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1

Dominion League / Re: League evaluation

« on: June 29, 2014, 01:45:53 am »

As one of the current (and probably future) inactive players, I'm heavily in favor of a division E for inactive players.  I'd need to seriously think about dropping out of the league for future seasons if this weren't instituted, as I am not able to play scheduled games of anything with as much regularity as I originally foresaw, and I don't want to be a drag on the league if that continues.

2

Dominion League / Re: Standings & Results thread

« on: June 26, 2014, 12:56:24 am »

D4-7 rrwoods vs D4-3 KingZog3 4-2 rrwoods wins

3

Hearthstone / Dreamhack summer, RDU/amaz finals game 2

« on: June 19, 2014, 05:29:42 am »

Just curious what peoples thoughts were on the whole thing.

For the uninitiated: in the finals of Dreamhack, RDU received a message from someone on his friends list that said, in Romanian, "he has a bow and a hunters mark". He informed the admins after the game was over, at which point they had him remove everyone from his friends list and continue the match. He won that game and they did not decide to alter its outcome in any way. Other pros largely agree that the information did not change his play and that he would have won the game without it.

For perspective, second place got $5,000 and first place got $10,000 so this match was for $5,000.

4

Dominion League / Re: Signups Season 1

« on: April 16, 2014, 02:56:26 pm »

rrwoods
GMT-4 but I sleep like 4am to noon.

5

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Card Idea - Rules text question - Reward

« on: February 25, 2014, 09:43:30 am »

"When another player plays an attack card, you may set this aside from your hand.  If you do, at the start of your next turn, play this three times."

You're playing the card from the set-aside area, which has no precedent, but I don't see why that works any less than playing it from the in-play area (which Counterfeit already does).

6

General Discussion / Re: Drinking

« on: February 18, 2014, 04:56:20 pm »

I'll just leave this here:

www.makemeacocktail.com

You can put in what you have in your liquor/mixer collection, and then search their database of drinks for things you can make with those ingredients.

It's ... pretty awesome, actually

7

Dominion League / Re: Dominion League?

« on: February 06, 2014, 12:02:30 pm »

This sounds pretty awesome.

I'd be in favor of either smaller divisions (5-6ish?) or longer seasons.  8 weeks to play seven sets could get a bit tight schedule-wise, depending on the occupations of the players and what time zones they happen to fall in.  Probably smaller divisions > longer seasons but I don't have a strong preference.

Either way, I'd definitely be interested in the first go-around of this.  I've been thinking about GokoDom but I'm intimidated and unfortunately there's no way I could commit to the schedule.

8

Dominion FAQ / Re: Kings Court Timing & Trashing nonreal cards

« on: January 15, 2014, 03:37:53 pm »

Here's how it goes when you throne a mining village and trash it the first time (kings court is similar; using throne because it's simpler) --

Play Throne Room (putting it into play from your hand)
- Play Mining Village (putting it into play from your hand)
-- Draw a card, receive two actions
-- Choose to trash Mining Village
-- Receive two coins (you did trash Mining Village)
- Play Mining Village (you can't put it into play as Throne Room has lost track of it)
-- Draw a card, receive two actions
-- Choose to trash Mining Village
-- Don't receive two coins (you didn't trash Mining Village as it was already there)


tl;dr -- lose track is involved, but it's at the point where you play Mining Village the second time, not at the point where you're given the choice to trash it.

9

Game Reports / Re: Breaking the PPR

« on: January 15, 2014, 03:25:56 pm »

Is this breaking the rule? I thought the rule was "if there's two Provinces left and buying something else will put you in the lead, buy that".

Yup. PPR seems to get misunderstood a bit lately...

The idea is that if something else puts you in the lead and you buy it, now you threaten to win if they buy a province. But if you buy the duchy and you're still behind, their province buy is still safe, so the value of the duchy is much much smaller.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: A sad noob case. (Re: effective trashing)

« on: January 14, 2014, 03:15:04 am »

Honestly, if somebody doesn't want to treat a game competitively, then there's not much use for advice. Step one is to actually *want* to put in effort to improve, and that's a step most people don't take for most games, myself included. And there's nothing wrong with that.

This is also very true, and it can ruin their fun to try to tell them otherwise. It'll just bother them.

It also ruins their fun, in my experience, to continuously win every game.  Unfortunately many casual gamers don't see see that they have two goals at odds with one another (that is, occasionally winning to maintain fun, and not putting effort into improving because effort is unfun).

11

Dominion General Discussion / Re: black market deck helper

« on: January 10, 2014, 04:41:38 pm »

Clearly I should have zipped these files together... you need all three and I see different numbers of downloads :-P

12

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Cave - secret vp card

« on: January 07, 2014, 04:46:38 pm »

What about:

(?s are values I haven't thought about, not variables)

Cave
$?  Victory
Worth ? VP per ? on your Cave mat.  (At the end of the game, reveal those cards, ?, and return them to your deck.)
---
When you gain this, set aside a card from your hand face down on your Cave mat.

[ to solve the problem of it being "too good" a trasher and doubly rewarding ]



or



Cave
$?  Action-Victory
Set aside a card from your hand on your Cave mat.
---
At the end of the game, reveal the cards on your Cave mat, ?, and return them to your deck.  Then trash copies of Cave from your deck until you have only one.  Cave is worth ? VP per ?.

[ to solve the problem of the number of Caves you get having the "original Duke" problem ]

13

Dominion General Discussion / Re: black market deck helper

« on: January 06, 2014, 11:14:38 pm »

... I see a link labeled "blackmarket.py" under a dividing line after the post?

14

Dominion General Discussion / black market deck helper

« on: January 06, 2014, 09:43:12 pm »

This is written in Python 3; you'll need to download and install it to use.

I've wanted a Black Market deck solution for a little while, specifically one that lets me read all the cards at once without having to pull them out of the box.  My randomizer of choice (D-Vault) will run the deck, but it won't tell me special setup or let me read the cards all at once.  So I whipped this thing up.

Enjoy!

==

Notes:

allcards.txt is grouped by expansion.  If your cards are grouped differently, you should rearrange the lines in this file.  Instead of lines naming expansions (;Dominion ;Intrigue ...) you might say what row of your box you find the card in (;Row 1 ;Row 2 ...) or some such thing.  You can add fan cards by adding lines to this file; the format of each line is Name|Cost|Type|Text -- replace line breaks in Text with / and replace dividing lines with \.

The version of options.txt included here has all options turned on so you can see an example of each (it doesn't support comments in any way, and neither does allcards.txt).  If you just want to use all cards not explicitly excluded, delete the "max" line entirely.  Add an "exclude" line for each card in your kingdom, and for kingdoms of other games you're running out of the same set.  If you remove the "no bane" option, when Young Witch is in the BM deck, the script will tell you which Bane card to use (it will only select from non-excluded cards that are in allcards.txt).

15

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Easy Puzzles

« on: December 23, 2013, 02:36:17 pm »

I actually took it from the all encompassing dominion FAQ: http://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Complete_and_All-Encompassing_Dominion_FAQ

It's not written by Donald, of course. I've never checked the actual rules for this as I avoid five- and six-player games; I'd just assumed that the FAQ had it right as it seems to have everything else right.

But, for the purposes of the puzzle, you can assume the piles are doubled as you're controlling the setup anyway

16

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Donald X on Rebuild

« on: December 23, 2013, 04:32:09 am »

What about something as simple as adding ", putting it on your deck" to the gain effect? It's a tad weaker, and also flavorful. Though with multiple rebuilds in hand it may be better or worse, I'm not sure.

17

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Easy Puzzles

« on: December 23, 2013, 04:16:41 am »

The Gold and Silver piles are doubled for six players

18

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Grinch Goko?

« on: December 19, 2013, 09:45:42 pm »

I just had a game where I feel like a complete ass, because Scheme from the Bottom was soundly trouncing me and literally as he empties the third pile, I suddenly see the login screen.  No clue whether it was the hotel wifi (which is otherwise completely fine!) or Goko.

So Scheme, if you read this, I wasn't trying to just leave you hanging as you finished it out :-/

EDIT: This site has PMs... I'll address it there as well.  But still, I'd love to know if anyone else has been just randomly kicked back to the login screen.

EDIT EDIT: I could have sworn I'd seen a post by a user with that name, but I suppose not :-(

19

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How do you deal with Possession?

« on: December 15, 2013, 10:52:28 pm »

I did once deal with possession in an engine game by drawing my deck, playing all my treasures, then buying Possession, Possession, and Mint.

...

I have *no clue* what I would have done if my opponent did the same.

20

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which Cards are Most Under-rated / Under-utilized?

« on: December 09, 2013, 09:17:24 pm »

I don't understand Remodel or Bandit Camp being in the trash combo list. Remodel because you can trash the incoming card if you want? Seems close to irrelevant... Bandit camp because you can trash the incoming spoils??

21

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is there a "good" and "bad" way to Win in Dominion?

« on: December 08, 2013, 05:09:26 pm »

Its better to

i found the problem

More seriously:  This rule is *designed to do* all the things you are complaining about.  Having control of when the game is over is one of the things that makes Dominion unique and interesting.  If you don't like this rule, then as others have said... don't play Dominion!

22

Goko Dominion Online / conditional entropy / which cards are least luck-based

« on: December 05, 2013, 02:17:56 am »

Somewhere around here someone posted a list of cards sorted by how hard it was for iso TrueSkill to determine a winner when that card was present in the kingdom (including Colony/Platinum).  Any chance of getting something like this for Goko?  Possibly on a continuously-updated basis?  I'd be interested to see how Dark Ages and Guilds fit into the mix.

23

Tournaments and Events / Re: Yet-another tournament scoring thread.

« on: December 04, 2013, 09:10:55 pm »

First, that's about as many rounds as anyone can play back-to-back and still have fun.

Challenge accepted.

At MAGfest last year I spent 40 straight hours awake, and I think probably 50% of that time was spent playing Dominion :-P

24

Tournaments and Events / Re: Yet-another tournament scoring thread.

« on: December 03, 2013, 04:58:00 pm »

Your (3) is my biggest concern -- that the sample size is too small to closely represent how easy or hard a seat is. (1) and (2) I am not as concerned with (though shuffle luck has enough to do with the outcome that (2) may be the same concern as (3)).

I do disagree with the problem not being present in dominion. Your opening can have a significant impact on the outcome; iso even had an identical starting hands option to mitigate this! First player advantage is also something I'm trying to account for, and matching the starting cards is a simple enough process that its (possibly small) benefit I believe outweighs its small cost. The only issue is that you need players not to talk about their openings to other players, which may raise the cost to a level that is unacceptable.

25

Tournaments and Events / Yet-another tournament scoring thread.

« on: November 28, 2013, 04:16:31 pm »

Recently there was a post about Bridge (the game, not the card) which got me looking into the game briefly. Apparently it's common to run what is called Duplicate Bridge at tournaments. For those unfamiliar with the game, one hand of Bridge consists of each team member taking certain roles (based on their position relative to the dealer), and the four players each get thirteen cards (so the whole 52-card no-joker deck is dealt). In Duplicate Bridge, several rounds are played where several sets of opponents play the exact same thirteen cards, and the scoring systems are (in theory) designed to balance the effects of "poor" hands vs "strong" hands and measure each teams skill with those cards. Apologies to the Bridge players if I've butchered anything, but what I e described above is a sufficient intro to what I propose here.

I don't have a system fully fleshed out here; indeed, the reason for this post is to gather more ideas on feasibility and implementation.

The outcome of any given game of Dominion (wait for it) depends on the board (!) and the starting hands. Some "solutions" have been proposed to the starting hands "problem" -- identical starting hands, force 4/3, agree on 4/3 or 5/2 and force what is agreed on, and many others. What I would like to do for a physical-cardboard tournament is to keep the individual games as the rulebook describes, and find a match scoring system that balances the effect of the starting hands and boards by somehow comparing the results of other games played under identical conditions in the same tournament.

The match structure would involve arranging the boards and drawing all the starting hands for all the round 1 games before any players are seated, and recording the starting hands (leave the boards on the table between games). Then for round 2, reset the starting hands to the same as they were in round 1, and shuffle the players around in some predetermined (semi?)random fashion. Repeat until a sufficient number of rounds are played; for very small tournaments, this may be when all players have played all others.

I'm thinking the scoring system would either (1) reward more for wins from "hard" situations (ones with a low final win percentage), or (2) penalize losses from "easy" situations (ones with high win percentage), or both. This incentivizes players to optimize their performance in each individual game, which is what I want -- no sort of VP comparison would be acceptable. Exactly how to form those metrics (what the factors are for rewarding/penalizing), or alternative "balancing" metrics, or even whether acceptable metrics exist, is the question posed by this post.