img]

This way, you can make the image smaller.

i did literally exactly that, except 30 pixels larger than your proposition

DO NOT GO FOR THE 8 POINT FAIRGROUNDS.

I know, crazy right? But seriously, it's not often worth it to get all those extra cards when you can be just scoring points. Be content with a $6 6 VP Fairgrounds. You're buying Province for cheaper than your opponent, and emptying the pile doesn't end the game on its own! Believe me, that is going to count big time for you in a close game.

so there's this new york times article that some of you may have heard of that tells me, someone who is either a millennial or female, to stop saying "i feel like."


so, you're wrong. or rather, misunderstanding fairgrounds, which is understandable because it is a hard card. of the cards with a non-fixed value of vp, this is the only one where i have heard people advise the number of vp it should be worth; nobody will ever say, don't go for the 5 point silk roads! 4 is fine! or don't bother with the 7 point vineyards! it only needs to be as much as provinces!


the thing about the 8-vp fairgrounds is that, well, that is very rarely a thing at all. there needs to be some special case on the board for that to be even possible, e.g. shelters, ruins, prizes (although unfortunately that has a tendency to not work out) and, the big one, black markets. these cases can be likened to obscenity and they definitely make it more trivial to have fairgrounds be worth more points. one way or another, 6 VP tends to be an ideal for fairgrounds, but don't go for 8 VP is trivially wrong where it is easy to buy several ruins because this is a wharf, worker's village, market, or whatever engine.


fairgrounds is one of the cards that makes it clear that, oftentimes, dominion doesn't lend itself to advice in the form of prose. i lost this game against ednever (congrats) wherein he went for 8-point fairgrounds, i had 6-point ones, and i lost. there were a lot of other things that contributed to this and it is a very confusing game. what seems to be the big errors i made were, sorta neglecting to notice that ed was going for fairgrounds as well, and buying provinces several times instead of fairgrounds to save fairgrounds for when i had less money except i definitely should have just denied him fairgrounds, and then i also went for fairgrounds too soon because i thought all the garbage i had would be able to hit $6 enough but then i also bought estates to try to end and none of those things worked out.


anyway, get 8vp for your fairgrounds when you can determine that getting the extra cards is either okay for building or trivial to do; in the latter case wait as long as you can to buy those, although that is often spooky to do.

[Seprix]

Hey, schadd. when you link your image, make it so that it's like this:

Code: [Select]

[img width=270]blahblahblah.jpg[/img]

This way, you can make the image smaller.

i did literally exactly that, except 30 pixels larger than your proposition

DO NOT GO FOR THE 8 POINT FAIRGROUNDS.

I know, crazy right? But seriously, it's not often worth it to get all those extra cards when you can be just scoring points. Be content with a $6 6 VP Fairgrounds. You're buying Province for cheaper than your opponent, and emptying the pile doesn't end the game on its own! Believe me, that is going to count big time for you in a close game.

so, you're wrong. or rather, misunderstanding fairgrounds, which is understandable because it is a hard card.

Except I'm not wrong at all. Yes, 8 point Fairgrounds is sometimes the right call. Perhaps I was not very clear, but my intention was to state that going for the 8 point Fairgrounds is often a reach and may even end up costing you the game.

[Kirian]

Perhaps the question shouldn't be about 6 VP vs 8 VP, but when do you go after Fairgrounds even when they're only 4 VP?  Sure, they're 1 coin for 1 point over Duchy, but that $6 could be a Gold or something else that gets you to Provinces.

[schadd]

Hey, schadd. when you link your image, make it so that it's like this:

Code: [Select]

[img width=270]blahblahblah.jpg[/img]

This way, you can make the image smaller.

i did literally exactly that, except 30 pixels larger than your proposition

DO NOT GO FOR THE 8 POINT FAIRGROUNDS.

I know, crazy right? But seriously, it's not often worth it to get all those extra cards when you can be just scoring points. Be content with a $6 6 VP Fairgrounds. You're buying Province for cheaper than your opponent, and emptying the pile doesn't end the game on its own! Believe me, that is going to count big time for you in a close game.

so, you're wrong. or rather, misunderstanding fairgrounds, which is understandable because it is a hard card.

Except I'm not wrong at all. Yes, 8 point Fairgrounds is sometimes the right call. Perhaps I was not very clear, but my intention was to state that going for the 8 point Fairgrounds is often a reach and may even end up costing you the game.

there isn't really a certain type of scenario that characterizes when you get 8pt fairgrounds is i guess what i'm saying, and so the advice to not do it is just not helpful and also less fun. feel free to do what i just did and sort through the logs of some pro players when they buy fairgrounds and note what the tendencies are: when ruins/shelters are trashable then they tend to trash them but if they're not, and also it is an engine game, there are 8pt fairgrounds, you know, halfish of the time. as i said, it's not a card that you can just say what to do with, generally, and sometimes it'll be clear when buying ruins or whatever is worth doing because it will give you an amount of victory points.

another way to put it: how are you confident that 8 is a bad number of points?

here are a couple logs of mine where both of us could have gone for 8 points


http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160215/log.0.1455515413590.txt

i think i was only at 19, and i would have won if i was at 20. it was knights and prizes so it's a tad up in the air.

http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160128/log.0.1453956699651.txt

i think i outbuilt him and would have won even if i completely skipped fairgrounds but, well, i went for the 8pt ones and i trounced him.

http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160204/log.0.1454562341960.txt

this one is interesting; i declined to pursue 20 uniques (at the end of the game i had 16) and looking at it there wasn't much different in the cards we bought; this can be exemplified by what we had on turn 17, when horist & i had the same amount of vp but he mining village megaturned and took the last three provinces. at the time, i had not bought province, duchy, estate, curse, or silk road, whereas i had bought all of the other action cards than noble brigand. i would argue that, if he hadn't built a little faster, it would have been very good to pick up, at some point, estate, duchy, silk road, and curse; this would be (considering my 5 fairgrounds) a 16 vp gain for $11 and four buys, not including any other fairgrounds i would get.

...and thus ends the ones where 8 points was an option available in the current log search.

perhaps the point value of fairgrounds is something to worry about after you have them already. but, seriously, evaluate it in a case by case basis.

[schadd]

Perhaps the question shouldn't be about 6 VP vs 8 VP, but when do you go after Fairgrounds even when they're only 4 VP?  Sure, they're 1 coin for 1 point over Duchy, but that $6 could be a Gold or something else that gets you to Provinces.

well, it is usually pretty clear when you get duchy over gold. 4 vp fairgrounds aren't really that interesting, i'll always be squatting on your left shoulder and whispering daintily in your ear, buy a bunch of cards. buy all of them and then just get in the car and drive.